This is The Guardian.

This is The Guardian.

She poked her head outside her tent and saw fire burning below them on the hillside a few hundred meters away.

Along with her parents and two younger siblings, she gathered documents, grabbed an armful of clothing and ran.

Throughout the camp, walls of flame and thick smoke blocked the pathways and made it difficult to breathe.

By midnight the sky glowed orange.

The road below the camp filled with people heading towards the safety of the city of Mittellini, six miles south.

Settike's family joined the procession, but the police had set up a blockade about a mile before the turnoff to Mittellini.

Behind us was fire, one refugee told me later, and in front of us were police.

A local anti-immigration group had also set up their own blockade to keep migrants from entering the nearby Moria village.

By 1am, thousands of refugees were marooned on the road without food, water or shelter.

Settike's family found a place to huddle on the roadside.

When the sun rose the next morning, it was clear that much of the camp had turned to char and ash.

The tents were gone, and the olive trees now resembled smoldering black harpoons.

The wind was still blowing, pushing the lingering flames into the unburnt areas.

It took four days to extinguish the blaze.

For more than a week, thousands of refugees remained on the roads with no medical care, hungry and thirsty, hemmed in by the blockades.

When food trucks organized by the local authorities, the Ministry of Migration and the UN arrived, people rushed the vehicles, pounding on the windows and climbing over one another to reach the supplies.

Almost nothing survived of the camp, but miraculously, no one had been killed in the fire.

Pretty much everyone had wanted Moria gone, refugees, locals, volunteers, politicians.

The camp had been built in 2013 to accommodate 1,200 people for short stays, then was expanded to a capacity of roughly 3,215.

But by the time it was destroyed, more than three times that number were living there, many of whom had been stuck for years, trying to get the documents they needed to move on.

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