A tribute to the men of Khamyab
Stories from a migrant community of Afghans in Istanbul
By Aziz Hakimi, Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, Norway
War is not the only reason why Afghans are leaving their country. The current phase of an upsurge in violence has reportedly forced hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians to abandon their homes and flee to the safety of provincial centres still in government hands. The current moment of crisis has led to the notion of a new exodus of refugees from Afghanistan flooding into neighbouring countries and beyond. The reality, however, is that Afghans trying to flee the conflict have rather limited options both inside as well as outside their country. And those who do manage to get out are often deported back, and importantly not all of them are or want to head to Europe - at least not until now.
Many of the young men I have worked with in Afghanistan and Turkey in recent years (part of a research on Afghan masculinities) have had other, more mundane motivations for migration. These young Turkish-speaking men from northern Afghanistan had embarked on dangerous journeys through Pakistan and Iran to reach Turkey, where they found jobs working in the country’s one-time booming construction and service industries, sectors which have been badly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Working in Turkey illegally, under constant threat of deportation, Afghan migrant workers aspired to attain the masculine ideals of a breadwinner and provider for their families and the social status and prestige that comes with marriage and starting a family.
Because of strong social ties to their communities in Afghanistan, hardly any of the men were interested in migrating to Europe. They worked in Turkey under brutally exploitative conditions, sent remittances home to support their families and saved some money on the side toward a brideprice. After five to six years, the men returned home to their villages, now as adult men, to get married and start families. This circulatory mode of migrant existence, working in Turkey and providing for families in Afghanistan have come under intense pressure due to the impact of Covid-19 pandemic, neighbouring countries’ harsher immigration policies and closed borders, and critically, the intensifying armed conflict in Afghanistan.
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Life in Afghanistan, as in Hobbes’ memorable description, can be poor, nasty, brutish and short - especially nowadays. The Taliban’s relentless military campaign in just the last two months have resulted in the capture of more than half of the country’s roughly four hundred rural districts. Although, the Afghan government has been able to recapture a few lost districts, the dynamic of the conflict has changed dramatically, possibly irrevocably. Civilians in rural areas have been frequently subjected to military and police violence in the last twenty years in the context of US-NATO-Afghan government counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations. At the time, foreign forces relied on a variety of paramilitary groups, including Afghan Local Police (ALP), government-backed local militias and Counter-Terrorism Pursuit Teams or Afghan Strike Forces, Afghan auxiliaries secretly funded and supported by the CIA and US Special Forces and used in search operations and night raids to kill or capture Taliban insurgents and members of Al Qaeda or Islamic State, actions which often resulted in harm to civilians.
The current phase of conflict, however, has shifted the dynamics of militarised violence from rural areas, where the seesaw nature of the battle, involving fighting between government forces and Taliban insurgents over the control of rural districts, to populated urban areas, to the towns and cities of the northwest, northeast, south and southwest, where the most unfortunate ones ended up living in internally displaced camps while those with family connections found shelter with friends and relatives.
The plight of civilians in heavily populated urban areas is especially worrying given the recent Taliban onslaught on cities and provincial centres. Civilians in provincial towns like Lashkargah in southern Helmand province are bearing the brunt as the fighting has worsened. Media reports show that local residents are trapped inside their homes while fighting between government forces and Taliban insurgents rages on all in the streets. Dead bodies, including of young children litter the streets as people are too afraid to venture out and collect the dead.
With thousands already displaced, the government has urged the residents of Lashkargah to evacuate their homes as security forces prepare to launch clearance operation against insurgents holed up inside the city. Taliban and government ground offensives and especially airstrikes by the Afghan National Army are causing the most harm to civilians but also damage vital infrastructure including homes, shops and health facilities. The intensification of violence in urban areas, and greater reliance on air power is likely to result in increased civilian casualties.
The so-called international community unable or unwilling to do more have resorted to issuing frantic declarations urging the warring parties to stop fighting, respect human rights and protect the civilian population. Confronted with Taliban unwillingness to heed such warnings, US and European diplomats have resorted to publicly shaming Taliban into respect for human rights. In a moral travesty fast becoming the norm, the British Embassy in Kabul in a twitter message condemned the Taliban’s disregard for Afghan lives in recent bouts of fighting and chastised the group that ‘this was not how legitimate powers or governments behave’.
Such statements prematurely confirming diplomatic recognition on the Taliban were preceded by public statements by some Western politicians indicating that their governments will be willing to work with the Taliban in the event of capturing governmental power. There has also been a flurry of diplomatic activities in the region as Afghanistan’s neighbours, near and far, hosted Taliban delegations urging the group to not allow terrorists groups of concern to these powers to operate from Afghanistan against their interests (for example, the anti-China East Turkistan Islamic Movement, or ETIM).
Statements and actions of this sort demonstrates to Afghans that most Western governments who until recently were heavily invested, both militarily and in the form of civilian aid, in Afghanistan have already written off the beleaguered Afghan government as talk of Afghanistan collapsing into more violence and civil war take centre stage. So powerful is the narrative of this impending ‘state collapse’ that Turkey recently reached out to Taliban to negotiate a deal allowing Turkish military forces to take over the security of Kabul international airport.
The UN estimated that 40 people were killed and more than one hundred were injured in a single day of recent fighting in Lashkargah. UN pleas to stop the fighting and negotiate peace have so far fallen on deaf ears. To the northwest, the Taliban already control most of the rural districts in Herat Province as well as the two key border crossing points to Iran and Turkmenistan. Having cut off the provincial centre, the insurgents have amassed their forces for a final push to capture Herat city. It has an estimated population of half a million people and is considered one of Afghanistan five key political and economic regional hubs.
The beleaguered government forces with the aid of local militias and former mujahideen fighters have so far managed to prevent the Taliban’s takeover of this key provincial capital in the northwest. The fall of Herat, if it happens, will be a major blow to both public trust in the government and the morale of the Afghan security forces. The situation in Kandahar is even worse. There, the Taliban managed to capture Spin Boldak, the border district with Pakistan (and the border crossing). They have also breached the city defences and are currently fighting government forces inside the city. The fall of Kandahar, where the Taliban rose to power in the 1990s and which they consider as their spiritual capital, will be a huge loss for the government which will further embolden the Taliban to push for the capture of the capital Kabul.
While civilians displaced by conflict in rural villages and districts typically sought safety by relocating to big cities like Helmand and Kandahar (south), Mazar-i-Sharif (north), Herat (west), Nangarhar (east) and Kabul (central), the recent expansion of fighting to the proximity and sometimes inside major population centres such as Kandahar city and Herat city have further eroded the safety mechanisms open to Afghan civilians caught in the throes of conflict. With border crossings to neighbouring countries either under Taliban control or the scene of frequent fighting between government and insurgents, Afghanistan’s neighbours have thrown a security cordon around the country, involving fencing of borders and deployment of additional border guards, making it almost impossible for civilians to flee conflict and seek refuge outside their country.
Everyday existence for Afghan civilians, already battered by decades of conflict, has become even more brutal in recent weeks. The current upsurge in violence and the spread of fighting to major urban population centres such as Herat, Kandahar and Helmand have turned these urban oases, where previously those fleeing the war in their villages sought refuge and safety, into death traps. With the adjoining districts and border crossings now in insurgent hands, Afghan civilians are trapped inside the cities while the Taliban push forward. The dramatic upsurge in violence have displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians inside the country, men like my friend Habib from the northern Kunduz province. As the fighting got closer to his family home, he had to abandon it and now lives with relatives in Kabul.
With the siege of cities and closing of borders, Afghanistan is being literally turned into an open-air prison for civilians while different armed groups continue to intensify the violence threatening their lives and livelihoods. Unwelcome by neighbours, Afghans in urban areas may very well be forced to repeat the displacement dynamics seen in the early 1990s when fighting among rival mujahideen factions forced civilians to abandon their homes in cities and seek refuge with relatives in their ancestral villages and rural districts, where they were often unwelcomed as their arrival put pressure on limited resources such as shelter, food, jobs, land and water.
As fears of more violence grip Afghanistan and hopes of a political settlement gradually disappear, and with the rest of the world silently watching Afghans kill and maim one another, Afghans in Herat poured into the streets chanting ‘Allah Akbar’, God is Great. A few days later the same cries were heard in the streets and alleys of Kabul, Khost, Nangarhar and Bamyan. With fighting entering the cities, Afghans are coming to the realisation that they are truly on their own now. The world seems to have washed its hands of Afghanistan and its problems. It is now up to Afghans themselves to ‘save’ their own country. In a sense, it represents a moment of hope for those of us who viewed the country’s military and economic dependence on NATO countries as morally and politically problematic. Yet, it is extremely difficult to ignore the severity of the military and humanitarian situation in Afghanistan right now.
The chants of Allah Akbar have been associated with popular rejection of the Taliban and support for Afghan security forces who are fighting Taliban to prevent the fall of key provincial centres to the insurgents. However, there is another, more humble, human side to these religious chants. To my mind, they symbolise the pain of a population battered by four decades of military violence. They speak to the utter loss of hope for peace and fears of an impending disaster among ordinary Afghans. It is only all too human to seek refuge in God when the human capacity to cope with adversity is overwhelmed. When something is beyond our human ability to manage, we call for divine intervention in human affairs. Sceptical minds will continue to ask if God is really listening. The faithful among us will blame human wickedness and our own depravity for the current state to justify God’s abandonment of his creation - and His wrath as a deserving punishment for our collective failures.
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The increasingly desperate reality of war and displacement in Afghanistan have given rise to concerns about a new exodus of Afghan refugees fleeing the country and either settling in neighbouring countries or heading toward Europe. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has recorded a 30 to 40 percent increase in the number of Afghans fleeing the country in the past month. Its estimates show that between 750,000 to 1 million Afghans migrated each year. However, since the upsurge in violence as a result of Taliban’s blistering offensive in the last two months, now between 20,000 to 30,000 people are migrating abroad every week, many headed ‘westward’ in search of safety and jobs (Bezhan 2021). This increase in out-migration has been attributed to the withdrawal of international troops and the subsequent deterioration in security situation across the country.
However, a small number of Afghans fleeing their country will eventually make it as far as Turkey, let alone enter fortress Europe. Pakistan says it has completed 90 percent of work on fencing the Durand Line, the British colonial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Turkey is also building a border wall along its border with Iran to stem the tide of Afghan migrants and refugees. It continues to arrest and deport Afghans; in 2019 more than 200,000 were arrested entering Turkey, many of whom were deported back to Afghanistan (Gall 2021). Those who made it to Europe are also being sent back. Despite the surge in violence, some European countries continue to deport Afghans, disregarding warnings that it is not safe to deport Afghans back to their country.
There is no denying that Afghans, mainly young men and women, are leaving their country in search of safety and jobs, including in response to the withdrawal of international forces and an upsurge in violence. However, as my research on Afghan migrant workers in the Eurasia arena (Hakimi 2020) shows, not every Afghan was headed for Europe. In reality, the motivations of Afghans, mainly young men leaving their country are varied and complex. This complexity can’t be reduced to a neat scenario of a unidirectional ‘flight’ from Afghanistan, with Europe or the US as the final desired destination in mind - at least this was the case before the current round of fighting.
First, not everyone is able to leave the country. Many Afghans are too poor and lack the resources to fund their journeys outside Afghanistan. Second, the number of internally displaced people are likely to be greater than those able to leave, especially given the reality of heavily policed borders and the unwelcome attitude of neighbouring governments toward new Afghan refugees. Importantly, the phenomenon of Afghan migrants is much older than the US troop withdrawal or the four war-torn decades or violence associated with the Taliban insurgency.
I would argue that one should be rightly concerned about this kind of alarmist reporting on and from Afghanistan - that is now that foreign forces are withdrawing, Afghans are fleeing their country fearing Taliban violence. In some ways this kind of orientalist ‘representation’ of Afghanistan feeds into self-serving official narratives in the US, especially the US military in its earlier reluctance to fully withdraw troops from Afghanistan. The anticipated doomsday scenario following US troops withdrawal - a repeat of the early 1990s when factional militias viciously fought each other for the control of Kabul and other parts of the country; or the possibility of Taliban military takeover of power and the massive flight of Afghans from cities - has fed into highly problematic imaginaries that portray US and NATO forces as agents of civilised order whose presence was desired to save Afghanistan from Taliban barbarians or gangs of ethnic warlord militias.
Frankly, it was less than comforting for me to watch so many enlightened Afghans opposing the withdrawal of US and NATO troops, as if Afghan voices or desires really mattered to the Americans. Granted, many were doing it because of legitimate concerns about the future of their country. But the irony of this discourse is that it wrongly portrays American troops as liberators and protectors of Afghans, or to paraphrase it in Spivak’s schema the withdrawal narrative is presented as a case of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ (Spivak 1994). This is of course deeply disconcerting given the role of American forces in the war, in militarising Afghan society and in the context of the botched-up peace process apparently facilitating the return of the Taliban to power.
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As explained elsewhere (Hakimi 2020), the circulatory existence of Afghan migrants, working in Turkey and providing for families in Afghanistan, was already under a lot of stress due to the toughening of immigration rules and tightening of international borders. The intensification of armed violence and the resultant civilian displacement in the north, however, will very likely throw this fragile lifeworld into more turmoil. With the loss of social networks and family connections in their villages of origin due to conflict and displacement, the young migrant men who became my informants and the subject of my ethnographic work in Istanbul in 2017 and 2018 will be forced to look further west, to Europe for safety and economic survival.
Although war and poverty are important push factors in many cases, in fact ideals of adult masculinity expressed in terms of cultural idioms of male provider and self-made family men as well as the desire for attaining higher socio-economic status were equally significant to the migratory and marital strategies of young Turkmen-speaking men from northern Afghanistan working in Istanbul. These men undertook dangerous journeys from southern Afghanistan through Pakistan and Iran to Turkey where they hoped to find a job that paid enough to support their families back home and allow them to save up a part of their income which they would eventually pay as brideprice to the father of the girl chosen for them by their parents. Although love marriage and marriages resulting from elopement are not unheard of, arranged marriage by parents is still considered the most prestigious route to matrimony and household formation in Afghanistan.
Such prestigious marriages are not cheap and require considerable resources to organize. While in the past, wealthy fathers were expected to pay for the marriage of one or more sons using land or livestock as an exchange mechanism for brideprice, men from poorer families had to resort to migration in search of work in Afghan cities or further afield in neighbouring markets in Iran and Pakistan - and more recently in the oil rich economies of the Gulf countries. Due to war and displacement, poverty, climate change and growing monetisation of the economy, household economies based on land and agriculture are no longer able to cater to the marriage market where cash-based exchanges involving payment of a hefty brideprice, and large and expensive weddings have increasingly become the norm.
Normally households will have some resources that can be drawn upon for organising marriage and other basic functions of social reproduction. For example, economic capital such as land or livestock or income from trade can be converted to social capital through marriage alliances and exchange of brideprice. However, prolonged periods of conflict, poverty, drought or unemployment means that households and society as whole may not always be able to reproduce itself without some additional input from the outside, in the form of external resources. The combination of these structural and cultural factors has, historically, necessitated the deployment of human capital outside the country. Migration, thus, typically translated into economic activities in the form of long-distance trade or engagement in wage labour in the markets of neighbouring countries. This circulatory mode of existence, helpfully described by the term ‘mobile societies’ (Ho 2017), has been a key feature of Afghan life and central to the modern history of the country.
As previously noted, poverty or the desire to improve one’s social position have driven the rural poor in Afghanistan, in paraphrasing Marx, to sell its labour power to live. The seasonal rural economy based on agriculture and sharecropping was never large enough; it could only provide paid work to a small number of working-class men. Many poor rural men sought work and livelihood by migrating to provincial centres or regional political and economic hubs such as Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, Herat in the west, Kandahar in the south, Nangarhar in the east and Kabul in central Afghanistan. Those with greater resources and ambitions travelled abroad, heading to regional markets in search of work and livelihoods, which in today’s context happens to be Turkey, especially for Turkmen-speaking migrants from northern Afghanistan.
According to official estimates, as many as 200,000 Afghan migrants are currently living in Turkey (Gall 2021). Although already in 2018 it had become increasingly difficult to cross into Turkey from Iran, and despite frequent detention and deportation of Afghans by Turkish authorities the country has retained its attraction for Afghans seeking to work abroad or those edging beyond in search of safety and protection. The cost of the journey to Turkey while not insignificant is not prohibitively high. The journey from southern Afghanistan through Pakistan and Iran to Turkey could cost between US$ 800 to 1000. There are many ways to pay for the journey to Turkey. Mortgaging family land is one way to secure a cash advance. Migrants who have friends and family members in Turkey can rely on their social networks to arrange the journey out of Afghanistan by paying smugglers at the point of arrival. Others may spend a few years working in Iran, and after accumulating the necessary resources would travel onwards to Turkey. Istanbul happens to be the favourite destination for Afghan migrant workers, where jobs were plenty and wages were good before economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic affected Turkey.
The young men I worked with in Istanbul with did not necessarily do the lowliest jobs such as collecting garbage from the streets. They happened to be engaged in more prestigious, if backbreaking construction work and in the service industry in Istanbul, as cooks, waiters, and cleaners. A few of the men worked in a garment factory making clothes which were then exported to markets in the Middle East and Europe. However, since they worked illegally, without working permits, Afghan migrants were typically engaged in informal work, accepting lower wages working 10 to 12-hour shifts without insurance or social security benefits.
In the pre-pandemic world when the Turkish economy had been kept buoyed by a frenzy of construction and real estate development, Afghan migrant workers constituted a cheap source of labour and were therefore welcomed in Turkey. However, attitudes towards migrants and refugees have hardened over time. In fact, the precarious nature of existence of undocumented Afghan migrant workers in Turkey got worse in the summer of 2018, when Turkish authorities started to deport them back to Afghanistan in large numbers. Two brothers from the group I interviewed in 2018 were among a group of Afghan migrants who were sent back to Afghanistan in the summer of 2018. From migrants deported to Afghanistan, I learned that they were typically arrested in police raids on homes, factories as well as in the streets and markets. After arrest, they were taken to military-run camps, and kept there for weeks in harsh conditions without adequate clothing, food, water or access to a doctor or medicine before being deported to Afghanistan.
The two brother I mentioned made it back to Istanbul a few months after being deported. However, the brothers were now heavily indebted because they had to borrow money from relatives and friends to get back to Turkey. Life was never easy for these men, but a deportation imposed an additional financial burden on migrant workers. On top of the marriage payments they had to pay to the father of the bride and providing for the sustenance of a large family back home, a deportation meant they now had to also pay the debt related to their return journey to Turkey. Some men spent five to six years to save up enough money to pay brideprices ranging from US$ 12000 to 15000. Those unfortunate enough to be deported had to work even longer stints, perhaps six to eight years or longer before they could return to their homes in Afghanistan and get married.
Writing at the time, it was evident to me that the hopeful expectations of the men I encountered in Istanbul in 2017 and 2018 were out of sync with the political currents of the time. The hardening of anti-migrant sentiments in the region and globally were easy to see. Since then, the attitudes of politicians and people in the neighbouring states toward Afghan migrants, and especially the growing number of refugees fleeing war and violence in their country has become more hostile and unwelcoming. In the midst of these geopolitical changes, the mode of itinerant existence that I describe here - working in Turkey and providing for families in Afghanistan - which happened to be key to the economic survival of many rural households in the country is now gravely threatened by a variety of forces, including the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated economic impacts, harsher immigration policies and the impermeability of international borders - and crucially the intensifying conflict in Afghanistan.
This fascinating world of migrant existence and the society and social practices in which it was embedded is on the verge of disappearing, and like so much else in Afghanistan’s recent history may soon be lost. My purpose in writing this short piece here has been to record it for posterity. It is an attempt at memory-making and the preservation of culture, a statement of genuine hope in the face of life’s adversity. It is dedicated to the young men of Khamyab in northern Jowzjan province. God be with you, wherever you are now.
Aziz Hakimi
Senior Associated Researcher
Chr. Michelsen Institute
Bergen, Norway
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References
Bezhan, Frud. 2021. “‘We Don’t Have A Choice’: Thousands Of Afghans Fleeing Abroad Daily As Taliban Violence Soars.” RFE/RL. June 26, 2021. https://gandhara.rferl.org/a/afghan-refugees-taliban-violence/31378092.html.
Gall, Carlotta. 2021. “Afghans Fleeing Home Are Filling the Lowliest Jobs in Istanbul.” The New York Times, May 6, 2021, sec. World. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/world/asia/afghan-migrants-istanbul.html.
Hakimi, Aziz A. 2020. “‘Good Men Don’t Elope’: Afghan Migrant Men’s Discourses on Labour Migration, Marriage and Masculinity.” History and Anthropology 0 (0): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2020.1865342.
Ho, Engseng. 2017. “Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies.” The Journal of Asian Studies 76 (04): 907–28. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911817000900.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1994. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 66–111. New York: Columbia University Press.