On Saturday, Baaz Muhammad Kakar left the coastal city of Mersin in Turkey and boarded a bus to Istanbul — another step in his long journey from home. He had eaten only a biscuit in the past 24 hours.
He caps that update to me with, “Unfortunately, I’m still alive.”
A 23-year-old Afghan asylum seeker, and an example of the collateral damage of America’s longest war, Kakar has been stuck in Turkey since March 20, waiting for human smugglers to get him to Greece. But things have recently tightened up in the Mediterranean route, with Greece even sending some asylum seekers back.
Kakar and I first met in Kabul in February, when he was planning to leave Afghanistan. He was a sports presenter at a local TV station. Ever watchful, the Taliban, who basically operates like the mob, put pressure on him to either join them in his hometown of Ghazni, their turf, or get a job of which they approved — nothing in the media or involving foreigners — and send money to them.
Hopeless, Kakar got a tourist visa to Iran, paid a smuggler, and walked nine hours through the mountainous northern border to reach Turkey.
He had not told his family he planned to leave, so I identified him as “Akhtar” at the time. He no longer wants to hide his identity, as his family is in the know.
“Every time my mother speaks to me, she cries,” he said.
Kakar, too, wept when I interviewed him in a subterranean café, decorated like a disco military bunker. Despite knowing the perils of the path to Europe, like an increasing number of Afghans, he felt he had to leave. 2015 was the deadliest year for civilians in Afghanistan, and the first quarter of 2016 had seen that trend continue. The Taliban attacked Kunduz again earlier this month and carried out an attack in Kabul on April 19, killing at least 28 and injuring more than 300.
One of Kakar’s cousins was injured in the attack he told me, and one of his college classmates was killed.
His messages from Turkey speak to the increasing desperation thousands of asylum seekers there must feel as they wait, unable to go back to war and instability, stuck between Turkey’s aspirations and the European Union’s desire to stem the flow of migrants to its shores.
I heard from Kakar on April 23, after over a week of silence. I asked someone in Kabul about him, and he said that a friend had been in touch with Kakar on Facebook and thought that maybe he had found a job in Turkey. Not so, Kakar told me — he only wanted to leave.
On April 14, he and others yet again headed to the coast to board a Greece-bound boat. But they were detained by Turkish authorities, held for three nights, fingerprinted, and released. They were ordered to go to Ankara and register as asylum seekers, which would prohibit them from doing so in Europe. Kakar won’t register in Turkey, even it if it means being deported the next time he gets picked up.
Jail, he said, was tough.
“The blankets stank… Several of us got sick,” he wrote. “It was the food, I think.”
Kakar is not just a victim of bad timing in Turkey. He also shoulders the consequences of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, where nearly 15 years later, the Taliban continues to flex its muscles as U.S. troops look for a way out. Like so many other Afghans, he’s lost patience with a peace process that has yet to happen. So Kakar managed to leave Afghanistan, but can’t seem to make his way out of Turkey.
He wrote on March 27 that he was headed to Greece soon. He was supposed to go the previous day, but the smugglers said the “conditions were bad.” There have been many false starts.
During one go, Kakar was kept in a filthy room with 40 men for five hours in a smugglers’ safe house. “The room was infested…I was covered with flea bites within an hour,” he wrote.
Some days, he doesn’t DM me, opting to like or retweet my Tweets to let me know he’s alive.
Turkish people, he said, have treated him with kindness, but the circumstances are hard. “The money I had has run out. I don’t speak the language,” he wrote on April 14, adding the only food he could afford are 2-Lira (70-cent) cheese sandwiches.
“I’m stuck wondering what to do. There’s no work,” he said.
When he’s not asking me, “as a big sister,” for advice I can’t give, he seems determined to stick to his plan.
“I’m almost certain that I can remain alive here,” he wrote on Saturday, adding that he’d only return when he’s “tired of living.”
“Going back to Afghanistan and Ghazni would be suicide.”