A dad who fled Afghanistan and now calls Cardiff home has spoken of his horror at a return of Taliban rule in his home country.
Abdullah Zabiullah, who now lives in Grangetown with his family, embarked on a three-year journey to flee his home in Jalalabad in 1999, before reaching Cardiff in 2002.
Abdullah said his three sisters and his father who are currently in Jalalabad are scared and have spent days at home.
Read more: Afghans fall to their deaths after clinging to plane in desperate bid to escape Taliban
One of his sisters – a nurse who works in a hospital in the Afghan city – is not sure whether she will have to leave her job.
The Taliban is known for its brutal and inhumane running of the country between 1996 and 2001, when women weren’t allowed to be educated or work, minorities and criminals were often publicly executed, and pastimes like music were banned.
The Taliban says this time around their interpretation of the Islamic legal system will be different and civilians have nothing to worry about, but Abdullah says he – along with the vast majority of Afghans – does not believe them.
Abdullah’s family had already left for Pushawar just across the border into Pakistan in 1993 after his brother had been shot in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan.
Abdullah Zabiullah and his son Muhammad Azzam outside their Grangetown home
(Image: Jonathon Hill)
“My father had money because of his farm, and he didn’t want to leave, but when the bullet hit my brother he said we had to go,” Abdullah remembered. “In Afghanistan it is very important to have a son, and he was scared he would lose us.
“There was no transport at that time and we went to Pakistan by donkeys and my dad took as much money as he could.
“After two years of renting we could no longer afford it, and we began living in a tent at my uncle’s house in Peshawar. We started selling my mother’s gold because there was no money left.”
After more than three years the family decided they had no choice but to return to their village farm outside Jalalabad, where Abdullah’s father started from scratch again. But in 1996, when the Taliban took control, Abdullah said no one could have realised what was in store.
“It was a different world when we returned. When teenagers finished school they were taking them by force to war. Most were uneducated or very poorly educated,” he said.
Taliban fighters in Wazir Akbar Khan in the city of Kabul on Wednesday
(Image: AP)
Burglaries became so rife that Abdullah was regularly asked to stay up with a lamp and shout every five minutes to deter thieves.
“The Taliban made the whole country feel like someone from each family had died,” the dad-of-three said. “There was no music, no TV, men weren’t allowed to shave their beards. Life changed so quickly.
“I remember one day when I was playing with my friends and we crossed the border into Pakistan and it was like a completely different world. I remember clearly that there was music [in Pakistan].
“My sister was in her second year of medical college when the Taliban took control, but she immediately had to stop learning. She couldn’t do anything for six years. She listened to the radio every day for the first two years, every day waiting in the hope that today the universities can open for women again.”
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Bravely Abdullah’s family decided to make their own small voluntary school from their home, where his sister could teach. If the Taliban had found the school Abdullah said he had no doubt his father would have been arrested, and the family could have been tortured with well-used practices such as stoning.
“It was to help my sister mentally – to make her busy we made a little school there,” he explained. “It started with four kids. Then slowly people started hearing and sending their little girls. More and more came, and my mother started teaching there as well to help.”
In its last two years, the school received funding from UNICEF and went from strength to strength.
By the end of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, there were 120 girls at the school, which was never discovered by the authorities.
“To make it less suspicious my dad banned me and my brothers from the house in the daytime. We used to spend the days at the farm. It needed to be all women and girls because if we got caught with men and women together, that was strongly forbidden.
“It would have been treated as badly as having an affair. We could have been killed.”
Abdullah started his escape from Jalalabad in 1999, after his parents spent more than ten years’ savings in an attempt to get him to Europe. There was no way the family could afford to let more than one person flee.
“They chose me because they felt my brothers were cleverer, and were less likely to join the Taliban or a gang,” he explained. “My parents were very scared I’d have a wasted life or be killed.
“I finished high school and at the time when you finished school there you could even be forced to join the Taliban. The people joining weren’t trained. They were forced to join and if they died they just said they’d go to Heaven. It was a one-way ticket.”
Abdullah fled Afghanistan in 1999 and finally arrived in the UK in 2002
(Image: Jonathon Hill)
Abdullah said in a country with such a poor education system as Afghanistan, it is not hard to realise how militant groups can grow.
“In maths from a young age it was never ‘two plus two’. It was done by using examples of weapons like guns. ‘Two guns plus two guns’. It was all deliberate. Most people are uneducated in Afghanistan. For some the only choice for income for their families was to fight or steal.”
Abdullah remembers his mother crying and begging his father not to send him away on an extremely risky journey dependent on traffickers.
“Dad said he had to do it. He was sure I would be forced to be in the Taliban or become a gangster and lose my life.”
Via Pakistan, Thailand and China, where two of the Afghans he had been travelling with were discovered to be illegal immigrants and were deported, Abdullah finally made it to Frankfurt in Germany in 2002, and then onto Birmingham.
It was only when he reached the UK that his real identity and where he was from was uncovered.
Afghans rushed onto the tarmac of Kabul’s international airport, some so desperate to escape the Taliban capture of their country that they held onto an American military jet as it took off and fell to their deaths
(Image: AP)
With the help of fellow Afghans, including a friend of his father who is from Cardiff, Abdullah obtained a temporary visa and moved to south Wales.
While the Taliban never left his home country, he said he could never have envisaged they’d return in such numbers. He predicts it will result in civil war again.
“At the moment the Taliban are back in control, but people cannot live under the Taliban, and they won’t. Afghan people will stand against them. There is another civil war coming.
“I am very scared for my family there. I can help them financially but not other than that, because the borders are sealed.
“Getting out of Afghanistan is very hard, and the Taliban don’t want people to leave either.”
Reacting to scenes of people cramming into planes in a desperate attempt to leave the country, he said: “I would do the same. Imagine if someone tells you not listen to music, go five times in the mosque, punishing you to pray, punish you for stupid reasons, you can’t have a passion, you can’t go to the doctors.
“They have been let down by the allies. The situation was better. The Afghan army was told to stop fighting. And now it has come to this.
“Twenty years building TV channels, music, musicians, people’s careers – all of it gone for nothing. Within a week we are back there.
“My whole family for the last few days have been too afraid to go out.
“It is still the same Taliban. The only reason they are speaking like this is because they have months to bring in their new government, and they want the people to choose them. Believe me, even people who choose them are doing so because they are scared.
“Even people welcoming the Taliban are scared. They’re doing it to protect themselves.
“Even if my sister can work again at the hospital, what about the next generations of nurses?”
Abdullah says he is relieved to live in a place where he doesn’t worry about the safety of his children. Son Muhammad Azzam (left) and eldest daughter Zuhra are pictured with him here
(Image: Jonathon Hill)
Abdullah now lives with his wife and three children in Grangetown, and drives taxis during the evenings.
“People criticising the NHS and the police in this country do not understand how lucky they are,” he added.
“When I am going to work I don’t even think about the safety of my children, I know they are safe. That really means a lot.”
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