Idris was born in a refugee camp for Afghans in Pakistan. He mostly grew up in the U.S., where his family was settled. His family, as it turns out, is a whole family of interpreters and he served as a linguist with Special Forces during the U.S. occupation. He’d gotten into medical school but deferred his admission with the fall of Kabul and spent the next year desperately working to get refugees away from the Taliban.
Nils, the director of the film I’m working on, had started filming with him around that time. The family, with Idris in the lead, had rented a small house in the Washington suburbs and worked truly around the clock establishing safe houses, chartering planes, loading up the planes with refugees. Nils filmed a great deal of it and then in the winter Idris decided that he had to go to Afghanistan and work in person. So Nils went with him as far as Abu Dhabi and filmed his plane taking off for Kabul.
Nils had been in regular contact with Idris’ organization - with his brothers, his girlfriend, etc - but suddenly they cut him off, told him they couldn’t respond to him. I joined the project in January and we pretty much just forgot about the Idris story and all the hours that Nils had sunk into it. It was just hard to know what had happened - Idris had many good qualities but he also had a bit of a screw loose, a case of PTSD, had been arrested once wandering blearily around D.C. with a loaded gun, so it was perfectly possible that what had happened was something like that.
But then Nils happened to see a news story about the release of Idris and his brother from the Taliban after three months of captivity and reached out to them, and there was a bit of a negotiation - some reality producer had been sniffing around their organization as well and promising them a series - but in the end they went with Nils and we took the train down to D.C. and smoked a lot of cigarettes with Idris’ brothers outside the rented house and then flew all together to Omaha for a celebration of Eid and a homecoming.
***
What’s odd about this homecoming, and the public events connected to it, is that it’s all about Idris, even though his brother Said had been with him the whole time, gone through the exact same three months of custody. But it’s Idris who does the TED Talk, Idris who is on television, Idris who is all over the surprisingly robust press coverage of his release - and somewhere, buried in the piece, well below the triumphant news about “U.S. Citizen Idris Khan” it’s mentioned that, oh by the way, “U.S. green card holder Said Khan” was released as well. And that disbalance extends to the family. Notwithstanding that Said is older, he, in the NGO they’ve set up, works for Idris and sometimes refers to Idris as ‘the boss.’ And when we get to the Omaha airport there are flowers for Idris, a mob of relatives around Idris, and Said off somewhere to the side.
Since my job is largely to stay out of the way - or at least to stay behind the camera - I often find myself standing next to Said and the two of us develop a certain smiling affinity, or at least frequently bum one another’s cigarettes. “I was glad I was there,” he says at one stage, while Idris is talking to other people, “since I am older and I was able to take care of him sometimes.” I never get close enough to the family to ask what the disbalance is really about. I assume it’s something tangled and not-ultimately-all-that-dramatic. Said is older, in his 40s. His life seems not to have gone exactly smoothly and he may be in something of a state of disgrace. He has a family in the U.K. that he’s estranged from. He doesn’t have a job job - just seems to chip in with Idris’ organization. He speaks with a strong accent and rambles when he talks. For instance, when they had talked to Biden on the phone after they were released, he had called him “Your excellency,” which is sweet but not exactly with-it. And Idris, meanwhile, is younger, crisp, slick, more Americanized. When we get to the interview, Nils asks him, as delicately as he can think to, “You’re different from the others, aren’t you?” And Idris says, matter-of-factly, a bit apologetically, “Everybody knows that I’m my entire family’s favorite. There’s a special place for me in the family. All the other siblings have an arranged marriage. I’m dating a Jewish white woman - if anybody else did that they would be disowned.”
It just seems to be a fact - the preference for him. And nobody else begrudges it. Even Said, talking to me, says about Idris, “He is strong. He has no fear of death.” So the youngest of 12 but, for one reason or another, the acknowledged leader.
And, as for the Jewish white woman, Alana, she is there, on her first trip to the Omaha homestead, and being slowly transformed step by sartorial step into an Afghan. She’s very ambitious - went to Harvard, now a musical director with a show that may open soon on Broadway. The two of them talk about it like it’s a done deal - “They’re just waiting for a theater to open up,” Idris says. She had volunteered for Idris’ organization at the time of the fall of Kabul. Idris was dating someone else at the time but shifted, after not very long, to Alana. “And she is much more conventionally attractive,” Nils confides to me.
The two of them are clearly enjoying the sense of themselves as a power couple. In the D.C. airport - Idris showing very little of the impacts of his imprisonment - their conversation is all about their Twitter verification: Alana has appointed herself Idris’ manager and has been closing the deal on that. And they have regular meetings with literary agents, with movie producers, with people who are looking for a piece of the story of his detention. Back in the fall of 2021, when Nils was filming regularly with Idris, his producing partner at the time, my predecessor, got a bad vibe from Idris, thought that he was an operator. He thought Idris was skimming money from the organization, which I see no sign of, but I sort of get what the producer was anxious about. In documentary, people are supposed to be kind of sweet and passive, and Idris is not that. That doesn’t necessarily bother me. He’s a young man going places is essentially who he is - and he’s looking for all kinds of opportunities, in humanitarian work, in advocacy, in politics, in selling his story. Even his imprisonment was in a certain sense a piece of opportunism. None of that particularly bothers me - he genuinely has a good story and by all accounts he conducted himself terrifically during his detention - but it does make me not particularly like him, no matter how impressive he may be.
In any case, it feels churlish to even think this way while we’re in Omaha. Idris, and incidentally Said, are greeted by about thirty people, who couldn’t be happier about seeing them. Omaha may seem like an unlikely place for Afghan resettlement, but it makes sense to them. Ten of the twelve kids, plus the parents, plus various in-laws, have houses here, and what they do, basically, is to rotate from house to house having meals all the time. Each house is laid out with carpets and stripped bare of furniture. The garages are retrofitted into outdoor kitchens for cooking meat. The point - in other words - is that land is cheap in Omaha and it is possible to have as perfect a facsimile of Afghan life as anywhere in America and with as few concessions as possible to the surrounding society.
And possible, too, to extend the famous Afghan hospitality. In the D.C. airport Idris catches me doing my usual booking of a rental car and tells me that I really shouldn’t do that. And Omaha turns out to be by far the cheapest shoot I’m ever on. I spend a wholly unnecessary $5 on an airport cart just before a group of strapping Afghan teenagers grab all of our bags. Other than that, a house is provided to us, we’re driven around from place to place - Said is enlisted as our usual chauffeur - and all meals are, of course, home-cooked.
The only real interaction with Omaha outside of their enclave is the visit to the halal slaughterhouse. This is a compromise to the grey weather and a slightly pressing schedule - the preference would be go a bit farther, out to a farm, and do the slaughter themselves. The slaughterhouse in Omaha is, I’m pretty sure, the most diverse place I’ve ever been in America. I see people who are Mexican-American, African-American, East Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern. A great deal of time is spent selecting the sheep and goats. The guy manning the stalls is a beefy Nebraskan farmhand type, a little developmentally challenged, and it’s somehow surprising to see him there - apart from Nils, Alana, and myself, he may be the only white guy in the place (all the other workers are Mexican). After the selection is made he spray paints the animals’ fur to mark them and then they are led off to the abattoir portion of the building. Alana, during this section of the day, makes the rookie mistake of locking eyes with one of the spray-painted goats. She’s a recovering vegetarian - recovering for Idris’ sake - but this moment of eye contact effectively incapacitates her for the rest of the journey. Her sole task, apart from being dressed up and made up and not saying anything too blasphemous, is to eat, and, instead, she spends the meals staring at the plates, begging Idris to let her not eat.
And then drive back out of non-Afghan Omaha. I’ve never been to Nebraska before, and it really is just as dull as I would have pictured it. Everything is flat and corporate, the residential areas are just sub-division after sub-division. The lone decoration is the driveway basketball hoop.
This is kind of the extreme of what this film has been like for me. It’s a lot of small-town and just out-of-the-way America. Every place feels the same as every other place - and all equally miserable. Everybody’s addicted to drugs or, at a minimum, to alcohol. And, in the days spent with the Afghans in Omaha, it’s not that. It can be a bit boring - lots of time sitting around waiting for food to cook, never really a feeling of privacy (and everybody is always very alert for the first flickerings of boredom on any of the guests’ faces and is eager to suggest some entertainment, which, usually, is to pour out more tea). One of the younger, more Americanized cousins explains to me that “Time slows down here in a way that’s a bit annoying but mostly pleasant.” There’s no alcohol, no atomization. There are so many people around all the time - kids, old people. Activities, while waiting for the meals to cook, include a very chaotic game of quasi-basketball in a neighbor’s driveway and a variety of teas. And then the meals last, really, for four or five hours. They are capped by the Afghan traditional dancing, which, as far as I can tell, is mostly spinning around in circles. At some point in the middle of one of the dances, the neighbors pull into their garage - and then I see the light of the TV come on in the house - and it feels so discordant and sad. And I would much rather be hanging out with the well-fed Afghans twirling in the driveway.
It strikes me as being a very good formula what they’ve done - figure out some customs maybe 5000 years ago, accept the overlay of Islam 1500 years ago, and, other than that, change absolutely nothing - no matter where you are in the world, around what people you find yourselves, do nothing any different from how it has been. I mention to Nils that this is the first time, on our extended travels, that I’ve been around anybody who’s happy and we both wrack our brains for a counter-example - and come up with maybe, maybe, the small town in Minnesota welcoming back a busload of soldiers returning home from war.
***
In terms of filming, the content is only so-so. Nils used to be an embed reporter in Afghanistan, so knows his way around Afghans. “Every Afghan family is a documentary,” he tells me like it’s a piece of folk wisdom. And, likely, that’s the case here. It seems to be an entire family of translators - they’re the moderate Afghans, the bedrock for the entire U.S. initiative there. The father had been a mujahideen in the ‘80s and fought against the Soviets. He actually had been held at one stage in the same prison as Idris was. He does, Idris has to concede, have bragging rights - when he was held, they took his fingernails, while the Taliban left Idris’ fingernails alone. There’s obviously a whole story there. And a story about Said and his service as a linguist with U.S. forces in Afghanistan, which was a very tough stint apparently, and then whatever went askew in his life afterwards and that makes him so overlooked even by his own family. And a story about Ibrahim - his favorite brother, Nils says - who had run the Coca-Cola concession for Afghanistan during the U.S. occupation and had really been the hero of the story of Idris and Said’s captivity. He had advised them not to go - “this is stupid,” he had told Said at one point - but when they were caught he flew to Kabul himself and worked his contacts from within the Taliban regime. The key contact turned out to be some famous terrorist badly wanted by the Americans - and he had considerately given Ibrahim a pair of ‘suiciders’ as bodyguards while he was in Kabul. And, between working their very different angles, Idris in touch with the State Department and White House through a phone that he had hidden in his cell, Ibrahim tooling around Kabul with his suicider escort, they had finally worked out the brothers’ release. And then there are little ancillary stories here - the brother-in-law who had also been a translator although only for one deployment (“he got scared and came back,” says Said) and has become a writer working on what he says is the first science-fiction novel ever written in Pashto. But, basically, it’s just food preparation and eating, every so often some collateral relative asking Idris about his captivity. And then, after a couple of days of this - much footage of sheep cooking in the tandoor, much footage of Afghan dancing in the driveway - we sit Idris down and he tells his story.
He had gone to Kabul, really, for something having to do with the airport contract. He had some government contacts and the beginning of his trip was uneventful. But that didn’t take away from the strangeness of being there. “My sank when we landed at touchdown,” he says, “Taliban soldiers marching on the tarmac with U.S.-made weapons. And the green zone looked so weird - a concrete city put down to keep the Taliban outside. Now the Taliban was inside of it and it almost felt normal.” And he had his meetings with various bureaucrats in the Taliban regime and had real trouble keeping himself together. “I wanted to go across the room and slap them really hard,” he says. “Their mentality is that they defeated the world’s most powerful country - when the reality is that America got bored and decided to leave.”
And then he had been in his hotel, just before the end of the trip, when he and Said were summoned to the tenth floor, asked a bunch of questions and the guy asking the questions was very aggressive. “It just didn’t feel good,” he says. And then he was brought to the police station for more questions and that night moved from the room where he was waiting to the basement where the small cells were and “that’s when I realized,” he says, “that something was terribly wrong.”
His plane was due to take off and there was no way even to alert anyone that he wouldn’t make it. Alana had tracking installed on her phone and she saw the phone at the police station, not moving, and had no other way of knowing what that meant - if he was in prison, if he had been shot and his body left there.
Idris and Said found themselves in a damp cell. There was no shower, no blankets, no heaters. The food was extremely bad - rice, beans, bread. Neither one of them took off their coat for about the first 40 days that they were there. What was surprising was that, after the hotel, there was no real interrogation - no charges were ever brought against them. The idea, clearly, was just to let them rot there - and Idris was pretty sure he knew what was really behind it, some negotiations that had gone wrong over the airport, some rivals getting back at them, and using the Taliban bureaucracy to carry out their bidding. It was fortunate that the keepers seemed to be inept - there was a lot of technical equipment that had been installed by the Americans, with cameras in the cell itself, but Idris could tell that they weren’t working. To his surprise, his biography - his work with Special Forces - never came up; apparently, the keepers weren’t able to connect that to him.
But, of course, interrogations would have been something of a relief from boredom. Idris found that the real event of the day was the call to prayer. “I could tell time from the call to prayer. It kept me calm and gave me something to look forward to every day,” he says. Other than that, all he could really do with himself was to make new memories. “I would think about all the things I was going to do when I got out,” he says. “I’d be like I’m going to go on vacation with Alana and I’d look for the perfect spot for the vacation. I’d google. I’d go through the whole process, finding the perfect place online. I would consider everything, minute details of the flight, of the Airbnb - I would spend hours planning that.” He would also, he says, spend a great deal of time on his childhood. “There was a lot of time spent thinking about the refugee camp, a lot of time going over events in just minute detail.”
There was, however, in the midst of all the boredom, an opportunity to do something. The two of them spent their time “working from the inside, reading the guards - trying to figure which one we could turn.” Bathroom trips turned out to be a pivotal event - a chance to talk to the guards, figure out what the weak points were in each one. I pictured Said as being particularly valuable in this phase - the way he’d sit when he and I smoked cigarettes together and point towards different people, make some observation about them. It seemed to be a habit that he had had all his life as if he were just wanting for the chance to turn prison guards, and then a new guard showed up and they found themselves in luck.
The chief had refused to give this guard money for his wedding and he had left in a rage, and then the father of his bride had told him that if he didn’t come up with money by a certain date then the wedding was off, and he had come back not knowing what else to do, just being stuck, and that was the opportunity that Idris and Said were looking for. They offered to pay for the wedding and said that they needed a phone in order to make the arrangements, at which point, on day 17, the guard slipped them the phone, and “everything,” says Idris, “changed from there.” They were able to send messages back, talk to their organization, and soon had people at the highest level of the U.S. government and of the NGO sector working to get them released.
With that, there was the feeling that the captivity would be over soon. Their case became regular business at the White House. And, meanwhile, the guard recruitment continued. “By the end of our detention we had half the guards working for us,” Idris says. But everything kept getting delayed. On day 35, Idris decided to declare a hunger strike. There’s a particular way, when he’s talking, that he pronounces these words. Everything with him is always so chill - like “everything is a lark,” as Nils always complains about him - but there’s an emphasis and pride whenever he comes to the phrase ‘hunger strike.’ Once he was on the hunger strike, he says, everything about his mental landscape changed. “I had built entire fantasies, gone on vacations, built organizations, worked out the salaries,” he says. “And then when I went on the hunger strike those fantasies went away completely. I only thought about food. I remembered every food that I had tasted in my life, what I liked, what I didn’t like, and everything I had ever eaten seemed like the most delicious thing I had had in my life. I started to daydream all the time. I imagined making the food, preparing the food, serving the food. The brain was doing everything in its power to get me to eat.”
The Taliban captors seem to have been genuinely startled by the hunger strike. As a sort of a joke, Idris had told the guards that he had sworn not to eat the prison food, so they went and brought food from outside. And then the Deputy Director of Intelligence brought Idris and Said to his office and said that the Director of Intelligence was traveling and they would be released as soon as he returned and put his hand on the Koran to swear it. “And when he did that we believed him - that means a lot to them - and we stopped the hunger strike,” says Idris.
But it was a lie and, as soon as Idris figured out that it was a lie, he threatened to start the hunger strike again. At which point 14 people came and dragged him to another cell and beat him up there, including a few of the guards who had been their allies.
There was another casualty of the hunger strike. At the beginning of their detention Idris and Said had done everything together, effectively shared a mind together - although, as Idris confesses to Nils and me, he found that Said “talks a little too much” - had turned the guards together. And Idris had been there for him when he had a heart attack, had spells where he couldn’t breathe, where he was coughing up blood. But they had a difference of approach around the hunger strike - “I was being very aggressive about it,” says Idris - and, at one point when they were arguing, Idris rattled the bars, called for a guard, and asked them to “take me to a different cell from this prisoner: I can’t stand to be around him.”
But the beating, and Said’s dissension, did not particularly dissuade Idris. When it became clear that the release was being further delayed and that no charges were being brought, he decided to embark on a fresh hunger strike - although this time without both food and water. This turned out to be a very different kind of challenge. “By day four of the hunger strike, my mind was slipping, things were slipping.” He had already made the decision that he was willing to give his life for his principles - in this case, decent treatment within prison - and he made, he said, Alana cry all night over that when he had explained it to her and, now, that was deeply distressing to his parents who had arrived in Kabul. They were brought to the prison. For his father, this was deeply distressing - he was religious, he believed that in the eyes of religion one cannot commit suicide and that a hunger-and-thirst strike is tantamount to suicide. “And, looking at my dad,” says Idris, “convinced me to give up the hunger-and-thirst strike.”
After 105 days, they were released. They were brought back to the U.S., had their call with his excellency Biden. Idris does his TED Talk and then returns to Omaha. “In the end I won and they lost,” he says. “I’m able to put out my story and put truth out into the world. I have a resilience within me that I never knew I had before. And the Taliban is trying to run a country and failing at it miserably.” He continues, “I used to get annoyed with Said smoking all the time or Ibrahim smoking all the time. Now I accept everybody just the way they are. I’ve changed but only in good ways. I’m not broken. I don’t have PTSD. I have a supportive family, an amazing group of people who support me in every aspect. I’ve never been this happy in my life.”
We’ve been talking for five hours. Dinner has been pushed back and people in the house are getting restless. The rest of the night is like all the other nights we spend in Omaha - the endless dinner, sitting on cushions on the floor, the endless cousins stopping by, and then the dancing in the driveway until deep into the night.
Names have been changed for this essay.
Very cool piece. Best thing about this, for me, is the slow build, the feeling that you're not completely sure where you are, or why it matters, and then suddenly you're in Idris' story, and a pit drops in your stomach.
Nice piece! Where the photos at?