We had no choice but to leave our home in Herat, a city in western Afghanistan (Picture: Hamed Amiri)
‘The mullah has given an order,’ my uncle told my dad in hushed tones.
The mullah was the leader of the Taliban, but we called our local one The Executioner – and we were terrified of him.
He had turned our local football pitch into a place of execution and it was now referred to as ‘the pit’. People would gather there to hear death sentences passed on anyone who spoke up against the Taliban.
And now my mother was apparently on their radar – all because she gave a speech about women’s rights in the playground of a local school.
My elder brother Hussein was born with a very rare congenital heart disease (Picture: Hamed Amiri)
She had spoken out for equality at a local gathering in the community. She called for girls to have the same rights of education, and said she didn’t want her children and others to grow up in an environment where people believed otherwise.
This might sound like an extreme punishment, but at the time – in 2000 – the Taliban had banned women and girls from going to school, studying, working or even leaving their house alone.
Someone must have told them about Mum, and now they wanted her dead.
So, aged 10, me, my mum, dad and two brothers – 13-year-old Hussein and seven-year-old Hessam – had no choice but to leave our home in Herat, a city in western Afghanistan.
Source:: Metro
