Darko Vojinovic/AP Photo
Hasib Qarizada, a student from Afghanistan, stands outside his room in the “Krnjaca” refugee center near Belgrade, Serbia, February 24, 2022. Qarizada had been studying in Hungary for years, but was expelled last September even as his native country unraveled.
When Ramez Niazi heard that Russian troops would attack the Ukrainian port city of Odessa within hours, he decided to throw his belongings into his cousin’s car and leave the country—not the first time they had done so. “For us Afghans it never ends. We are doomed to leave our homes over and over again,” Ramez recalled when I met him in Stuttgart, Germany, in July.
Three years ago, the 28-year-old Ramez fled Afghanistan. At the time, the war between the Taliban and the Afghan Republic’s security forces had reached a peak. Kabul and other regions were haunted by terrorist attacks, American airstrikes, and brutal fighting. Every week, hundreds of civilians were killed. For Ramez, his cousin, and many other Afghans, the only option was to leave.
“You did not know if you returned alive after leaving the house. I could not continue living like that,” Ramez said. For years, the human trafficking business in Afghanistan was thriving, and he was a reluctant customer.
A smuggler sold both Ramez and his cousin a Russian visa for $3,000 and booked them airline tickets to Moscow. A few days later, both men landed in Moscow and headed west. Eventually, they found a refuge in Odessa, a seaside metropolis in southern Ukraine, where many Afghans found a new home.
According to official numbers, at least 5,000 Afghans were living in Ukraine before the war erupted last February. Many of them had already received Ukrainian citizenship, while others, like Ramez, arrived shortly before the Russian invasion. During the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s return to power last summer, 370 Afghans were evacuated to Ukraine. But since the Russian invasion, many of them are on the run again. Others have taken up arms against the invaders, just as Afghans did in the 1980s.
The most well-known Afghan defending the Ukrainian nation is Jalal Noory, a commander with the Ukrainian forces. “This is my second country and I will defend it,” Noory repeated in several interviews. He also underlined how many Afghans were forced to leave their country after the Soviet invasion of 1979. That decade-long occupation led to the death of something like a million Afghans. “If the Russians didn’t invade Afghanistan, I wouldn’t have probably landed in Ukraine,” Noory concluded.
Mostly, Afghans in Ukraine lived as shop owners or ran other businesses, and found the country reasonably welcoming. Many integrated within the society through intermarriage and started to consider Ukraine their new home. Even Ramez found his place and was happy, although he did not obtain proper residency documents. Before the Russian invasion, he had a takeout shop and sold Afghan snacks.
“My plan was to go to Western Europe but I started to like Ukraine. I did not feel like an outsider there,” Ramez said.
But the onset of the war changed all that. He was forced to flee once again. When Ramez arrived in Germany through Poland, he noticed how he was treated much differently than his Ukranian counterparts, although he was fleeing from the same conflict. “I am still not allowed to work while Ukrainian citizens have been granted full access to the job market and social securities,” Ramez said. At the moment, he lives in a refugee home and faces an uncertain future. Multiple times, German authorities told him that he would be treated like an Afghan refugee and not a Ukrainian one—and the negative implication was clear.
When Ramez arrived in Germany through Poland, he noticed how he was treated much differently than his Ukranian counterparts, although he was fleeing from the same conflict.
Ramez and other doubly displaced Afghans find themselves in a situation similar to that of thousands of Afghans who have been evacuated since the Taliban returned to Kabul and American forces terminated their two-decade occupation. These Afghan evacuees find themselves in limbo all around the world, facing an uncertain future and irritable if not hostile receptions. Especially since the war in Ukraine started, it’s obvious that Western governments are not terribly interested in a proper resettlement of the thousands of new arrivals—and that’s if they allow any legal refugees at all. (That said, the U.S. Congress is reportedly near agreement on a new bipartisan bill that would provide an easier track for Afghan refugees in the country to get legal residency, as well as streamline the refugee application process for those still in Afghanistan—though it comes a year after it should have.)
Afghan refugees who can’t manage the burdensome and time-consuming legal application process, and thus continue trying to leave the country through other means, still face legal persecution—if not beatings, torture, and death—in the borderlands of Iran and Turkey, or in the Mediterranean at the gates of the European Union fortress.
“There is no place for us to go. Nobody wants us,” Nadeem, an Afghan refugee who lives in Turkey, told me. Like many others, he lives in the shadows and works illegally in one of the many factories in Istanbul’s industrial suburbs. Nadeem left his village in Logar province, 40 minutes south of Kabul, when the war in the region reached a peak. “Night raids, drone strikes, and military operations were part of my life there. I could not handle it anymore,” he recalled when I met him.
Last November, Nadeem was part of a group of Afghans trying to reach Europe. Several refugees drowned in the sea after their boat was attacked by Frontex forces, the European Union’s infamous border agency. After one day of imprisonment in Greece, Nadeem and his companions were sent back to Turkey, where border guards welcomed them with beatings and theft. A few weeks later, the war in Ukraine started and European politicians called for an unconditional acceptance for refugees who were fleeing from Vladimir Putin’s bombs.
But the sad fact is that such noble statements simply did not apply to nonwhite Afghans. “This world is full of hypocrisy and I struggle to find words for all these inequalities,” Nadeem told me.
