Abbas fought the Taliban alongside US and Australian troops. Now exiled in Iran, he feels abandoned

‘They always called us brothers’: Abbas, a former Afghan national army commando, served alongside foreign forces including US and Australian troops in Afghanistan. Photograph: Supplied

War is Abbas’s* earliest memory.

As a child, the first iteration of Taliban rule forced his family to flee – with nothing but the clothes on their backs and what food they could carry – for the relative safety of far-distant hills.