Tears, a tissue, and iPhone photos – an Afghan softens a Turkish heart

Stuck in Istanbul’s epic traffic on a bridge crossing from Asia to Europe on the fabled Bosporus Strait, my cab driver launches into a charged monologue about refugees destroying Turkey. 

He says Afghan refugees are stealing from bodies under the rubble of the Feb. 6 earthquake in southern Turkey, referring to a viral video accusing Afghans of stealing gold and cutting the arms off the dead. But the Turkish influencer, Ugur Kardas, who made the video was later arrested for spreading disinformation.

“We are not the thieves. We also died with you,” I say in my broken Turkish.  

No matter what I say or what the truth is, the cabbie believes that refugees are the reason for Turkey’s every problem – inflation, unaffordable rents, unemployment, and now the biggest natural disaster of the century that killed more than 54,000 people in Turkey and Syria. 

Istanbul’s been my home for seven years. But the anti-foreign sentiment has become so ominous that I have to prove my loyalty in public. The perennial question is: Where are you from? Upcoming elections don’t give refugees any reprieve; nearly every party is against them, and kicking out migrants seems politically popular.

I was born in Afghanistan, and raised partly in the U.S. I moved here to work as a foreign reporter and to raise my two daughters. Istanbul is a culturally diverse, cat-loving, family-friendly, geographically accessible cosmopolitan hub. People were generally welcoming toward Afghans until a wave of migration beginning in 2015 turned Turkey against us. Tens of thousands have moved on to Europe but about 200,000 Afghans legally remain in Turkey – some 144,000 of them are refugees waiting for asylum elsewhere. Afghans are second only to Syrians as the largest refugee population in Turkey. The worst-hit targets of discrimination are Syrians, then us.

The consequences of prejudice are much worse for Afghans who don’t have Western passports like I do. I confront verbal hostility, but refugees are often illegally detained and deported.

Somehow, I thought the earthquake might have a unifying effect in Turkey. But in this city, mourning and on edge, anticipating the next big earthquake, Turks want a scapegoat.  

And yet, in the traffic standstill on the bridge, my driver stops his rant, scratches his neatly trimmed mustache, and quietly asks me which Afghans died under the rubble. 

Hundreds of Afghans were among the casualties in the 10 provinces hard hit by the quake, I tell him. I take out my phone to show him videos and photos so he can get another view of Afghans besides the one he saw presenting them as looters. 

I tell him about Mohammed Amin Qaderi whose extended family had housed me when I needed a home in Afghanistan and in New York, where some of them had settled. Mr. Qaderi and his family had fled the war in northern Afghanistan in 2017 and made it to Turkey. They, like most refugees, were sent away from urban areas to the hinterlands of Anatolia to live – with no legal right to work – while their asylum cases were processed. 

There, in the town of Adiyman, the Qaderis’ apartment building collapsed in the February earthquake – just eight days before their appointment for resettlement in New York with Mr. Qaderi’s brother, Sharif Qaderi, who is a U.S. citizen.

Mohammed and his two daughters, Bahar, 10, and Fariheh, 7, died. His wife, Meryem Amini, and two of their children were pulled alive from the rubble, but none of them can walk – Ms. Amini’s legs were amputated, her 3-year-old son Suheyl lost a leg, and surgeons are monitoring her 10-year-old daughter Lale to decide whether she also needs an amputation. The survivors are each in different hospitals in Ankara unaware that half of their family is gone.

The cabbie, Burak, turns off the radio to hear me better. 

I see a glimpse of sympathy. 

“Who’s with the survivors now?” he asks. 

“Sharif, from America, and other family members are taking turns visiting the three survivors,” I reply. 

Burak scrolls the photos of the Qaderi children on my phone. He offers his condolences, and I feel I have accomplished something – somehow he may stop blaming Afghans, if just for a moment. 

Then suddenly, I burst into tears, sobbing. 

Burak fumbles, hands me a tissue, and apologizes. 

But my tears aren’t just about Burak’s discrimination – nor the blow dealt by the earthquake. My grief, part of the story of my homeland, is layered in years of loss: an uncle lost to torture in the Soviet invasion, a 9-year-old classmate to a rocket, countless Afghan friends and colleagues to suicide bombings in the decades of war in Afghanistan. Now the Qaderi family is suffering, and Meryem Amini is barely hanging onto life.

In the chaotic aftermath of the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan in August 2021, I managed to help evacuate two families with teen girls to California on a P2 visa granted for helping me report during the seven years – 2000 to 2007 – that I wrote from Afghanistan. 

Then I stopped talking or writing about Afghans. It physically hurt to think about the lives we left behind. The Taliban had won, and the American envoys anxious to end an unpopular war said the hardliners had reformed. Those of us who knew Afghanistan shook our heads, but few others cared.

The overwhelming sentiment about Afghans globally is fatigue and helplessness. The attitude I most often encounter is that Afghans lost a battle for freedom and were betrayed by the U.S. and its allies, but that Afghans had 20 years to save themselves from the depths of poverty and religious extremism. They failed themselves and the world. No one owes Afghans anything. 

These narratives are apparent in mainstream and social media – and these sentiments filter into how refugees are considered for asylum and treated in their host countries like Turkey.

I stop crying as I reach my destination. I tell Burak that most Afghans in Turkey want to leave, just as Turkey wants. But they are in purgatory, waiting for a Western country to accept them. They work jobs in construction and farming for low wages that Turks wouldn’t accept. Many are abused on the job. 

Burak says he’s sorry if his comments upset me; that he’s just angry that he can’t afford to eat meat and is accumulating debt to pay his rent in Istanbul. 

“Turkey’s your home as much as it is mine,” Burak says.

Fariba Nawa is an Istanbul-based journalist, host of “On Spec Podcast,” and author of “Opium Nation: Child Brides, Drug Lords and One Woman’s Journey through Afghanistan.”