A Poor Patch of Land

Qandi Gul worked in the cotton fields from spring until mid-summer. Grandmother’s slender, elongated hands were covered in kokalleh (cotton ball) wounds. Zia Khan knows his grandmother from his father’s memories and from a photograph of her in a tattered orange blouse, its hem strewn with white cotton flowers; her small, dark eyes shining under the scorching summer sun of rural northern Afghanistan. Qandi Gul was the beautiful and wise bride of Sher Mohammad, who was killed by the communists for deserting the army. Zia Khan does not remember Sher Mohammad, and all his father, Arjumand, remembers are the pleasant, warm plains of Balkh, with a blue sky full of kids’ colourful kites …, the white cotton fields and the scent of cottonseed oil Qandi Gul used to prepare her delicious fish; bream, which she fried on early evenings, using either safflower or the fragrant cottonseed oil. Arjumand recalls the heavy bundles of stalk and dry leaves that Qandi Gul’s slender frame would carry to keep the hearth alight.
He speaks of the cold winters of Balkh, when from beneath a heavy, patched and mended quilt he would see his mother’s long shadow mending old shoes and clothes. Arjumand recalls Qandi Gul’s yellow, bony, deeply lined face and her eyes, which no longer sparkled as they once did in her youth and were extinguished forever one day in the poppy field, next to the poppies.

Finding a crust of bread in Afghanistan is perhaps the hardest job in the world; a country that has been a war-torn wasteland for nearly half a century, and this very crust of bread has forged an incredible destiny for its workers. Qandi Gul, Arjumand, her son Zia Khan, and his young friend Hossein are all among these workers. Zia Khan shows a photograph of a wall in Kabul on which a man has written:

“Yes, we are tired of unemployment.“

Afghanistan has no oil or gas, no seas, and hardly any roads or factories. It is a poor, landlocked patch of land in Central Asia.
In its study, ‘A History of the Economy of Afghanistan,’ the London School of Economics and Political Science reported that, until 1980, nearly 85 per cent of Afghanistan’s workforce were peasants. However, agriculture in Afghanistan is fundamentally different from that in Europe; Afghanistan has neither particularly fertile soil nor many rivers on which to navigate.
The peasants cultivate just enough to feed themselves, and sometimes less than that.

Yet, Afghanistan lay on the doorstep of India, a British colony; close to the warm waters of South Asia, and this historical fact forged a tragic destiny for it, trapping this small country in a cycle of coups, civil wars and foreign conflicts from which it has never recovered.
According to a report by the London School of Economics and Political Science, in 1960, Afghanistan’s per capita income was only 13 per cent of the world average.

The communist coup and the Soviet war reduced this income, and by the time American governments were stationed in the country, its per capita income was only about five to 5.5 per cent of the world average.
A World Bank report shows that Afghanistan’s per capita income is currently around 2.5 per cent of the world average.

*The Dark Days of Cotton

Perhaps the story of Qandi Gul began here … The cotton fields of northern Afghanistan and Uzbekistan are as far apart as the meanders of the Amu Darya. The generous, lofty river, which springs from the Pamir Mountains, sews the border of Uzbekistan to those of several other countries like a water-coloured thread: Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. The people of Balkh reach the Uzbeks by simply crossing a white bridge; a bridge spanning the border river.

The cotton fields remind the people of Afghanistan and Uzbekistan of a shared story: the story of Russia and the occupation of their land.

After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the country occupied much of Central Asia, and Afghanistan remained like a wall between India, Britain’s great colony, and Russia’s territorial expansion.

The textile mills of cold Russia needed cotton, and the country planned to get it from Central Asia.

The beginning of industrial cotton cultivation in Uzbekistan was set in motion here. Russia made Uzbekistan’s agriculture monocultural, to the extent that 70 per cent of Russia’s cotton was supplied by Uzbekistan. Monoculture trapped the country in severe soil erosion and rising water consumption in the deserts of Central Asia, while the region’s rivers and the Aral Sea almost dried up.

Protesting against the monoculture cotton farming and the drying up of the Aral Sea was severely punished; so much so that Fayzulla Khodzhayev, the former head of the Uzbek government, was executed in the Soviet Union for this very crime.

This was not the end of the matter, and Russia forced the Uzbek people into forced labour on the collective cotton farms. Russia changed their language and suppressed the Muslims.

A little across the border, where the Amu Darya sews the body of Uzbekistan to Afghanistan, a similar story unfolded.

*The Soldier Who Did Not Want to Be a Soldier

One of the perennial problems between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, which had extended its territory to the Afghan border, was the allocation of water in the Amu Darya basin.

Research by the London School of Economics and Political Science explains: “The Soviet Union often appeared as the bully in negotiations. Under the 1987 Tashkent Agreement, Afghanistan, despite receiving 27 per cent of the annual flow of water on its territory, had access to only seven per cent of the river’s water.“

This predicament made Afghanistan’s poor farmers even poorer. However, the story of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union did not end there, because long before that, Russia had been coveting the country.
Afghanistan could have been Russia’s route to the warm waters of the south, at a time when its rival, Britain, had come to dominate the waters of South Asia. Perhaps this is how Russia first became involved in Afghanistan, right on the doorstep of British India.

But Qandi Gul remembered the Soviets and the communists from the Saur Revolution in 1978. She was underage during Zahir Shah’s reign and recalled only faint memories. Zahir Shah had built schools and universities in Afghanistan and was keen to construct roads and factories, but they said the king’s hands were empty and he had no money. Eventually, the Shah was overthrown by his cousin, General Mohammed Daoud Khan. At the time, people on the streets said that the Soviets had infiltrated the Shah’s army under the pretext of training soldiers, and Daoud Khan became Afghanistan’s first president. A short time later, in the middle of spring, General Mohammad Daoud Khan and 18 members of his family were brutally killed by the Soviet-backed People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and the communists openly seized power. Qandi Gul said that in those years, many Afghans went to the Soviet Union to study and became communists.

Urbanites regarded being a communist as a sign of modernity and enlightenment, while peasants described communists as licentious and infidels.

In those days, the counters of urban teahouses and the kiosks of Kabul were filled with photographs of Afghanistan’s communist leaders, yet many rural soldiers deserted the Afghan army so as not to be forced to fight for the ‘infidels.’ Sher Mohammad, Qandi Gul’s husband, was one of those deserters; he was captured and killed.

*“We don't know why the war broke out.“

After Sher Mohammad was killed, Qandi Gul remained forever mourning her beloved and, by working in people’s cotton fields, fed her three little children.

Cotton-field labour was hard and gruelling, and most of the peasants were always poor. The main profit from cotton went to the middlemen and foreign traders, leaving little money for the farmers.

Even though industrial cotton cultivation had begun in the villages of northern Afghanistan at that time, and the cotton fields grew larger and larger year by year.

In 1976 there were nearly 128,000 hectares of cotton fields in Afghanistan, and within just five years this area rose to 188,000 hectares.

Qandi Gul remembered the textile factories that were being built one after another in Afghanistan, yet most of the farmers’ cotton was being exported to the Soviet Union.

In those days, there were constant reports from the major cities of bloody communist coups, mass graves and executions on the hills near Kabul and in the prisons, and Qandi Gul heard the news of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on the radio one cold winter’s day. The peasants did not know why the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, especially when communist governments were already in power.

Many of them still say they do not know what on earth the Soviets wanted from Afghanistan.

*Killing wild pistachio trees

Soviet advances in Central Asia made the American presence in Afghanistan serious, and suddenly many peasants and religious villagers took up arms to fight the communists. They called themselves mujahideen.

The situation in Kabul was chaotic; prison doors had been broken, thieves and criminals had escaped, and there were no longer any police or security forces in the city. Criminals and various other groups had attacked the armouries and armed themselves. Meanwhile, the mujahideen were arriving in Kabul from every corner of the country; most of them were peasants, villagers who were said to have been trained via Pakistan and the regional powers and to have acquired American weapons and ammunition.

Every corner of the city had fallen into the hands of armed groups; one claimed to be from the Unity Party, another from the Movement Party, and yet another from the 53rd Division. The cities fell one by one, and the villages even sooner than the cities.

The mujahideen destroyed the cotton fields, slaughtered the livestock, and the yarn-spinning and fabric-weaving factories were laid waste. The warlords spared not even the wild pistachio trees in Badghis, uprooting them.

While the American media were writing that the Mujahideen were heroes and had routed the Soviets, it was Afghanistan that was being devastated and civilians were being killed in droves.

The war lasted 13 years; from 1979 to 1992. The Soviet Union was simultaneously beset by internal problems, and its impending collapse forced the Russians to withdraw from Afghanistan.

After the war, factories lay in ruins and cotton fields had been laid waste and were soaked in blood. The roads were unsafe, trade had ground to a halt, and people had no means of earning a living. Famine raged, and many farmers died. The cotton fields gradually turned into poppy fields, and by mid-summer, the white of the cotton fields had given way to the purple of poppies. Statistics from the Afghan Ministry of Agriculture show that in those years, the area of cotton fields was reduced by almost a quarter.

*Death next to the poppies

Qandi Gul would now, until dusk, prick poppy heads instead of cotton bolls, and instead of her skirts filling with white flowers, her hands would turn a murky, inky black. The smell of opium hung in the air above the fields, intoxicating, and making her feel high and hungover. It was impossible to work in the poppy fields and not become addicted. In the villages of Balkh, almost all the peasants and labourers were addicted, and Qandi Gul, with her yellow, bony face and eyes that had shrivelled in their sockets, one day died in the poppy field, next to the purple poppy flowers.

Arjumand could only recall a faint image of his father, Shir Mohammad; a tall man with gaunt cheeks and eyes that were always laughing, filling in for his lips, lips that were unseen beneath a thick, black moustache.

Of his mother, Qandi Gul, he had thousands, perhaps millions, of images in his mind: of her slender, elongated hands that were always wounded; of her soothing, kind voice when she sang; or of her peals of laughter when she told tales of elves and fairies and, in jest, frightened her children, hiding them under the heavy, patched quilt.

Arjumand recalls that Qandi Gul did not return home until midnight, and he and his two younger brothers were too frightened to sleep until dawn, their hearts pounding so fast with every howl of the dogs that they felt their hearts might leap from their chests.

When the sun clawed at the window in the mud-brick wall, the three boys ran to the poppy field in one breath and found Qandi Gul with her eyes dull and cold, but her eyelids open. Arjumand hated poppy fields forever from that moment on, and he set off for Nimruz province with a small group of young Baluchi villagers to smuggle himself into Iran.

*Short of Paradise!

On one of the last days of summer, at 11 am, the smugglers of Nimruz Province took them to the Pakistan border, and the Baloch smugglers led them to Mount Moshkel, near the Iranian frontier. A gruelling trek through the rocky crags and crevices of the arid, waterless mountain began.

The sound of gunfire came from the direction of the Iranian border, from the high observation posts. With every shot, the migrants lay flat on the ground, on stones scorched by the sun’s heat. After eighteen hours’ walking they reached the high cliffs behind which Iran came into view; at the head of the group walked a man, who, every now and then, sang the song about Mullah Mammad-Jan. He dug his dusty fingernails into the rock, hauled himself up, and when his eyes fell on the green fields and the towering trees across the border, he turned his head and said to his companions, “We have reached paradise!“ He had not yet turned his head when a stray bullet came from across the border and tore through his chest. He trembled against the rock, like a pigeon drenched in blood, his eyes fixed on the sky as they grew dim, just like Qandi Gul’s.

Arjumand became a farmer in Zabul, a small region of Iran near the Afghan border. Zabul was beautiful, and the Helmand River ran through it like a water-colour thread. A river that came from Mount Baba in Afghanistan and sewed the body of Iran to that of Afghanistan; just like the Amu Darya and Balkh.

He worked on a wheat farm; sometimes he grew watermelon, cucumber and tomato, and sometimes mung beans. Occasionally he went fishing and caught carp or whitefish from the Helmand. Zabul reminded him of the cotton fields of Balkh and of cotton fish. Arjumand fell in love with an Iranian girl in Zabul and Zia Khan was born, but in Iran he could not obtain a birth certificate for him, which meant the boy could not go to school. Arjumand was an illegal migrant and, after being arrested and deported from Iran three times, he decided to go to Afghanistan for good. Mara-Jan, Zia Khan’s Iranian mother, was afraid to go to Afghanistan, and so the mother and son remained in Iran.

*Into exile to the rubbish dump

Arjumand bought a car with his wages as a labourer in Iran to run a taxi service in Afghanistan’s Nimruz Province. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the country was still at war, with the Mujahideen divided into various factions fighting for power, until the Taliban came to power. Stoning of women, public executions, the ban on girls’ education, on music, and so on, were just some of the Taliban’s harsh laws. It was at this time that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda entered Afghanistan, and the country had become terrifying for Arjumand’s Iranian bride. Zia Khan was only one year old, and each time Arjumand risked the perilous and arduous journey to see the child and his beloved, he was arrested and deported again.

Before the start of the US–Afghanistan war, Arjumand was killed in an accident in Nimruz. Zia Khan could not attend school in Iran. In his early childhood, he often heard people speak of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden, whom English-language newspapers had once hailed as a hero, was attacking American embassies and ships. After the communists were overthrown, the Mujahideen regarded Americans and Europeans as infidels.

Zia Khan heard the news of the 11 September attack on the Twin Towers in Manhattan and the name al-Qaeda on a small radio at a bakery in Zabul. This news marked the beginning of another war in Afghanistan. The Taliban government was overthrown and the United States announced that it intended to install a modern, democratic government in Afghanistan. The US had built numerous dams in Afghanistan to confine the flow of water to within Afghanistan’s borders. The Helmand watercourse dried up, and the thread of water that stitched Afghanistan’s body to Iran was severed.

Zia Khan had always thought he would become a farmer like his grandparents, but by the time he was old enough to tell his right from his left, the beautiful fields of Zabul had dried up one by one. In their place, the ponds and streams, large and small, had left behind a scorched earth where white veins of salt had dried on the soil and glinted in the sun, almost blinding. He remembered the sandstorms of Zabul that filled people’s hair, eyes and lungs with dust. The parched fields and gardens, scorched by drought, had plunged Zabul into unemployment much like Balkh. Zia Khan had heard that Tehran was a paradise of rubbish and decided to make his way there to earn a crust.

*The Strange Graveyard of Migrant Children

He rummaged through large rubbish bins from dawn until midnight. His hands had been cut many times by blades and broken glass, his narrow shoulders bent under the weight of the big sacks of rubbish, and his knees were always aching.

Years of working in the foul, putrid rubbish had caused Zia Khan to contract hepatitis B in his youth. That was why his face and eyes were always yellow. In the depot he had seen that when a little Afghan boy fell fast asleep on a pile of rubbish, Tehran’s large black rats gnawed at his toes.

Zia Khan had seen Hossein Nazari in this very warehouse. A small-framed boy with black hair that always stood on end, making his face look cute. Zia Khan remembers that Hossein was too weak to lift the sacks of rubbish and was always punished by the warehouse owner for dragging them along the ground.

The Tehran municipality had outsourced waste sorting and part of the city’s street cleaning to private contractors, who had employed many child scavengers in the waste-sorting depots and to clean the streets.

Most of these children were Afghan, with the odd Pakistani child among them.

Many of them, like Zia Khan, had no birth certificate or identity papers, or were illegal immigrants. As a result, they could die buried under heaps of rubbish and no one would ever find them.

Zia Khan was about ten or twelve years older than Hossein and thought it might be better for them to become street sweepers instead of working in the rubbish depot.

The street sweepers wore cleaner clothes and put on gloves when collecting rubbish. They could ride pillion on the contractors’ motorcycles instead of walking to the city’s neighbourhoods. The sweepers gathered the rubbish with brooms, and the contractors took photographs and videos of them to send to the municipal representative and claim payment. One day he confided this decision to Hossein, when the warehouse owner had beaten him severely with a leather belt and Hossein had cried himself to sleep.

*The mirage of democracy

Zia Khan and Hossein were to sweep the alleys of the Nawab neighbourhood in Tehran; at midday they rested under a flyover and beside a public lavatory. After a long time, Zia Khan and Hossein had put on clean orange uniforms. The sweepers’ clothes were far too big and baggy for Hossein’s small frame; he folded the sleeves and trouser legs several times over.
In Iran, labour for under-15s is illegal, but this law is not taken very seriously when it comes to the poor and to migrant children, especially undocumented ones.

Not only were his clothes for people taller than him, but Hussein’s broom was tall too; once Zia Khan had told him his broom looked like a witch’s broom and that he could sit on it and fly, and Hussein had laughed out loud. Hussein loved jokes and humour and sometimes, while sweeping the streets, would whistle merrily. Zia Khan didn’t know much about Hossein. He only knew that his family had fled when the Taliban returned to Iran; four summers ago.

Donald Trump, the President of the United States, said during his first term in office that he was no longer prepared to spend American taxpayers’ money on Afghanistan, and analysts argued that America’s presence in Afghanistan had served to secure China, Russia, and Iran, and that the US did not benefit from containing the armed terrorists and extremist Muslims of the region.

Joe Biden, the subsequent president, had said that America’s 20-year mission in Afghanistan was over and that America’s only national interest in Afghanistan was to ensure it was not attacked from there.

Following this news, global and regional powers held numerous meetings with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, and no one understood exactly what happened behind the closed doors of those meetings.

Biden swiftly evacuated 120,000 Americans from Afghanistan. Ashraf Ghani, the country’s last president, packed his bags and fled the country, and the Afghan army surrendered cities one by one to the Taliban without any resistance.
Some American media outlets wrote that Afghanistan is not suited to democracy and that the United States had failed there.

*Left behind by the rescue plane

The mobile phones of people in Iran and Afghanistan were full of images of the Taliban, who, wearing baggy trousers, turbans and skullcaps and sporting long beards, were revving motorbikes, strapping thick belts of ammunition around their waists and waving their weapons and white flags in the air.

They came as far as the Islam Qala border and even frightened the people of the border villages in Iran. Zia Khan says Hossein and his family had gone to get on the last American plane. The US was only supposed to evacuate Afghan government employees and military personnel, and there was no place on the plane for farmers and ordinary people. Nevertheless, many of the  people had come to the airport from near and far to get on the American plane and escape the Taliban.

A large crowd was running towards the airport wall, and a cigarette seller near the airport abandoned his stall and managed to force his way onto the plane. The doors of the last rescue plane closed, and a large crowd clung to its wings and fuselage, but the plane took off.
Zia Khan says, ‘The American pilot didn't care that they were human. If this had only happened to one American, would the Americans have remained silent?!’

Hossein was young and his family had not been able to get past the airport wall. From the other side of the high wall, they watched the last plane take to the sky and grow smaller and smaller.

*In search of a crust of bread

Afghanistan still had few factories, no proper roads, and no thriving trade. Afghanistan was a major importer of food and all essential goods from Iran and Pakistan.

Throughout the years that the US was in Afghanistan, it built large dams so that the people there could farm and produce their own food. This helped so that the people of Afghanistan would not have to rely on international aid and American taxpayers’ money to feed themselves. However, this cash aid corrupted the Afghan governments. In this small, poor, and underdeveloped country, cash was like gold dust. Meanwhile, poppy cultivation had poisoned all of Afghanistan. Addiction and unemployment were rampant, and on the walls of a large city like Kabul, people had written, “Yes, we are tired of unemployment“. This was even more the case in the small towns and villages.

With the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban, international aid was restricted, and famine and malnutrition gripped large and small cities and villages. Hossein and the Nazari family set off for Iran in search of a morsel of bread. It was exactly 3 pm, on 1 September, in the summer of 2024, when Parvin stepped out onto her balcony to water her geranium and chrysanthemum pots. Her balcony in the Nawab neighbourhood overlooked the quiet, narrow Yusefzadeh alley. Suddenly, her gaze fell upon a young municipal contractor who was pulling Hussein’s shirt from his body and groping him, while Hussein, like a small, lifeless pigeon, struggled to escape his grasp.

Parvin, flustered, calls her daughter and drags her onto the balcony. The first solution that occurs to them is to call the police. The officer explains that it will take some time for the patrol unit to arrive and that the best course of action is to ring the council’s 137 helpline.

*A poor patch of land

The council operator, however, reacts unexpectedly to the child abuse report, saying, “Don't be so hard on them, the contractor was probably just making amends with the child.“ Meanwhile, the contractor puts Hossein on his motorbike and drives him away. Contacting several other municipal operators and following up with the central municipal organisation and the 10th district municipality proves fruitless, and the municipality, by simply saying, “We will follow up.“ regards the matter as closed.

Reza Shafakhah, a lawyer and children’s rights activist, suggests that Parvin and her daughter Maryam file a complaint and take the matter to court so that the child can be rescued from the contractor and placed with social workers and charitable organisations.

The judicial process in Iran is lengthy and protracted, and a report of rape, even from the victim, requires a witness. This is despite lawyers criticising the law, arguing that most rape offences occur in private and thus have no witnesses. There is another problem regarding Hussein’s case: the testimony of women is not as valid as that of men, and the testimony of two women is considered equivalent to that of one male witness. A report of rape requires at least two witnesses.

Maryam visits every house on Yusefzadeh Alley to gather evidence and find out whether the houses’ cameras recorded the footage. Most of the houses have no cameras, or their coverage does not extend to the area where the incident took place. Between Yusefzadeh Alley and beside a narrow garden, there is a small local car park that serves as the hangout of Mr M (full name withheld for security reasons), a taxi driver.

He tells Maryam that he knows the street-sweeper child but does not know his name. The driver explains that he has previously witnessed the contractor’s sexual behaviour towards the child.

The taxi driver even knows the street cleaners’, and the child’s, rest area in that district; a small, filthy patch under the flyover and beside the public toilet.

The driver takes photographs of the child, the contractor and his motorcycle. The municipality insists that the child is at least eighteen years old so as not to fall under the child labour law, but in the photographs Hossein looks so small that his street-sweeper’s uniform hangs loosely on him and his broom is too tall.

Eventually, the complaint notice reaches the council, and the court asks the local police station to identify the owner of the motorcycle by its number plate and orders the council to submit both the contractor’s and the child’s names to the court.

*Refugees caught in the crossfire again

Before the municipality responds, the contractor vanishes from the neighbourhood and Hossein turns up with a different one. One day Parvin sees him whistling and sweeping and asks his name. He says his name is Hossein Nazari. He says he is twelve years old and does not have a mobile phone.

When Parvin tries to get the boy’s home address, the new contractor turns up and, without another word, takes the boy away with him.

Parvin and Maryam are worried that as they get closer to the child, the municipality will send him to another area and that Hossein will get lost in Tehran, eight-million-strong. The taxi driver also advises them not to ask any more questions in the neighbourhood, as the contractor might threaten the two women.

The police station forwards the contractor’s name to the lawyer handling the case: Yasser, 27, from a mountainous province in north-western Iran.

In the autumn of that year the case is sent to the Shahid Motahari Judicial Complex in Yaftabad, while the prosecutor, without summoning the defendant, only calls the complainant, the witness and their lawyer to testify, and the verdict is issued at the end of the year: the defendant is acquitted and the prosecution against him is barred for lack of sufficient evidence!

The lawyer is referring the case to the Court of Appeal. The Law for the Protection of Children and Adolescents in Iran is less than fifteen years old, and Reza Shafakhah hopes that, with the help of this law, he can rescue Hossein Nazari from his predicament. 

The Court of Appeal refers the case to another court, namely the Criminal Court 2 of the Basat Judicial Complex; the case files and evidence must be resubmitted.

Nearly nine months have passed since the incident, and then another war began in Iran. On 13 June 2025, the people of Iran were suddenly awakened from their slumber and realised that Israel had attacked. People were confused; there had been no sirens or warnings, and no one knew where to take cover.

At night the sky over Tehran was filled with drones and missiles that looked like vast swarms of red insects, followed by the sound of gunfire, explosions and white smoke.

Tehran rapidly emptied of people, but no one knew what twelve-year-old Hossein went through during those nights and days.

Lieutenant Sarafraz called the local county office to follow up on Hossein’s case. As he spoke, the relentless crackle of anti-aircraft fire could be heard. This time, however, Social Emergency was on hand to compile a local report and interview the residents of Yousefzadeh Alley on that same and the following day.

Much time has passed since the event, and the people of Iran are living in wartime conditions. Maryam is not sure whether the residents of Yusefzadeh Alley remember that quiet afternoon on 1 September last year. The television news and Iranian media constantly talk about war. The war against Iran did not last more than 12 days, America announces a ceasefire between Iran and Israel with a simple oral statement. The subtitles on Iranian television programmes state that the police have arrested a large number of Israeli spies and have decided to deport a large group of Afghans.

The government has arrested hundreds of thousands of Afghans in city streets and alleyways, on the metro, in bakeries and while gardening in the city’s parks, and is sending busloads and busloads of them across the Islam Qala-Dogharun border, to Afghanistan. According to reports, some children were sent back across the border without their parents, and a coach of deported migrants caught fire in Herat, with many people burning to death.

The news reports that many people from Sistan and Baluchestan went to see off the migrants with water, food and fruit. That is the same Iranian province which, via the colour-faded thread of the Helmand River, connects to Afghanistan, and where Zia Khan, Iranian mother, Afghan father, was born.

Hossein never returned to Yousfzadeh Alley after the war. Neither did he show up, nor was Zia Khan ever seen again under the flyover beside the public lavatory. They disappeared from the Nawab neighbourhood while Hossein’s case was still open in court, and eventually a man named Nazari from the municipal contractor’s company contacted Maryam and said that Hossein Nazari had been deported to Afghanistan, and “of course I am not related to that Nazari and I am Iranian.“