ICRC representative. The ICRC representative was told by jail officials that in order to meet Yasir safely,
six or seven guards would need to be deployed, and that this was an impossible provision. If he wanted
to meet Yasir, he would have to at his own risk. When the ICRC representative agreed, Yasir refused to
meet in the end.
The ICRC officials said it was also due to picking fights with jail guards that phone calls with the family
were cancelled. In 2011, Yasir’s brother, Rehman, waited at the ICRC office for an hour, only to be told
that the call would not be taking place. This would make it the second call to be cancelled, and two
months since the family last spoke to Yasir. Rehman later wrote to the ICRC to try and explain that
due to a head injury when he was about 8 years old, Yasir suffered mental health issues and could be
hot-tempered as an adult. The calls seemed to resume following the sharing of this information. But
uncertain to intermittent contact with Yasir would continue to characterize how long the family waited
for news of his release.
Yasir did not trust the ICRC:
These Red Cross people used to visit and ask us how they could help us and after we told them,
they refused to help. We asked them if they could not help us, why visit us? They told us that
this is American procedure; America is America ... They used to just visit us to gain popularity
– to tell the world that they were visiting Bagram – only to show that the Americans were
working.
They used to tell us that their hands are tied, and they could not do anything. Then why did
they visit us? They only came to deliver letters so the Americans could pick out things to use
against us.
In 2013 the family recalled one call arranged by the ICRC in which the connection was so faulty, it had
to be reconnected 30 times.
2014
“I was arrested while I was sleeping in a mosque,” Yasir said in an interview with JPP after his release. “I was
there to sell second-hand shoes. Then, suddenly, a helicopter started firing at us from above and killed the
people who were with me. After that, they set fire to all our shoes. Those were our things, they even took our
money, car, rings, everything … they did not spare anything, not even a pen.” Drawing on the circumstances
of his arrest, Yasir described instances of speaking up to jail authorities during interrogation:
They asked us why we fought them so we told them that it was because they set fire to the
sack they put our torn up shoes in. That was our evidence. That was my evidence. I came to sell
those shoes, but they told me I came to the Taliban.
Then they would ask me why haven’t I brought my visa or passport along. I told them that a
million people came from Afghanistan to Pakistan and [asked] whether they too required visas
and passports?45 So we went there [Afghanistan] and we did not need a visa or passport either.
Haseeb Asif (2016), describes the shared, but geopolitically contentious, thoroughfare at Chaman, writing about
Pakistan’s attempt to inaugurate the border in 2003, with Afghanistan responding “Pakistan had shifted the border
45
37
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