“I am going to be a professional cyclist,” Amir Ansari told a friend resolutely, days after crossing the Aegean Sea in a small rubber boat. It was autumn 2015 and only a few weeks earlier he had fled from Afghanistan in search of safety, carrying with him only the contents of a small backpack. His dream, as it existed then, could not have been more distant from the reality of his situation.
Ansari, now 24, was born as a refugee in Iran in 1999, where he grew up for the first 10 years of his life with his mother, father and three younger siblings. He and his family are Hazara, one of the groups who are systematically persecuted by the Taliban. In 2009, western forces were making an increased push against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Ansari family returned to their homeland, moving to western Kabul, to the relative security of a community where Hazara were in the majority.
