It is almost 5:40 in the evening. A hair salon in New Delhi’s bustling New Friends Colony neighbourhood is alive with the sound of buzzing clippers and chattering customers. The air is thick with the scent of hair spray and aftershave.
Zaki Marzai, 29, stands behind a barber’s brown chair, his hands moving with precision as he snips a customer’s hair. Marzai, though, would rather be elsewhere – with a rifle in his hand, not a razor.
Three years ago, Marzai was a soldier in the elite special force of Afghanistan’s army, fighting the Taliban in a war that started with the United States and NATO forces invading the country in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The Western-backed Afghan government had sided with the US in the 20-year war. Marzai joined the army in 2015 as a sergeant and was on track to become a commissioned officer.
Everything changed on June 20, 2018. At about 2am that day, Marzai was stationed outside a camp in Ghazni province of Afghanistan when a barrage of bullets hit him and his fellow soldiers.
Before Marzai and his comrades could realise what happened, 25 soldiers had died on the spot and six others had been injured. Bullets had pierced through Marzai’s chin and right leg.
“The attack was so intense we couldn’t do anything. The bullets were coming from all four sides. We were sitting ducks. The Taliban wiped out the entire camp,” he recalls. According to the United States Institute of Peace, an estimated 70,000 Afghan military and police personnel lost their lives in two decades of war in Afghanistan. After nearly a year of treatment, his jaw was still deformed, so the Afghan government sent him to India for better care. He left behind his parents, a sister and seven brothers.
In 2019, Marzai arrived at a medical facility in Gurgaon, a city adjoining New Delhi. Later, he was also taken to two other public sector hospitals in the Indian capital.
By August 2021, Marzai hoped to return to Afghanistan, his face finally fixed. But the Afghanistan he knew was about to be broken. Then, on August 15, the Taliban stormed into Kabul and took power, forcing the US and NATO forces to flee the country in a chaotic exit. Marzai tried to reach his family and soldier colleagues on the phone, but couldn’t get through because mobile networks were down.
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He was stunned: Marzai had expected a fight, not a meek surrender from the country’s politicians, whom he accuses of looting Afghanistan and then escaping.
“I cried all night when the Taliban took over the country,” says Marzai. “I was heartbroken. I was looking forward to returning to my family and rejoining the army, but now I am stuck here [in India].”
