New Delhi, India – It is sort of 5:40 within the night. A hair salon in New Delhi’s bustling New Friends Colony neighbourhood is alive with the sound of buzzing clippers and chattering prospects. The air is thick with the scent of hair spray and aftershave.
Zaki Marzai, 29, stands behind a barber’s brown chair, his palms transferring with precision as he snips a buyer’s hair.
Wooden cabinets on the partitions bear vibrant bottles of shampoo and styling merchandise. The mirrors mirror Marzai, his eyes targeted on the hair earlier than him. His buyer seems to be glad.
Marzai, although, would fairly be elsewhere – with a rifle in his hand, not a razor.
Three years in the past, Marzai was a soldier within the elite particular pressure of Afghanistan’s military, combating the Taliban in a conflict that began with the United States and NATO forces invading the nation within the aftermath of the 9/11 assaults. The Western-backed Afghan authorities had sided with the US within the 20-year conflict. Marzai joined the military in 2015 as a sergeant and was on monitor to change into a commissioned officer.
Everything modified on June 20, 2018.
‘Sitting ducks’
At about 2am that day, Marzai was stationed exterior a camp in Ghazni province of Afghanistan when a barrage of bullets hit him and his fellow troopers.
Before Marzai and his comrades might realise what occurred, 25 troopers had died on the spot and 6 others had been injured. Bullets had pierced by means of Marzai’s chin and proper leg.
“The attack was so intense we couldn’t do anything. The bullets were coming from all four sides. We were sitting ducks. The Taliban wiped out the entire camp,” he recollects. According to the United States Institute of Peace, an estimated 70,000 Afghan army and police personnel misplaced their lives in 20 years of conflict in Afghanistan.
It was eight hours earlier than any backup arrived to rescue the wounded. Marzai, who had misplaced loads of blood, was first taken to a close-by hospital in Ghazni and shortly transferred to a hospital in Kabul for additional remedy on his jaw.
After practically a yr of remedy, his jaw was nonetheless deformed, so the Afghan authorities despatched him to India for higher care. He left behind his mother and father, a sister and 7 brothers.
In 2019, Marzai arrived at a medical facility in Gurgaon, a metropolis adjoining New Delhi. Later, he was additionally taken to 2 different public sector hospitals within the Indian capital.
By August 2021, Marzai hoped to return to Afghanistan, his face lastly mounted. But the Afghanistan he knew was about to be damaged.
‘I cried all night’
As the Taliban grabbed management of province after province in Afghanistan in early August, Marzai was following the information on his telephone, watching YouTube, monitoring Twitter and ready for Facebook updates.
Then, on August 15, the Taliban stormed into Kabul and took energy, forcing the US and NATO forces to flee the nation in a chaotic exit. Marzai tried to achieve his household and soldier colleagues on the telephone, however couldn’t get by means of as a result of cellular networks had been down.
He was surprised: Marzai had anticipated a battle, not a meek give up from the nation’s politicians, whom he accuses of looting Afghanistan after which escaping.
“I cried all night when the Taliban took over the country,” says Marzai. “I was heartbroken. I was looking forward to returning to my family and rejoining the army, but now I am stuck here [in India].”
Marzai is from Ghazni, an Afghan province dominated by the Shia Hazara neighborhood, which has been persecuted by the primarily Sunni Taliban for a very long time.
And he’s a former soldier for a authorities that the Taliban considered because the enemy. Since August 2021, regardless of a normal amnesty introduced by the Taliban after its takeover, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported that not less than 200 former Afghan troopers and authorities officers have been killed extrajudicially by the brand new authority.
Marzai will not be the one Afghan soldier in India, unable to return residence.
‘We couldn’t return’
Khalil Shamas, a 27-year-old former lieutenant who now works as a waiter at a New Delhi restaurant, arrived in India in 2020 for coaching on the elite Indian Military Academy (IMA) in Dehradun, the hilly capital of India’s northern state of Uttarakhand. By the time he and his colleagues accomplished the course, the Afghan military had ceased to exist on the bottom.
He says there have been about 200 Afghan troopers coaching on the IMA. A number of returned to Afghanistan. Many others migrated to Iran, Canada, the US and Europe.
But not less than 50 of them stayed again in India – unable to get visas to the West, and too scared to return to Afghanistan.
Back in India, the difficulties for Afghan troopers compelled to remain in exile worsened after the Afghanistan embassy in New Delhi, their solely supply of contact and help, stopped funding their keep after the federal government in Kabul modified. The troopers are reticent about sharing particulars of simply how the embassy supported them financially.
“Since 2021, we have not received any help from the embassy. We have been left on our own, to fend for ourselves,” says Marzai.
After exhausting all of his financial savings and with no assist coming, Marzai managed to enrol in a six-month haircutting course and began working in a salon.
He lives in a two-room residence with a humid odour, with three different Afghan males within the congested Bhogal space of South Delhi. The paint is peeling off the partitions, and soiled quilts are strewn about.
Not removed from Bhogal, Shamas lives with seven Afghan buddies in a small residence within the metropolis’s Malviya Nagar space. “It is challenging to live in a foreign land without any financial assistance from your government. I had to not only look after myself but also send money back home for my family,” he says.
Shamas’s older brother Dost Ali Shamas was a district governor in his hometown, Ghazi, when Taliban fighters killed him in an ambush in 2018. After the incident, the household moved to Kabul looking for a safer setting.
Since 2022, India has additionally slowly elevated its engagement with the Taliban, a bunch it shunned when it was in energy within the Nineteen Nineties and when it was combating US-backed forces between 2001 and 2021. In June 2022, the Indian authorities reopened its Kabul embassy and deployed a crew of “technical experts” to handle its mission.
In November final yr, the Afghan embassy in New Delhi, which was led by diplomats appointed by the elected authorities that the Taliban overthrew, introduced that it was shutting down, accusing the Indian authorities of now not cooperating with it.
Now, along with now not receiving monetary help from the mission, the Afghan troopers even have nowhere to go for paperwork to authenticate that they had been as soon as a part of their nation’s military.
According to a 2023 report by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), India is residence to greater than 15,000 Afghan refugees. Nearly 1,000 of these are Afghans who took shelter in India after the Taliban got here to energy in 2021.
The report says practically 1.6 million Afghans have fled the nation since 2021, bringing the full variety of Afghans within the neighbouring international locations to eight.2 million.
Among them is Esmatullah Asil.
‘My dream came crashing down’
Asil, one other former Afghan soldier, begins his day at 7am. Dressed in a black sports activities T-shirt and trousers, he hurries to work the place younger girls and boys watch for his directions.
Asil, 27, is a fitness center coach in South Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar, residence to a whole lot of Afghan migrants who’ve opened eating places, outlets and pharmacies there.
After ending his grasp’s diploma in social science from Herat University in western Afghanistan, Asil enrolled within the military and was set to change into a lieutenant. “It was my dream to join the army and serve my country. But after the Taliban returned, my dream came crashing down,” he says.
While on the IMA, Asil used to go to the academy’s fitness center, the place he realized bodybuilding. It was a ability that got here in helpful when he then sought work on the Lajpat Nagar fitness center.
“I told the gym owner to give me a chance and worked there for free for six months. If I hadn’t secured the job, I don’t know how I would have survived here,” he says.
The former Afghan troopers in India say they’re afraid of returning to Afghanistan – they worry they are going to be focused for supporting the US-led NATO forces.
Shamas, whose brother was killed by the Taliban, recounts the threats that preceded that assassination.
“My brother received numerous threatening letters from the Taliban demanding to quit his position before they ultimately killed him,” Shamas recollects.
Marzai has his personal demons.
He says he nonetheless wrestles with nightmares from the “harrowing night” he was ambushed. He instinctively strikes his palms and legs in sleep, as if making an attempt to evade the bullets that rained on him years in the past.
“I sleep alone in a separate room. My roommates are reluctant to sleep beside me. I don’t know whom I will hit in my sleep because I move unconsciously,” he says.
‘Never tastes like home’
In their free time, Asil and Shamas go to one another’s properties, recalling with nostalgia their days of hope and goals on the IMA, the place they first met. Conversations usually find yourself veering in the direction of the state of present-day Afghanistan – and the realisation that they should distract themselves.
“We usually play cards, listen to songs – Afghani and Bollywood – watch movies on Netflix, and on occasions also cook,” Asil says. “My favourite actor is Shah Rukh Khan, and actress is Deepika Padukone,” he provides, laughing, referring to the Bollywood stars.
They cook dinner their favorite dishes. Asil prefers kebabs and ashak, pocket-sized dumplings full of chives, and usually served with yoghurt and a mint seasoning. Shamas has a weak spot for kabuli pulao.
“We try our best to cook our favourite dishes. But it never tastes like home,” Shamas mentioned.
And the delicacies of residence can’t fill the void of lacking out on household features.
Shamas’s niece obtained married in early March, whereas Asil’s brother was married 5 months in the past. One of Marzai’s older brothers obtained married in 2022.
“I desperately wanted to be there as my brother is no more. But, I couldn’t travel. I watched the wedding through a video call,” Shamas says.
Shamas and Asil need to migrate to the US. However, their lack of energetic service within the Afghan military makes them ineligible to hunt asylum, they are saying.
“Because we were still in training and had not yet joined the army in active duty, the US authorities are not considering us for asylum despite the dangerous conditions we face in Afghanistan,” says Shamas.
According to the International Rescue Committee, as much as 300,000 Afghans had been related to US operations in Afghanistan since 2001. Since the withdrawal of the US, roughly 88,500 Afghans have been resettled within the US, in accordance with the US Department of Homeland Security, whereas 1000’s extra have utilized, searching for asylum.
Asil is making an attempt to maneuver to different international locations as effectively. “Let’s see what God has in store for me. I have no plans to return to Afghanistan. I want to settle in any Western country and later bring my family there as well,” he says.
Marzai is making an attempt to get asylum in Europe or the US. “I am worried about my family. I want to go home but I am afraid of the Taliban. I am hoping that as a serving soldier, I will find a home in the West,” he mentioned.
But for now, they have to keep in India. And whereas the Afghan military they as soon as served now not exists, they will’t do away with the habits they picked up over years of coaching.
Whenever Marzai meets a senior ex-officer, he maintains the identical routine of self-discipline and respect he had been skilled in, decreasing his head and standing at consideration whereas greeting the officer.
In Marzai’s head, he’s nonetheless a soldier.
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