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Qismat Amin’s adjustment to life in America wasn’t easy but, by his own account, it could have been much worse. For the Afghan former combat interpreter, 29, the truly hellish part was what came in the years before he arrived in San Francisco in 2017.
Amin was laid off by his employer, the US military, in 2013, when the Obama administration sought to wind down American forces in Afghanistan. He had served alongside US soldiers for three years, starting at the age of 19, but then spent much of his twenties inside his house in the southern Afghan city of Jalalabad, with the door locked. Fighters from the terrorist group ISIS, which at that time was only just emerging in Afghanistan, had his name on a list of targets. They wanted him to confess to his “crime” of collaborating with the US military.