On the run from the Taliban

Thousands of ordinary Afghans have sought refuge in Britain from the terrors of their native land. Each has a different story. Julia Stuart meets a doctor who fled to save his life, leaving behind his family

Since 11 September, Mohammad Wali, an Afghan doctor living in Oxford, has had a pain in his chest. At times it wakes him in the middle of the night. His medical background tells him that at 28 he's too young to have heart disease. "I think it's just distress," he says, rubbing the left side of his chest.

He has also spotted the signs of clinical depression. The sudden change in his health is not surprising. Dr Wali spends any spare time obsessively monitoring the news, as military forces mass for their war against terrorism. He fears that a bomb will drop on his wife and seven-year-old son who are still in Afghanistan.

The last he heard from his wife was a phone call a month ago, before she and their son fled from the city to a village, which they hope is a less likely military target. Dr Wali has no way of contacting them. There is no phone line in the village, and letters are not getting through the border with Pakistan.

"I've lost my appetite, I cannot eat much, I have headaches," says Dr Wali. He no longer introduces himself as an Afghan, for fear of reprisals. "If people realise I'm from Afghanistan their reaction is not good. Of course they will feel bad about me."

Dr Wali (which is not his real name: he fears his family may be targeted by the Taliban) arrived in Britain last December as an asylum seeker. Two years earlier, as a houseman, he had taken part in a faculty demonstration (again, he dare not say where, for fear of reprisals). "We wanted some rights from the Taliban," he says. "They stopped females coming to the schools, sent doctors to the battlefield, we were not allowed to practise gynae and obs [obstetrics] house jobs, and we were not allowed to examine female patients in our private dispensaries without a male present with the patient." Dr Wali's wife, a medical student, had to give up her studies.

During the demonstration, two students were shot dead, and Dr Wali, the students' representative, was one of three protesters to be arrested. He was held in prison for three months. "It was really bad. They punished me, they hit me with wooden sticks on my back, on every place, they kicked me. Finally they released me. At that time I decided to leave the country but my friends and family said it's not good, you're a doctor, you have to serve your people and have to stay here. So after a while I got a job at the hospital."

He worked as a general physician and lecturer, forced to wear the Taliban-imposed long beard and turban, and leaving the hospital and his private clinic at regular intervals throughout the day to go to the mosque.

Twice he was sent to the front line of the Taliban's war against the Northern Alliance, in Laghman and Kunar, to attend to wounded Taliban soldiers. "It was very dangerous, you were just next to the people who were fighting. One of my colleagues died in that way," he says. In November last year he was ordered to go again, but refused. "I was in close contact with students and talking to them privately, and I already had a history with the Taliban, and I think they suspected me of doing something with a movement. One of my friends, a student, phoned me and told me that this time they would kill me. He had a relative in the Taliban who was a big man. They would take me to the battlefield and kill me and say to my family that I had died in the fighting. They couldn't kill me in the city. They had to make some excuse."

Eventually, Dr Wali was imprisoned by the Taliban for five weeks until he agreed to go to the front line. He was released and given two days to prepare, but immediately went into hiding. His brothers paid an agent around $10,000 to send him to Britain, which they had heard didn't refuse asylum seekers. Saying goodbye to his family was excruciatingly painful. "My wife agreed that I had to go, I told her maybe one day she would be with me. I felt very upset and sad. Everyone was crying, my mother, my wife, my brothers, me. It was very difficult."

The agent took him part of the way by car. They crossed the border into Pakistan on foot, and then flew to London. Once at Heathrow, Dr Wali approached a police officer and told him he was seeking political asylum. Immigration staff, seeking proof of his nationality, asked him countless questions about Afghanistan, from its history to which types of crops are grown. They then interviewed him about his claim.

The authorities wanted to send him to the north of England, but Dr Wali refused, having heard on the BBC's World Service of problems of racism there. Instead, he was allowed to go to Oxford and stay with an Afghan whose phone number his brothers had given him.

There he was helped by Asylum Welcome, a charity that helps some 2,000 asylum seekers and refugees in Oxfordshire each year to find their feet in a strange new country. Nine months on, he is still a regular visitor to their day centre in Oxford.

The doctor, who had never previously travelled outside Afghanistan, was immediately struck by the enormous differences between the two countries. "The first thing was the ladies and what they were wearing," he says, smiling at how shocked he had been. "I couldn't imagine. In Afghanistan ladies have to be covered from head to toe, and here they can wear trousers and skirts. And women were sitting with males in the same seats, and this was something unbelievable for me... I saw some ladies driving big buses, that was something strange.

"The other thing is people eating when they're walking. In Afghanistan they sit in a restaurant or house when they eat."

Not only was he struck by pubs selling alcohol, but he also experienced rain for the first time in two years. "I hoped that it rained in Afghanistan like here. I stood out in it, I was very happy, I was drinking it. It also snowed one day, that was the first time that I saw it. I was enjoying it, I ate that too."

When he arrived in Oxford he started an English language course at Abingdon College. Not wanting to forget his medical training, he has secured a clinical attachment to Stoke Mandeville Hospital, where he observes other doctors at work. In order to practise in the UK, he needs to take two exams, one of which he has already passed.

He still lives with his Afghan contact, sleeping on the floor of the room his friend rents in a shared house. "It's very difficult two people living in one room, sometimes I need to study, sometimes he needs to listen to the television."

Still waiting for a decision on his case from the Home Office, he receives £36 a week in vouchers, and earns around £100 working in a takeaway restaurant.

Does he enjoy his life in Britain? "In some ways," says Dr Wali, who now has a neatly trimmed goatee, rather than the long whiskers he was forced to grow. "Everyone here has the right to work, men and women, and to go to school. Women have the same rights as men. Sometimes they are braver than men."

He enthuses about the technology, public libraries, and, in particular, British manners. "The other thing I like here is the apologies," he says, smiling. "Everyone 'sorry, sorry' even if you are to be blamed. If you are walking in the road and you step on someone else's foot, he or she will say to you 'sorry' and both sides become happy and they just go away. In Afghanistan they don't apologise."

Not everything, however, is to his liking.

"I realise one thing here that is really bad – the young generation doesn't respect the old people. On buses a young man is sitting and an old man is standing. It's not fair, I think. A couple kissing each other in public, I don't like this thing. It's a culture thing, it doesn't seem nice to me.

"In general, the young generation doesn't like foreigners. They don't say anything to you, but I realise that they don't like. I was studying in Abingdon College and I like to talk with English boys or girls to improve my English and learn their accent. I try to be friends with them, but they don't want to be friends with foreigners. In Afghanistan, people respect foreigners a lot, and everyone likes to speak with them, but here they don't want to."

If the situation back home ever changes for the better, Dr Wali will return and put his medical skills to use. In the meantime, he tries to study for his exam, but has found it hard to concentrate since 11 September. "At night I wake up five or six times. I sleep one hour and then I wake up again," he says, his crushed look returning. "I'm just dreaming about the next thing that will happen in Afghanistan."