Huddled on Afghanistan’s chaotic border with Pakistan, his young son shivering in the cold, Ibrahim Danish stared at the unmoving metal gates – willing them to open, even just for a moment.
“We spent the night there in the middle of the street with little Daniel and it was [the most] difficult night of my life,” he says.
“Without food, water and blankets we stood until morning in the middle of thousands of people … but they did not allow anyone in and we come back again to Kabul.”
Back to the Taliban.
Stranded
Since the fall of Kabul and the descent of Afghanistan back into Taliban rule, there have been many dark days. The passage of nearly half a decade has dimmed neither the fear nor the threat.
Mohammed Ibrahim Danish, now in hiding with his wife, Amina, and two children, Daniel and Helene, is a target of the Taliban because he worked on behalf of the Australian government.
Between 2011 and 2015 in republican Afghanistan, he was employed by the international NGO Save the Children on a program known as Children of Uruzgan. It was funded by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The program built and ran schools for children in one of Afghanistan’s poorest provinces, aiming to establish 50 kindergartens across a part of the country where six in 10 children never set foot inside a classroom. It taught girls to read and vaccinated children who never visited a hospital. The program trained dozens of doctors in neonatal care in the country with the highest infant mortality rate in the world.
In the middle of it all was Ibrahim, quietly travelling from village to village, translating for Australian aid workers as they spoke with village elders, delivering vaccines to doctors, distributing cash to rural women.
Ibrahim was proud of his work and the differ...
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