Forced from Home in Helmand

On October 11, Taliban fighters in Helmand converged on the districts surrounding the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, capturing huge swathes of government-held territory in a matter of days and raising concern that the city would fall to the insurgents.The offensive was the Taliban’s largest, countrywide, since representatives of the group signed an agreement with the U.S. in Doha in February, which both sides said they hoped would pave the way for bringing an end to the war.Although it wasn’t specified in the publicly available version of the agreement, U.S. officials have repeatedly stated that a verbal agreement was made to reduce violence thereafter. Since February, U.S., N.A.T.O. and Afghan government officials have lamented on an almost daily basis the Taliban’s failure to live up to this supposed part of the agreement. Afghan government forces, for their part, have assumed a defensive posture since February as a gesture of goodwill and the U.S. have halted offensive air and ground operations, resorting to air support for Afghan government forces only when they’re under extreme pressure, as was the case last week in Helmand.I flew to Helmand last week to speak with some of those who were caught up in the Taliban’s offensive and others who were fighting back against it.This episode, I speak with a school teacher who was forced to leave his home and village in Nad-i Ali district, a place where British and U.S. forces fought at great cost for several years which abuts Lashkar Gah to the northeast.Mohammad Sardar, as I’ll refer to him, has lived in the same village, which I won’t be naming, all his life. It wasn’t, however, the first time he and his family were forced from their home in the face of a military offensive. We spoke in his father’s home in Lashkar Gah, where he’d resettled his family after leaving the village  a week prior. Two of his children came in from time to time as we spoke for help with their homework.(The interview was conducted in Pashto, through a translator, and like previous episodes, transcribed and then re-recorded in English).It’s the third time since 2008 that Mohammad Sardar has had to leave his home because of Taliban military offensives. Soon after the last time it happened, in 2016, he ended up returning to the school to teach after coming to an agreement with the Taliban.But his profession isn’t his only cause for concern when it comes to his relationship with the Taliban. While Helmand is an overwhelming Pashtun province, Mohammad Sardar is among a small Hazara minority living there. With ethnic minorities increasingly worried about the Pashtun-majority Taliban coming to power in the future and the prospect of persecution at their hand, we speak about his experience as part of an ethnic minority in Helmand and whether it affects his dealings with the Taliban, of which he has had many in recent years.But to begin with, we start closer to the present, with Mohammad Sardar explaining what happened in the days and weeks leading up to the Taliban offensive that saw his village fall into the insurgent group’s control yet again.