Exit Strategy - Trying to get out of Afghanistan, illegally and otherwise, for years.

It was nine years ago, when I was 23, that I first tried to leave Afghanistan. I had been working as an interpreter for coalition forces, and I started getting phone calls from the Taliban. They would say, ‘‘We will find you, and we will kill you.’’ They claimed to know my name and where I was living. I don’t know if it was true — when you worked with the Americans, you hid your face to protect yourself — but interpreters had been killed before. I felt I had to try to go to Europe and make a new life there. So I went to a kachakbar, a smuggler, to get me out of the country.

It cost $700 U.S. There was a little group of us who went. But soon after we crossed into Turkey, we found ourselves surrounded by the border police. They put us in jail for seven days, before deporting us back to the Iranian border, where we were told to walk home. Then, in Iran, we were taken by thieves. Luckily, I speak Persian. After they sold me to someone else for $500, I was able to persuade this person to let me go.

That scared me off trying to go for a while, and I didn’t really want to leave my home country anyway. But some years later, another interpreter was on a bus outside Kabul when he was dragged off and killed. So I decided to try again. - Read More at NYT

Exit Strategy - The New York Times

Mullah Muhammad Omar’s Life Ends With Little Clarity