Best of Guernica: Aliyeh Ataei’s The Border Merchant
Photograph by Aliyeh Ataei Editor’s Note: While our all-volunteer staff is on vacation, we’re returning to some of our favorite work. High on that list is this reportage, for its intimate look at a smuggling operation on the Afghan-Iran border. As the Taliban return to power in Afghanistan, and its borders with neighbors begin to swell with refugees, Aliyeh Ataei’s brilliant immersion reporting, translated by Salar Abdoh, feels, once more, urgent and necessary. -Jina Moore
Even under the full moon, the red revolving floodlights along the border between Iran and Afghanistan are easily visible. My guide is asleep in the next room. I wake him up, so we can get a head start toward the border village of Gazik. We are going to meet Mohammad Osman. “I’ll be up and running at 5:00 a.m.,” he’d said. “Be there before me.”
Mohammad Osman Yusefzai has been arrested three times by Iranian border police for trafficking undocumented immigrants, and every time they’ve had to let him go for lack of evidence. His area of operation is the South Khorasan province of Iran, which borders Farah in Afghanistan. “I have no idea where this guy is from,” an Iranian Border Police colonel told me later. “He’s got both Iranian and Afghan papers. The illegals we catch never testify against him. Even when we lock them up, they still won’t testify. We know for a fact this man is moving people, but without witnesses stepping forward our hands are tied.”
I grew up near the border, on the Iranian side. In these in-between regions we have an entire vocabulary for the geography of our lives. Some places we simply call the border, some we call border-plus, some are called this-side-of-the border and some that-side-of-the-border. It is a vocabulary that can be exhausting, and dangerous. Gazik is border-plus. It is on the very cusp.
Our aim is to meet Mohammad Osman
