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Download the full eBook from Ben Anderson's The Interpreters
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Hamid came from Mazar-i-Sharif, the fourth-largest city in Afghanistan, famous for its beautiful mosques, archeological sites, and relative peace. I spent five weeks with him in Sangin, the most violent district of Afghanistan’s most violent province, at the end of 2010. US Marines had just taken over from British forces, which had lost more men in Sangin — 109 — than they had anywhere else in Afghanistan. Casualties caused by IEDs (improvised explosive devices) were hideously high, and we all had to watch every step we took to avoid stepping on one. Rather than clearing IEDs by hand, as the British had done, the Marines blasted themselves new paths every day, mostly using long explosive belts called A-POBs. Sometimes they simply bulldozed their way through villages. When we were away from the Marines, Hamid was often tearful when he saw what life was like for the villagers of Sangin. He later told me that after I left, he was allowed to interrogate a Taliban prisoner about the meaning of Islam. He was so offended by what the prisoner said that he beat him “badly.” He later had to take a few months off and seek treatment for stress.I worked for the US government as an interpreter for more than 11 years. The US Marines I was with really liked me a lot. All of them were my friends. “We stand shoulder to shoulder,” they said. We went out on patrols, helping each other; they let me carry and fire weapons. The people who came from the US, they don’t know anything. They don’t know about Afghanistan. So this is my country, I know what is going on inside here, so my responsibility was to help them understand.
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The Special Immigrant Visa program was created for both Iraqi and Afghan interpreters, but for reasons that aren’t clear, the Afghans are offered far fewer visas than their Iraqi counterparts, and fewer people are eligible. No one knows the exact numbers, but tens of thousands of Afghans worked as interpreters and only approximately 9,000 visas have so far been offered (as opposed to 25,000 for Iraqis), and many of those have expired. So only 2,799 interpreters (as of March 31, 2014) have been given visas. And it’s common to hear about the process taking three, four, or even five years. Although they have already been vetted thoroughly and regularly (they were, after all, living, sleeping, and patrolling alongside American troops, often while carrying weapons), to receive a visa interpreters have to prove themselves all over again. For starters, they have to demonstrate four basic things: that they are Afghan, that they worked for the US, that they provided “faithful and valuable service,” and that they are now facing an “ongoing and serious” threat because of their work.
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