'It was hard to leave my family... my father feared the Taliban would come after me'

Hedi Mehrez talks to a young Afghan about his dangerous nine-month journey across Asia and Europe to sanctuary in the UK

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“IF you stay here, they will come after you,” Ibrahim’s father told him.

He was just 14 at the time, living in a region of Afghanistan where the Taliban's presence was growing stronger by the day.

It was 2019, two years before the group swept into Kabul and reclaimed control of the country. Now 20, Ibrahim still remembers that moment vividly. The fear and the painful decision to leave home behind all remain fresh in his mind, as if it happened just yesterday.

He said: “The area that we were in, we were mostly close to the Taliban and you're also in the middle between the Taliban and the government.

“There was a time when people said the Taliban would be picking on boys from each family for joining them. That was the reason my father got scared. He would say to me ‘if we stay here, they will come after you and take you with them.”

Fearing for his son’s future, Ibrahim’s father made the difficult decision to send him on a long and uncertain journey to Europe.

He was “handed over” to a man Ibrahim was not familiar with to help him cross borders.

“I was so young, and didn’t know much about this stuff. I cried a lot when I hugged my mother, it was a very hard moment for me to leave my family behind,” Ibrahim said.

“My father took me to a person, he handed me over to him and told me to just follow him. He told me it was going to be a long journey.

“So I went with that person, and we went through provinces, city by city in Afghanistan, and then I joined a lot of people, young people and we started crossing the border. We crossed country by country.”