.png)
4 hours ago
1
On 15 August 2021, 21-year-old Sam Pordale and his father found themselves part of a huge, panicked crowd of people all trying to get to Kabul airport and away from the Taliban militants who, just hours earlier, had taken control of Afghanistan’s capital city.
Between the crowd and the entrance to the airport, Pordale could see a Taliban checkpoint, where heavily armed men were holding lists in their hands and checking people’s documents. Pordale, whose father had until that morning held a high-ranking position in the democratic government, knew that their chances of getting to the airport and on to an evacuation flight were blown.
Pordale turned to tell his father that they had to get away, but he had disappeared, vanished without a trace into the crowd. “At that point I didn’t know I’d never see him again,” he says. “But I did know that I was now on my own and it was up to me to find a way of getting out of Afghanistan.”
The Taliban’s advance across Afghanistan in the chaotic days before the withdrawal of US and UK troops had been so fast and everything had unravelled so quickly that Pordale says he and his father had not thought of an escape plan. “My mother and my siblings were already in Turkey and I’d stayed in Kabul to help my father, but in those days when the provinces were falling to the Taliban, my father just couldn’t accept that this could happen and everything we’d been working towards would disappear,” he says. “It was only that morning of the 15th, when we woke up and realised that [President] Ashraf Ghani had fled, that we came to our senses.”
Pordale’s life to this point had been spent in the highest circles of status and wealth in Afghanistan, thanks to his father’s positions in the military and government. But the huge security risks that came with his father’s work had also meant that his childhood was isolated and lonely. “Me and my siblings only really had each other because we weren’t allowed to go out and play. We only left the house to go to school and we changed schools all the time, so we didn’t have friends,” he says. “My mother would never let us sleep anywhere near a window, so we’d have our beds in the corridors because the house could come under attack. And my father was always facing assassination attempts. By the time I was a teenager I’d survived two suicide bombing attacks on different schools.”
Looking back, Pordale says that the isolation from everyday life had also made him arrogant and entitled. “We really had no contact with the outside world,” he says. “If we did leave the house, we would go with an armed escort. We grew up just accepting that our family had a lot of power.” Then all that wealth and power vanished overnight. “That morning the government fell, we called everyone we’d been working with in the US and UK governments to ask for help but nobody answered,” he says. “All these powerful allies and friends were gone in an instant.”
Getting closer to the checkpoint, Pordale knew he had to flee. He shouldered his way through the crowd and ran through the streets of Kabul before he found shelter in a shop. “I had nothing: no money, no luggage. We’d gone to the airport in such a panic,” he says. “The only person I could think to call was this dodgy guy who was connected to everyone, including the Taliban, but our family had helped his mother when she was sick. He was the only one who answered the phone to me that day.”
Pordale was told to wait, and after an hour someone turned up and said they were there to take him to Iran. He took a bus to the border, then crossed into Iran hidden in a compartment under the floor of a minivan.
In Iran, he was put under the floor of another bus, compressed into a small space just a few feet above the road for a journey that lasted nearly two days. Trapped in the dark, with the heat and the pain, he kept trying to locate parts of his body to make sure he was still alive. “It was like nothing existed outside the inside of the bus,” he says.
When he finally made it to Istanbul, he turned up dishevelled and filthy at his mother’s front door. “They hadn’t heard from me since Afghanistan fell,” he says. “So it was a shock to them all.” The family were reunited, but because Pordale had crossed into Turkey illegally he didn’t have the paperwork he needed to work or stay in the country. In 2022, a few months after he had arrived, Turkey began an aggressive deportation of illegal Afghan migrants back over the border into Afghanistan. “Many people I knew who had stayed in Afghanistan or who had got sent back were getting arrested or just went missing,” says Pordale. “I knew people who had been killed. I was terrified of being sent back.”
Like many other Afghans who had fled to Turkey, he felt that the only thing he could do was to move on towards Europe. Pordale called the people who had got him into Turkey and they told him to go to a market in the centre of Istanbul. “It was like a shopping centre for people smugglers,” says Pordale. “People would just be standing there outside shops yelling in multiple languages offering different packages to get you to Europe.”
Pordale was told that the cheapest route was overland through Bulgaria, with prices starting at £1,500. The most expensive, at about £8,000, was the sea crossing to Italy. He managed to get together the money to go to Italy and prepared to leave. The smugglers took Pordale and a group of about 60 others, mostly Afghans, to İzmir on the Turkish coast, and one night they did a long night trek in silence to a deserted beach to meet their boat. “When we saw the boat I thought, I’ve made a big mistake, because it was just this little fishing boat. It couldn’t have been more than 14 metres long,” he says. “People were sitting literally on top of each other, piled up. There were parents trying to keep hold of babies. I managed to sit on a small kitchen sink, sort of crouching on top of it but my legs were bent underneath me.”
They were told the journey would take three days; in the end it took six. “On the third day everyone ran out of food and the sea was so rough that the water started coming in the boat,” he says. “We were all soaking wet and terrified. People were going crazy. One guy just started screaming, ‘We’re all going to die,’ and at that moment I did just want to die so this could be over.”
On the sixth day at sea, they were spotted by an NGO rescue boat and taken to Sicily, and then, after being processed, to a reception centre. After a few days there, Pordale decided to keep moving towards the UK. “My family had worked a lot with the British government and I felt this sense of brotherhood,” he says. He also spoke fluent English. “I experienced such bad racism in Italy that going to the UK felt like my only chance to be accepted and do something useful.”
He walked most of the way from Italy to France with another group of refugees. “Most of the time I was just putting one foot in front of the other but sometimes it would just hit me, what had happened in Afghanistan and how not just me but also hundreds of thousands of other normal people had been reduced to something that felt less than human. There were moments on that journey when I thought, if I die here, nobody will know what happened to me. I’m nobody, nothing. I barely exist.”
He describes his time in the migrant camps in Calais waiting to cross to the UK as “the most degrading, humiliating experience you could imagine”. He says there was no violence inside the camps from the Kurdish smugglers running the place, “but once you start the journey to the boat, that is when it starts”. He says that on his first attempt at crossing the Channel, the boat was in such a bad condition that the smugglers were beating people to make them get onboard. “I paid them £1,800 for the crossing and it took nine attempts to get to the UK.” He doesn’t remember much about the journey itself, “because by that point I didn’t care if I lived or died. It felt like just another thing that was happening to me.”
When he finally arrived in the UK (he says he has no idea where he landed) on 16 April 2022, eight months after he had escaped Afghanistan, Pordale says he was treated “like a human being for the first time in months. But when I spoke to my mother I just wanted to get off the phone. I had caused them all these financial problems and all this worry. They were alone in Turkey, and I had failed them.”
He was taken to an asylum hotel in Coventry, “where water was running down the walls and the toilets were broken”, he says. “After the first month I just felt myself slipping into this deep depression. I thought, this can’t be my life.”
At his asylum accommodation, Pordale had come into contact with the Red Cross, and he started walking three hours back and forth each day to one of their drop-in centres to volunteer as an English teacher. “In Afghanistan it never would have occurred to me to do something purely to help someone else, but I discovered volunteering was something I loved,” he says. “Just to feel active and useful and part of something, it brought me alive again.”
He also knew that his fluent English was the reason he had been treated so humanely by the immigration officials he had met since he got off the boat. “I could express what I’d been through. I could form a connection,” he says. “I wanted to help other people to do that too.”
His manager at the Red Cross put him forward for an interview for an academic research programme looking at the barriers that refugees faced accessing higher education. He was shocked to learn that he was allowed to apply to study at UK universities, so he applied for five undergraduate courses across the country.
Meanwhile, he was moved by the Home Office from Coventry to Stockton-on-Tees, where he started volunteering at Citizens Advice, helping local people navigate problems with benefits and jobseeking. “I would sit there and local people would tell me it was all the immigrants’ fault that they couldn’t get a job, and they should all go back to where they’d come from. I would say, ‘Well, I’m a refugee,’ and they’d say, ‘Oh not you, the others.’”
Pordale was profoundly shocked by the poverty and desperation he saw in Stockton. “Many people were living in worse conditions than people in rural Afghanistan,” he says. “So much poverty! Some people would sit and cry because they hadn’t eaten in three days. They felt that nobody cared about them and they were right.”
When protests kicked off in Middlesborough over the summer, Pordale watched the TV coverage of people attacking buildings housing asylum seekers and recognised some of the people he had helped get universal credit or housing benefit. “They were only believing what they’d been told, but they were angry with the wrong people, and the damage the riots have caused to the mental health of many refugees is huge.”
At the beginning of 2023, he was told he had been awarded a full scholarship to study politics and international studies at the University of Warwick. It was “the most miraculous thing that has ever happened to me”, he says. He started university in September 2023 with “no money, no clothes, no suitcase”, but now the campus feels like home. “I know everyone here,” he says. “From the lecturers to the cleaners, everyone is my family.” He intends to stay at Warwick to get a PhD and then spend his life trying to open up higher education opportunities to refugees and asylum seekers.
The first week he enrolled he also joined the university’s Student Action for Refugees group and is now the president. “I went back to the same asylum hotel I was first taken to in Coventry, but this time to teach English,” he says. Sometimes he thinks back to his life a few years ago and can’t believe what he has been through. “The idea I could become a refugee overnight would have seemed crazy,” he says. “But laws, governments, your rights, they can all disappear in a second and all you’re left with is yourself. I just want to make the best of every chance I have to live a good life.”
