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Qatar has invested a lot of money in hosting the 2022 World Cup, but the official accommodation now assumes a different role than the organizing committee envisioned-hosting Afghan refugees.
Ahmad Wali Sarhadi, 28, who arrived a few days ago, said: “In our home, we don’t have air conditioning or flat-screen TVs.” He is now living in the building. One of the approximately 600 refugees in the group, most of them are journalists.
Doha, the capital of Qatar, has become a major transit point for refugees who have fled the Taliban to take over Afghanistan and evacuated by evacuation flights.
Although he shares a clean, well-furnished ground floor space with Khalid Andish, 24, he feels comfortable, but Sarhadi said that he sleeplessly at night worrying about his family home.
High doses of antidepressants calmed his mood, and he used quick, continuous words to unlock his experience.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino (C) took a photo with Afghan refugees at the accommodation in the park view villa for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Doha, Qatar 2022 on September 4 [Karim Jaafar/AFP]Sarhadi’s new situation is impossible to imagine, just in late August, when he was still living in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, with his wife and five children, aged between 2 and 13.
As a journalist and a US-funded aid organization, he said that he has worked on the Taliban’s attack list for two and a half years, and it sounds like a man still on the run, even in Qatar.
“When we heard them entering the street, there was a two-meter-high wall near my house—I jumped to the other side” to escape.
He called his wife, said he was taking a taxi to Kabul, and urged her not to tell anyone, even if “she was crying.”
“I put [on] He added that the turban looked like a Taliban” to avoid detection. Later, “I tried to call my family, but the phone ran out.”
Once in the capital, he will show up at the airport at 7 o’clock every morning, trying to get through the boarding gate.
Contacts of the Committee for the Protection of Journalists and other organizations that help Afghan media workers eventually passed his name on to the Qatari, who sent him on the plane.
On the Taliban’s list
Andish, who works at a radio station near Kabul, said that before he left, he knew he was “on the list of Taliban attacks.”
Since he does not have his own wife or children, he has had no news of his brothers and sisters since he fled on August 15.
“They are in danger,” Andish said. “If they don’t find me, they may target my family.”
His ambition is to “serve my country as a reporter, social activist, teacher, and reporter trainer”, but he added that “I have no hope of returning to Afghanistan at the moment.”
Sarhadi balances his smartphone with his left hand. His fingers were blown up by a Taliban bomb more than ten years ago. He showed the photo, and the smiling selfie of his little daughter radiated from the screen.
He chatted with other refugees on a street between rows of identical houses in the Park View Villas complex, which is designed to accommodate 1,500 delegation members, media and guests for the World Cup in November and December next year.
The goal of this wealthy Gulf country is to get rid of relative obscurity by hosting one of the world’s largest sporting events.
As fate wishes, since the Taliban seized power on August 15, Qatar has improved its status on the world stage by mediating negotiations and assisting in the evacuation of about 50,000 people from Afghanistan.
Lolwah al-Khater (R), the official spokesperson of the Supreme Council for Crisis Management in Qatar, and Martin Griffiths, the UN Special Envoy for Yemen, visited the landscaped villa [Karim Jaafar/AFP]Unknown destination
Sarhadi believes that “no one cares about us except the Qataris”.
He said that a few weeks ago he rejected an offer to study for a master’s degree in journalism in India.
“Financial support is needed,” he said. “India can’t feed its own population, how can they help me?”
Although the others in the World Cup complex hope they will find asylum-in Ireland, Iraq, Rwanda, the United States, the United Kingdom-but Salhadi does not know where he will eventually go.
“I don’t know who will accept me as a refugee,” he said.
Apart from backpacks, smartphones and computers, the only real wealth he can get from Kandahar is a pile of ID cards and qualification certificates-he has been stuffed into a plastic bag all his life.
“Physically I am in Doha, Qatar, but mentally I and my family are in Afghanistan,” Sarhadi said.
“I am worried that something will happen to them. I am like a dead person.”
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