Izatullah Nasrat Yar’s life has been nothing if not eventful. The 42-year-old spent nearly five years in the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Now he is seeking election as an Afghan member of parliament (MP).
On the campaign trail, Izatullah sat at a market stall in Kabul, narrating his life story to an AFP correspondent to withering looks from a friend who appeared uncomfortable with Westerners — until he nodded off, uninterested.
“Armed struggle is worthless today,” said the one-time commander, who fought during the 1990s in warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami, which is Afghanistan’s second-largest insurgent group.
The son of a former Hezb-e-Islami official who fought the Soviets in the 1980s, Izatullah denies ever fighting against US-led Western troops who moved into Afghanistan in late 2001 and brought down the Taliban regime.
“I was very happy when the Taliban fell, and I opened a petrol station. I had plans to buy farmland. We thought that Afghanistan would become like Europe or the United States,” he said.
Then his world fell apart on March 1, 2003. US soldiers turned up at his home in Surobi, a mountainous district just outside the Afghan capital Kabul. They took him away, blindfolded and hands tied.
He left behind two wives and nine children.
“Before going to Guantanamo, I used to think it was only for members of al-Qaeda. Now I know they also send normal people,” he said.
The US military accused him of belonging to a terror organization, receiving weapons from Hezb-e-Islami, hosting Hekmatyar at his home and being a senior insurgent in Surobi.
Izatullah denies all the allegations, saying that he collected and kept weapons only as part of a disarmament program run by the government.
“Some miserable human beings are just telling the American authorities that I did things and they are giving them wrong information,” he told a hearing at Guantanamo, which ultimately ordered his release in 2008.
Izatullah’s father, Nasrat Yar, was also deported to Guantanamo after trying to find out what happened to his son. They were released together.
Izatullah has campaigned modestly for election to Afghanistan’s lower house of parliament, the Wolesi Jirga. He has done the rounds in Surobi. His petrol station is the only place he has put up campaign posters.
“Americans, Taliban and the government — they’re all the same, but Afghans are fed up with this war brought from outside,” he said.
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