It was three hours to midnight on a hot Virginia evening in early July when Nasrat Ahmadyar returned to the two-bedroom apartment he shared with his wife and four children. He’d just finished a game of volleyball, but the night was not over.
Ahmadyar, 31, was struggling to pay rent, behind on his car payments and constantly preoccupied with the situation in Afghanistan, the country he’d fled not two years earlier after the Taliban took over. Had he stayed, he was certain he would have been killed because of the years he spent helping American special forces in their long and ultimately fruitless campaign to stop the hardline Islamist movement from returning to power.
