Slowly, they made their way from Herat to the Iranian pilgrimage site of Mashhad, to Tehran.Īt last, they drew close to the border that snakes through the mountains between Iran and Turkey. Other times they rode in trucks, staying as silent as possible, concealed in compartments underneath goods. They rode out in the open, in buses when they could. Turkish officials say 300,000 Afghans live in Turkey overall.Īs city after city fell to the Taliban, the smugglers sent the Hussainis on a circuitous trail through Iran. The Turkish city of Trabzon on the Black Sea coast hosts approximately 8,000 Afghan refugees. When he said he was, they beat him profusely. They were stopped at a checkpoint guarded by Taliban fighters, who ordered Hussaini to get out of the vehicle, and asked if he was Hazara. In July of this year, the Hussainis squeezed together into a smuggler's car on the road from the city of Herat. The Taliban is the same." Their escape begins "In the news you can see them saying, 'We're changed, we are a new Taliban,' but I don't trust them. "They're the same Taliban," Hussaini says. He wanted his family out before the country returned to the group that still haunted his childhood memories. firepower and intelligence, would likely fall to the Taliban. He knew the Afghan National Army, no longer bolstered by U.S. This summer, as the Taliban gained momentum in an offensive that began in the east, Hussaini decided to hire smugglers to take him, Mahbube and Elisa across the border into Iran. That's when I decided Afghanistan was no place to live," he says. "The Taliban came, and they beat me, because we were listening to music. They estimate at least 35 families have arrived in the city from Afghanistan in the past three months, although the Turkish government says it has blocked more than 40,000 Afghans from crossing through Turkey's borders. Staff at the Afghanistan Hazaras Culture and Solidarity Organization assist refugees from Afghanistan in Trabzon, Turkey. Turkey already hosts 3.6 million refugees from Syria and 300,000 from Afghanistan, according to official figures. Turkey's leader has called on the West to shoulder the responsibility of housing refugees from America's longest war. More than 40,000 Afghans have been prevented from entering the country so far this year, officials say. In response, Turkish authorities began extending a wall and beefed up patrols along the country's land border with Iran, a common route for asylum-seekers. Smaller numbers of Afghans have ventured into Turkey in hopes of reaching Europe. Thousands more fled on foot, across the borders of Pakistan and Iran. Last month, the United States airlifted more than 122,000 people from Kabul as the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. "I'll do everything I can to find a safe place for them, to make them happy." "I have a responsibility to my wife and daughter," Hussaini says. That's where they spent about a week, keeping an eye on the news back home while they navigated the bureaucracy of becoming refugees in Turkey. He took the little family in, letting them stay in a spare room in a shared apartment. Children ride on a swing in Atapark, a park frequented by the Afghan community in Trabzon, Turkey.Īs it happened, the man was also an Afghan and lives in Trabzon.
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