After 11 years of marriage, we were in it together after that.

All of it.

Then August 2021 came.

I will not spend a long time on the chaos of those weeks because most of the world watched it from the outside and knows the broad shape of it.

The American withdrawal, the Afghan armies collapsed.

Neil, the Taliban sweeping into city after city, the fall of Kabul.

I will just tell you what it was like from the inside.

It was unlike anything I had lived through before and I had lived through a great deal.

There was a particular quality of fear in those days that was different from the ordinary.

Long-term fear we had been managing for years.

That old fear was like a low noise you had learned to live with.

This was something much louder, much faster.

That the sense that everything was changing at a speed you could not keep up with and that the world you had carefully built your hidden life inside was dissolving faster than you could figure out what to do next.

For the underground church, the Taliban’s return meant something very specific.

Everything that had been dangerous under the republic became existential under the new regime.

Apostasy which had been a social and community risk before now carried Taliban law which in practice meant death.

The risk calculation that we had all been living with changed overnight and not in survivable direction.

Members of our small community began making decisions.

One family managed to get to Kabul airport in those first desperate days and eventually got out.

Others went to family members in other provinces lying low going dark cutting all contact for their own protection.

One of our members a young man named Tatarik.

I will tell you about Tariq later because his story is part of mine in in in in a way I cannot avoid.

He went completely silent in the first week of the Taliban’s takeover and we did not hear from him for a long time.

We had a meeting uh the last one where several of us were together.

I’m about 2 weeks after Kabul fell in a house in a neighborhood where we had met several times before.

We sat and we prayed and we talked about what to do.

Some members said we had to stop meeting entirely, perhaps indefinitely.

It was no longer a risk we could calculate in the old way.

The environment had changed too fundamentally.

I listened to all of it and I understood all of it and I could not argue with any of it and at the end of it I said what I said.

How which was that I understood if people needed to step back, that no one should do anything that put their family at risk beyond what they could bear, and that whatever anyone decided, I would not judge them for it.

But for myself, I said I was going to keep meeting with whoever was willing.

Not out of bravado, not out of any particular sense of spiritual heroism, but because I had come too far and paid too much to let fear be the last word.

And because the people in that room, the ones who stayed, the small handful who were still there and still willing, needed somewhere to bring the thing they believed.

and I was not able to take that away from them.

Three people besides Mariam and me continued to meet with me in those final months before my arrest.

The risk was known.

We all knew it.

We met anyway.

In those months, poor meetings were stripped even further down to the essentials.

No food, too much movement in and out of home drew attention.

Very short, very quiet, almost entirely prayer.

We prayed for the people who had left for their safety.

We prayed for Afghanistan.

We prayed for each other.

We prayed for whatever came next.

I do not know how we were found.

I have thought about it many times, turning it over, and I still do not know.

It could have been a neighbor who noticed a pattern over time.

It could have been someone who saw or heard something.

It is also possible that someone in or near our network under pressure or fear said something they did not intend to be harmful or did not fully understand the consequences of.

I do not say this with anger.

Fear does things to people.

I know this better than almost anyone now.

Wait, what I know is that they came on a cold night in December 2021.

Mariam and I had put the girls to bed.

We were sitting together in the main room, not doing anything particular, just sitting.

And the knock on the door came, the knock on the door of an Afghan home late at night in that period.

You knew what that knock was.

It was not a visitor.

It was not your neighbor needing something.

It had a particular quality to it.

A loudness, an assuress that told you everything before you even stood up.

I looked at Mariam.

She looked at me.

There was a lot in that look.

Everything that we had been to each other.

Everything we had walked through together.

everything we both knew about what came next.

It was all in that look and none of it could be said in words.

I stood up and I went to the door.

I already knew the men who took me that night were not dramatic about it.

That is one of the first thing I noticed in the strange calm that comes over you when the thing you have feared for years finally happens.

They were businesslike, efficient.

There were four of them.

Two stayed outside.

Two came in.

They told me to come with them.

They told Mariam to sit down and not make noise.

And they searched the apartment briefly.

quickly going through the shelves and the cupboards, finding nothing because over the years I had learned how and where to keep the few physical things I had connected to my faith.

They took me down the stairs and into a vehicle.

I had time in those few seconds between the moment they told me to come and the moment I walked out the door to look back at Mariam.

She was sitting where they had told her to sit very still with her hands in her lap.

She looked at me.

I looked at her and then I went out the door and the door closed behind me.

And that was the last time I would see her for 54 days.

The drive was not long.

I have tried to trace it in my memory many times and I cannot map it accurately because I was not in a condition to track directions.

It was dark and cold and I was trying to control my breathing and my fear and focusing on streets was not something I had the capacity for.

What I know is that we arrived somewhere in the city, that it was a compound of some kind, that there were lights on the outside and more men inside, and that this was clearly a place being used by Taliban security authorities as a holding and interrogation facility.

It was not a formal government prison.

I want to be precise about this because it matters for understanding the conditions.

Official Taliban detention facilities, as bad as they are, have at least some structure, some chain of command that connects to something larger.

This place was more informal, the kind of facility that the Taliban’s intelligence apparatus operated in those early months in parallel with the official system where the rules were whatever the people running it decided they were and accountability to anything above them was limited.

They put me in a room, not a cell yet, just a room, concrete floor, one light.

They left me there for a long time, hours alone.

This I later understood was itself an interrogation technique.

The waiting than not knowing, the silence giving your own imagination room to generate more fear than anything they might actually do.

Ah, when the questioning began, it continued over several sessions across multiple days.

The men who questioned me were not all the same.

There seemed to be a structure.

Someone who asked the opening questions.

Someone who came later who seemed to be in a position of more authority.

The questions were consistent across all of it.

Who else was with me? Where did we meet? How many people who led us to this faith? How long had this been happening? Did I know of any other such groups in the city? I told them my name.

I told them I was a translator.

I told them nothing that would lead them to anyone else.

This was the one thing I had decided in those first hours alone in the waiting room that I would not do regardless of what came.

I could not protect myself, but I could protect the others.

Whatever happened to me, their names would not come from my mouth.

The physical part of the interrogations I will not describe in detail.

I will just say that they hurt me and that they were not careful about it and that there were days when the pain made it very hard to think.

This is something that happens in these places.

It was not something that surprised me.

I had known in the abstract that this was possible.

Knowing a thing in the abstract and experiencing it in your actual body are not the same knowledge.

But at least I was not surprised by it.

And not being surprised helped me in a strange way to manage it.

What I want you to understand about those interrogation sessions is not primarily the physical element.

What I want you to understand is the particular goal of what they were trying to do which was not only to get information and it was to get recantation.

They wanted me to say formally in front of witnesses that I was returning to Islam that I renounced Jesus that I acknowledged I had been deceived and was now correcting my error.

This was the thing they pressed most consistently across all the sessions.

The information about the others was secondary to this primary objective.

I did not give it to them not because I was strong.

I want to be clear about this.

I was not strong.

I was terrified.

I was in pain.

There were moments during those sessions when the recantation was so close to the surface of my mouth that I could feel the shape of the words.

But each time I got to that point, something stopped me.

Something that was not courage in any conventional sense, but was more like clarity.

The same clarity I had felt that first night in my bedroom when I knew something real had come into the room.

Whatever else I was unsure of, I was not unsure of that.

And I could not deny a thing I was not unsure of after the formal interrogation sessions ended.

And I do not know exactly when that transition happened because the days had already begun blurring.

I was moved to the cell.

The cell was approximately 2 m by 2 1/2 m.

I know this because I paced it many times in the early days when I still had the physical capacity to pace.

The walls were concrete.

There was a small opening near the ceiling on one wall that provided ventilation and some light, but not much of either.

The floor was concrete.

There was nothing on the floor.

No mat, no blanket.

Later, after some time, a thin blanket appeared for pushed under the door without explanation.

It was not enough for the cold, but it was something.

There was a bucket in the corner which served as a toilet.

Someone removed and replaced it periodically.

The smell in the cell was what you would expect.

There were other prisoners in adjacent cells.

I could hear them but not see them.

Mostly men.

Occasionally there were sounds that I will not describe.

At night it was cold and dark and the sounds of the other prisoners, their coughing, their sleep, occasionally their crying became the texture of the darkness.

The deliberate starvation began as far as I can reconstruct.

Within the first week, it was not immediately clear to me that it was a policy.

At first, I thought it was disorganization or that food for prisoners was simply inconsistent in this kind of informal facility.

I I would see guards moving around would smell food from somewhere else in the compound and nothing would come to my cell.

This happened for several days in a row.

Then one of the guards told me directly what was happening.

He came to the cell door.

They had a small sliding panel in the door that they could open and he told me that it had been decided I would not be fed.

He explained the reasoning without apparent emotion.

I had rejected Islam which meant I had rejected God which meant I was already spiritually dead.

And a spiritually dead man did not require food.

they would not waste resources on me.

He said they were giving me time to change my mind and that if I changed it and recanted the situation would change.

If I did not, it would not.

He slid the panel closed and walked away.

I I sat on the floor of the cell for a long time after that.

I was already hungry in but several days with almost nothing had made certain of that.

Now I understood that the that the hunger was not an accident but a mechanism.

A mechanism designed to do one of two things.

Break my faith before it killed my body or kill my body in a way that is very strange to explain knowing the intention behind it helped me more than it frightened me because it was no longer uncertainty.

It was a clearly defined situation and I have always been better with defined situations than with formless fear.

I want to take you through what the weeks felt like as accurately as I can.

Not to make you feel sorry for me, but because I think it is important for people to understand what this kind of suffering is actually like.

But rather than imagining it through a movie lens that makes it bearable by making it beautiful.

It was not beautiful.

It was very ordinary and very physical and very slow.

The first 10 days without proper food, the body is angry.

There is real sharp persistent pain in the stomach.

The hunger is loud.

Your mind focuses on food in a way that is almost involuntary.

You start remembering specific meals, specific smells with a clarity and a vividness that almost feels like hallucination, but it’s really just the brain’s way of expressing what the body needs.

I thought about my mother’s cooking.

I thought about specific meals, the smell of karma on a cold day, the particular way Mariam made bologani on Friday mornings.

The mind goes to very concrete and specific places.

During this period, I prayed, but the prayers were effortful in a way they had not been before.

Hunger makes concentration difficult.

I found myself starting a prayer and losing the thread of it.

Finding myself somewhere else had having to pull myself back.

I would recite verses I had memorized simply to give my mind something to hold on to.

The 23rd Psalm.

Parts of the gospels I had committed to memory.

I recited them the way you hold onto a railing on a steep staircase.

Not with spiritual inspiration necessarily, just with need.

The guards or some of them developed a particular cruelty during this period.

They would sometimes open the panel in the door at meal times from other parts of the compound when food smells were strongest and hold food near the opening, not offering it, just letting the smell in.

and and asked if I was ready to talk.

I do not think this was something they had been specifically instructed to do.

I think some of them enjoyed it.

This is also part of what imprisonment does.

It gives small authority to people who might not otherwise have it.

And some people do ugly things with small authority.

This is not unique to Taliban guards.

It is a very human thing and a very sad one.

By the second and third week, the body enters a different phase.

The loud angry hunger becomes quieter in a way that is itself frightening because you understand dimly that the quiet is not the pain listening but the body beginning to use itself.

Your thinking changes.

It becomes slower.

It takes longer to follow a thought from beginning to end.

Physical movement becomes costly.

Standing up from the floor becomes a process that takes planning and effort.

I slept more or tried to, though the cold made sustained sleep difficult.

My prayer life during these weeks was strangely the most honest it has ever been in my life.

Not the most eloquent, not the most theologically sophisticated, the most honest because I did not have the energy for anything other than the direct thing.

No preamble, no Polish language, just I am here.

I am cold.

I am hungry.

I don’t know if I can do this.

Are you here? That was most of my prayer for weeks.

just that I just the bare minimum of reaching towards something I hoped was there.

There were also moments during this period when I was very angry.

Angry at God.

I will not pretend there were not.

Angry in the way you are angry at someone you believe exists and has the power to act and is not acting.

I said angry things in the privacy of that cell.

I accused God in those whispered prayers of things of abandonment, of cruelty, of not being what he had seemed to be.

I said these things and then sat in the silence after them.

And in the silence something held me that was not my own will holding myself.

Something steadier than me met the anger and did not collapse under it.

And that was its own kind of answer.

By the fourth week, the physical deterioration was serious.

I knew this not from any medical assessment, but from my own body’s communication, which becomes very direct when you are in this condition.

My muscles were losing substance.

Sitting on the concrete floor had become painful in a new way because there was less cushion between bone and surface.

My hair was coming out when I ran my hand through it.

The cold felt colder than it had in the first weeks, which I understood was related to the loss of fat and the body’s reduced ability to maintain warmth.

I had also begun to lose track of time in a more complete way.

The small panel of light from the ceiling opening told me when it was day and when it was night, but beyond that, the days had become a texture rather than a sequence.

I tried to keep count by marking scratches on the wall with my thumbnail, but I was not always consistent, and the count I was keeping by the middle of the ordeal was probably not precise.

Around what I think was the fifth week, a guard, a different one younger, who I had not seen often, slid something through the lower gap under the door when he passed.

It was a small piece of bread, dry, not much, but real.

He did not say anything.

He did not stop walking.

He just pushed it through the gap and kept going.

I never saw him do it again.

I ate that bread very slowly, carefully.

The way you treat something precious, and I wept while I ate it, not dramatically, just the quiet tears of a man who has been without basic human kindness for a long time and then encounters one small unearned piece of it.

I do not know why that guard did it.

I have no way of knowing.

I have prayed for him whoever he was.

I believe God can use any person to do any small thing at any moment when it is needed.

I as I move deeper into the sixth and seventh weeks, there were periods where I was no longer entirely present in a normal way.

I want to be very careful about how I describe this because I do not want to claim things I cannot verify or make it sound more supernatural than I can honestly present.

What I can tell you is that there were periods during those last weeks where my consciousness was not operating in normal or consistent way.

Whether this was the result of starvation induced delirium or sleep deprivation or hypothermia or some combination of all of these things.

I cannot tell you scientifically.

Probably it was all of those things.

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