It is a 23-year-old young man with a fate like no other who made his return, on August 31, in the second year of a degree in political science, specializing in international relations, at the University of Kalmar, in the south of Sweden. . Since the beginning of August, Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada has his eyes fixed on social networks.
He has been watching the news from Kabul since the Taliban returned on August 15. Her maternal grandmother, her mother’s brother and sister, as well as her cousins still live there. Like Ahmad, they belong to the Hazara Shiite minority, persecuted by the Taliban. But, above all, it is their links with him that he fears to see resurface, at the risk of making them prime targets.
A controversial scene
In 2008, Ahmad was only 10 years old when he was awarded the prestigious Critics Choice Awards, in the young actor category, for his role in The kites of Kabul, by Marc Forster. The adaptation of the bestseller by Afghan writer Khaled Hosseini had been released a year earlier in theaters. Ahmad was spotted by the casting director while he was taking English lessons with an American NGO in Kabul. Illiterate, his parents had never heard of Khaled Hosseini or his book, but they saw it as a chance for their son.
A few months later, he left for China, for the shooting. In the film, Ahmad plays Hassan, a Hazara foster brother and servant to the son of a wealthy Kabul trader. One day, Hassan is raped by young Pashtuns. A scene barely suggested on screen, but so controversial in the context of inter-ethnic tensions in Afghanistan that it led the authorities to ban the film.
Informed of the threats weighing on the young actors, the production exfiltrated them in Dubai after the shooting. Ahmad and his father stayed there for two years. They had been promised that the rest of the family would join them. Tired of waiting, they eventually returned to Kabul, where the harassment began on Ahmad’s first day of school. For two years, the family remained cloistered in their house, until the day when armed men tried to climb the enclosure supposed to protect the building. Two weeks later, Ahmad left the country alone with a smuggler. His journey through Central Asia and then Europe lasted more than three months. It ended in Stockholm in 2012.
“People who have never experienced war in their own country don’t seem to understand that you don’t quit everything if you have other choices. »Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada
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