Jawid Ahmadzai, 27, risked his life to defy the Taliban.
As a child born in Kabul after the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979-1989, Ahmadzai quietly disapproved when the mujahideen freedom fighters, a precursor to the Taliban, rose to power.
“About 10 or 11,” he recalled in near-perfect English with a slight Russian accent, “I had seen worse than the Taliban government in civil war. Then [the] Taliban government was almost as bad, or worse.”
In town, Taliban trucks unloaded men. Anyone found outside a mosque during the hour of prayer was beaten without question, Ahmadzai said. One day with his older brother, he pushed through a crowd huddled around a woman shot dead in the street, “because she was with another man, or she liked another man — it was not clear.”
A young boy never knowing peace, he questioned the cruelty.
“I was going to school and I saw all this extremism. Most people disagreed with it,” he said.
Quietly, he learned the forbidden language of English from a woman who lived next door.
Then the terrorist attacks of 911 brought the might of America to his doorstep.
“That’s when I started talking to soldiers,” he said, ignoring the Taliban who told him that the American infidel was evil.
The conversations were cordial and superficial. “How are you? When did you come?” he would ask.
After graduating from school, though, Ahmadzai said he “began to understand why the soldiers had come. I realized they are in Afghanistan to help.”
As a nervous 18-year-old, he walked willingly into Camp Phoenix, a former U.S. military recruiting station in Kabul. The Army was looking for interpreters to help on the frontline. Ahmadzai scored high on a fluency test for English and dialects native to the region.
And so he signed up to fight with America in the war to liberate the Afghani people.
“I was poor. But I didn’t do it for the money. I could have done a different job in Kabul,” he said. “It was this feeling that America came from a foreign country to help. Why can’t we stand together to support this mission?”
The service, which included two years crossing the deadly border with Pakistan, eased Ahmadzai’s bid to resettle in the United States as a refugee. But he knew nothing of America.
“So I would always start by showing them a map of the United States,” said Benjamin Baran, a U.S. Navy officer who supervised 26 Afghan interpreters in 2013, including Ahmadzai.
“This is Texas,” Baran would say, illustrating the expanse of the United States. “It’s about the size of Afghanistan.”
“Well, we’ll come near you, sir,” interpreters like Ahmadzai would tell Baran, who lives in Hudson.
Now raising a family in Cleveland, Ahmadzai works as a case manager for other incoming refugees and immigrants at the International Institute of Akron. He recently considered returning to the Middle East to serve America again.
But that was before Donald Trump became president and issued a temporary blanket ban on all refugees — like him. He gives two reasons for not serving Trump’s America.
“Are we going to be let in to come back?” he questioned. “I know Afghanistan is not on the list [of countries with immigration stoppages], but I am Muslim. And it’s clear to everyone that [Trump’s order] is a Muslim ban.”
“The second reason is why would we serve?” he said. “It’s a big question. … I’m pretty sure from what I know about my people, from what I know about interpreters, they will not serve, because when we served, we felt that America had our back.”
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug .