Syrian Pastor Starved 54 Days in Taliban Prison – “They All Thought I was Dead, a Miracle Happened”
I want to start by telling you something that might surprise you. If you had met me 20 years ago, if you had sat across from me in Kabul in my father’s house, I would u offer a cup of green tea and you had told me that one day I would be a Christian pastor.
I would have looked at you the way a man looks at someone who has said something deeply offensive.
Not with loud anger, with quiet, serious concern. The kind of concern you have for a person who has lost their mind.
I was not a violent man. I never was. What I believed were the way I believed in the air I breathed and the mountains I could see from a rooftop that Islam was the only truth.
Not because someone forced me to believe it, because it was the water I had grown up swimming in and I had never once been outside the water long enough to know there was anything else.
So before I tell you what happened to me in that prison, before I tell you about the 54 days and the hunger and the cold and the moments when I was not sure I was still alive, I need you to understand who I was before any of that.
Because if I just start with the prison, you will think of me as some kind of special person, some kind of hero.
And I am not. I am just a man, a very ordinary man from Kabul who God somehow decided to reach and the reaching took a long time.
My name is Ysef Rahimi. Hello viewers from around the world before our brother Ysef continues his story.
We’d love to know where you are watching from and we would love to pray for you and your city.
Thank you and may God bless you as you listen to this powerful testimony. I was born in 1981 in the western part of Kabul in a neighborhood called Cartes.
This was during the Soviet occupation. So I came into the world already surrounded by war.
Though as a child you do not fully understand what war is. You just understand that some sounds mean you go inside and some sounds mean you stay inside.
Find that your mother’s face has a particular tightness to it that you learn not to ask about.
My father’s name was Abdul Karim. He was not a mala, not a religious scholar, but he was a deeply devout man.
He prayed his five prayers without fail every single day of his life for as long as I know him.
He fasted through Ramadan not as a cultural obligation but as something he genuinely looked forward to.
He would say that Ramadan was when he felt closest to God, when the noise of the world was quietest and something in his chest was most clear.
I respected that about him even as a child. There was nothing performative about my father’s faith.
It was simply who he was. My mother Fatima was a quieter kind of believer.
She prayed. She covered herself. She taught us the basics of the faith when we were small.
How to do woo for how to recite the fata, what the bellars meant. But her faith expressed itself mostly in how she treated people.
She was the woman in our street who always had food for whoever needed it.
She never asked questions about who you were or where you were from before she fed you.
I think about her a lot. I think about how much of what I understand about God’s generosity.
I actually learned from watching my mother’s hands. I had three siblings, two older sisters, Sora and Najiba, and one younger brother, Dawood.
Dawood. I will come back to Dawood. I have to. His story is part of mine in a way that I cannot separate.
Growing up in Kabul in the 1980s and 1990s meant growing up inside a series of catastrophes, the Soviets, then the civil war between the Mujahedin factions, then the first Taliban regime.
Each period had its own particular kind of fear. Each period changed the city a little more, took something from it that did not come back.
By the time the Taliban came to power the first time in 1996, I was 15 years old and Kabul had already been through enough to age everyone in it well beyond their years.
Under the first Taliban regime, our life contracted. There was no music, no television. My sisters could not leave the house without male escort.
Education for girls stopped. The things that had made Kabul feel like a real city.
The markets with their noise and color, the small pleasures, all of it became something that had to be done quietly or not at all.
But I want to be careful here because I do not want to give you the wrong impression.
Even during that first Taliban period and my father did not see them as the enemy of Islam.
He disagreed with some of their methods. He thought some of them were using religion as a tool for power which is a very different thing from actually having faith.
But he still prayed the same prayers. Faced the same direction, believed in the same God.
His Islam was not their Islam and he knew the difference. Many Afghans knew the difference.
I finished my basic schooling when I could under whatever circumstances existed at the time.
Then after 2001 when the Taliban were pushed out and the republic was established, there was a period about 15 years when the when Afghanistan breathed differently.
It was not peace. There was never real peace. But there was a kind of opening.
Schools reopened. Women went back to work and to university. Couple had traffic jams again.
One which sounds like a complaint but was actually a sign of life. I used that opening.
I studied hard improved my English which I had been quietly learning in pieces throughout my teenage years and I found work as a translator.
First for aid organizations, then for a period for international military units, then later for a variety of NOS and diplomatic bodies.
It was good work. It paid reasonably well, and more than that, it put me in contact with a world that was larger than the one I had grown up in.
I want to be honest about something. Working with foreigners, with westerners especially, it did not make me question my faith.
That is what some people assume that exposure to western culture is what turns Afghans away from Islam.
That is not what happened to me. If anything, some of what I saw of Western culture reinforced my sense that Islam had something valuable that the secular west did not.
The loneliness I saw, the way people seemed untethered from anything larger than themselves, the drinking, the restlessness, none of that made me want what they had.
I was proud of who I was. I was proud of my faith, my family, my language, my country.
I married Mariam in 2007. She was from a family in Kabul, educated, thoughtful, a woman with strong opinions that she knew when to share and when to keep to herself.
We were introduced through family, the way things are done. But we had several meetings before the formal arrangements were made.
And I remember thinking clearly that she was someone I could talk to, not just someone to manage a household, someone to actually talk to.
That meant a great deal to me. We had two daughters together. Lena born in 2009.
Sana born in 2012. So if you want to know what happiness looked like for me in those years, it looked like those two girls.
It looked like coming home from a long day of translation work to find them fighting over something small and ridiculous.
And Mariam trying to referee and all of us sitting down for dinner together in our small apartment and the ordinary completeness of that.
I did not know then how rare it was. You never know how rare the ordinary good things are until they are taken.
Now I need to tell you about Dood. My younger brother was born in 1985, 4 years after me.
Okay. He was, how do I describe him to people who never met him? He was the kind of person who made a room feel warmer just by entering it, not in a loud way.
Adawood was not loud. He was warm and funny in a quiet way. The kind of funny where something he said would hit you 5 minutes later and you would suddenly laugh at the wrong moment.
He became a mechanic. He was excellent at it. He had a small workshop near our parents’ neighborhood and he was always full of grease and always ready to stop what he was doing if you needed to talk.
He married in 2010, had a son in 2012, a boy named Karim, who he loved with the particular intensity of a man he had waited for fatherhood and was not going to waste a single moment of it.
In 2014, Dawood was killed by a Taliban roadside bomb. He was not a soldier.
He was not political. He was driving a vehicle to deliver some parts to a client outside the city and the bomb was meant for a military convoy.
And he happened to be on the same road at the wrong moment. This is how most people die in wars, not in dramatic confrontations in the wrong place on a nor in on an ordinary errand on a Tuesday.
I got the phone call in the middle of a work assignment. I remember exactly where I was sitting.
I remember the quality of the light through the window. I remember that I stood up and walked outside and stood in the street for a long time, not knowing what I was supposed to do next.
My brother, my Dawood, the funniest, warmest man I knew, gone just like that in a moment that had nothing to do with who he was or what he deserved.
What followed was the expected things, the washing and the burial done quickly as our faith requires.
The morning period, the relatives coming to the house, the prayers, people said the things you say, God’s mercy, God’s will, God’s plan, he is in paradise now.
These are not bad things to say. I had said them myself to others. But sitting in my parents’ house during those days, hearing those words, I noticed something happening inside me that I had not expected.
The words were not reaching me, not because they were wrong words, but because something in me was asking a question underneath all the words, a question I did not know how to ask in any language of faith I had available to me.
The question was not why did this happen. I knew enough of the world to know that bad things happen without meaning.
The question was something closer to is there a god who is actually near this pain or is there only a god who is far away and will eventually make it all make sense in some afterlife I cannot see or touch right now I did not say this to anyone you do not say this in an Afghan Muslim household during morning but I felt it and once I felt felt it.
I could not unfeill it. I went back to my prayers. I kept my fasts.
I did all the external things correctly. But there was something cracked open in me that the practices could not reach.
A room in my chest that had always been locked. And now the lock was broken.
And whatever was in that room was cold and asking questions. This went on for months.
I carried it alone the way Afghan men are expected to carry these things. Mariam knew something was wrong, but I could not explain it to her because I could barely explain it to myself.
I threw myself into work. I worked longer hours than I needed to. I told myself that purpose would fill the space.
It did not. It was about 8 months after Dawood’s death that I met Daniel.
He was with the European humanitarian organization that was running a food distribution program in one of the poorer districts of Kabul.
I was brought in as their translator for a series of community meetings. Daniel was in his late 40s from somewhere in Northern Europe with very plain features and very steady eyes.
He was not a dramatic person. He did not perform his goodness. He just worked and he was good at his work and he treated the Afghan staff with a straightforward respect.
That was not always common among foreign workers who sometimes had a way of being kind that was also beneath the kindness slightly superior.
Daniel did not have that. He was just level just there. We worked together for about 3 weeks.
During that time we had many conversations. Most of them were practical logistics, cultural context to how to approach particular community leaders.
But Daniel was also curious in a genuine way. He asked real questions about Afghan life, about the history of the city, about what the various periods of conflict had been like from the inside.
He listened to the answers. He did not wait for his turn to talk while I was speaking.
He actually listened. At some point during that 3 weeks, I told him about doubt.
I am not sure why I told him. Something about the way he listen made it feel possible to say things you would not normally say.
He did not immediately fill the silence with words. He sat with what I had told him for a moment.
Then he said something simple that he was sorry and that he hoped I had people around me who could carry some of it with me.
That was all. He did not tell me Dwood was in a better place. For he did not offer me a theological framework.
He just said he was sorry and that he hoped I was not carrying it alone.
It sounds like a small thing, but something about the simplicity of it reached me in a way that months of correct religious language had not.
Toward the end of our working period together, Daniel gave me something. He did it quietly, almost awkwardly.
He was not a pushy man. He said he wanted me to have something, that he had been thinking about our conversations, and that this was not meant as pressure or as any kind of statement, and that I should feel completely free to set it aside or throw it away.
And he gave me a small book, a New Testament translated into Dari. I looked at it.
I looked at him. I told him honestly that I was a Muslim and was not looking to change.
He nodded and said he understood completely and that it was still just a gift if I wanted it and that was all.
I took it home. I put it at the bottom of a box of work papers in my study.
I told myself I would decide later whether to get rid of it. A week later I took it out of the box.
Not because I had decided anything, just because I was curious in the way you are curious about something you have been told your whole life to avoid.
There is a particular pull to the forbidden thing. Not always out of rebellion. Sometimes just out of the honest desire to know what is actually in it.
I read it the way I would read any document. Carefully with a kind of professional distance, alert to what it was saying and what it was not saying.
I read through Matthew. I read slowly. I I kept stopping. I do not want to make this sound like a movie scene.
It was not a movie scene. And it was a man in a small room reading a book he had been told was dangerous.
Trying to hold himself at a scholarly distance and finding that the distance kept collapsing not because of any single verse or passage but because of something in the cumulative weight of it.
This Jesus the way he spoke to people. The specific people he chose to stop for the particular ones he chose to touch.
The ones everyone else had already given up on or written off. There was something in the texture of those encounters that kept pressing on the crack in my chest.
I read the whole New Testament over the course of about 6 weeks, hiding it, reading late at night, putting it away if I heard Mariam or the girls, feeling guilty about it and not entirely sure if the guilt was about the content or about the hiding.
Then I read it again. But by the second time through, I was no longer reading it like a document.
I was reading it like a man looking for something. Even though I could not have told you clearly what I was looking for.
I will tell you about the first time I prayed in Jesus’ name. Not because it was dramatic.
In fact, I tell you about it precisely because it was not dramatic. And I think that is important.
It was a night in late 2013. It was cold, which Kabul winters always are.
Mariam and the girls were asleep. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, and I had been sitting there for about an hour just thinking, which I had been doing a lot of in those months.
And without planning to without any kind of buildup or decision, I just started talking very quietly almost in a whisper.
I addressed Jesus directly and which felt strange and also felt completely natural in a way I cannot fully explain.
I told him I did not know if he was real. I told him I did not know what was happening to me or what I was supposed to do with the things I had been reading.
I told him about Dwood. I told him about the crack in my chest and I asked when not for a sign, not for anything spectacular.
I just asked if he was there, if any of this was real, if there was actually someone on the other end of this that was something more than my own voice in an empty room.
Then I stopped talking and sat quietly and something happened. I cannot describe it with theological precision and I’m not going to try.
I will just say that the room felt different. That the thing in my chest that had been cold for a year felt different.
That something that I can only describe as presence, a warmth and a weight of presence came into that room in a way I had not manufactured and could not explain and did not know what to do with.
I sat there for a long time. Then I went to bed. The next morning I woke up and I had no certainty about anything.
That feeling whatever it had been or had not resolved into a clear package of belief.
I was not suddenly a Christian in any organized sense. I was just a man who had had an experience he did not understand and who was now carrying something new alongside everything else he was already carrying.
But something had shifted and shifts unlike dramatic changes have a way of continuing to move even when you are not paying attention.
Over the following months I found myself praying that way more often quietly privately. Why in fragments reading the New Testament again, thinking, wrestling, asking questions that I had no community to ask them in.
I could not go to a mosque imam with these questions. I could not tell my wife.
I could not tell my parents. If what was happening to me became known, the consequences socially, legally, personally would would be severe.
I knew this with complete clarity. My faith was costing me nothing yet. But I could feel in the distance what it might eventually cost.
This was not a season of peace. I want to be honest about that. Coming to faith in Jesus for me was not accompanied by immediate lightness or happiness.
It was accompanied by profound fear, deep uncertainty, and the loneliness of carrying something this large entirely alone.
There were weeks when I pulled back completely. When I did not read the testament and did not pray in Jesus’ name and told myself that whatever had happened was a moment of griefdriven confusion and I should return to the faith I knew but I could not fully return because the room in my chest had changed because something had been in there and I knew it and I could not unknow it by 2014 quietly without any ceremony or formal declaration because there could be no such thing for me in my context in my country.
I understood myself to be a follower of Jesus. Not because I had everything figured out, not because I was brave, but because I had been reached by something I could not reach myself and I had run out of reasons to keep refusing it.
I became a Christian the way a drowning man grabs a rope. Not because I was looking for it, because I was already going under.
And in the moment my hand closed around it, I understood for the first time in over a year what it felt like to be held.
When people in other countries hear the word church, they picture a building, a physical place with a structure and a sign and specific hours when it is open and all of that.
When I say church, I need you to remove that image from your mind completely and replace it with something much smaller and much more fragile and in its own way much more alive.
Our church was a group of people. That is all it was. People who believed the same thing, who met when they could, where they could, as quietly as they could, and who prayed together and read whatever scripture they had access to, and tried to take care of each other.
There was no building, there was no sign, there was no address. If you asked me where my church was located, I would have told you it was located in the living room of whoever was hosting that week.
And the week after that, it was somewhere else. This is what Christianity looks like in Afghanistan.
And it has looked this way for a long time. Long before the Taliban returned, even under the republic, even during the years of relative openness, there was no legal space for an Afghan to be a Christian.
Apostasy, leaving Islam, carried no formal codified state punishment under the republic’s constitution, but it carried enormous social and community consequences that could easily become physical one.
You did not leave Islam publicly in Afghanistan. You simply did not. Whatever you wore inside, whatever you believed in the privacy of your own heart and your own home, the outside world saw a Muslim.
So, and you kept it that way. So the community of Afghan Christians was and remains entirely underground, invisible to most of the country.
And within that invisibility, trying to do the same things any church anywhere does, gather, worship, grow, support each other, while carrying the constant awareness that discovery could end everything.
I need to explain how I found other believers because people always ask this and the answer is never satisfying to people who want a dramatic story.
The truth is that it happened slowly and almost accidentally over a period of about 2 years after I came to faith myself.
The first person I found was a man I will call Hakim. He was someone I had known slightly through work.
We had over overlapped on a few translation assignments. For one afternoon, we happened to be waiting together for a meeting that had been delayed and we were talking about something related to the organization.
We were both working with some discussion about resources or logistics. I don’t even remember exactly.
And somewhere in the conversation, there was a moment, one of those moments that you recognize only afterward, where something he said was slightly off for a Muslim, just slightly, a small thing, a reference he made and then quickly recovered from.
And I felt it the way you feel a particular kind of vibration when you are already tuned to that frequency.
I did nothing with it for several weeks. Then very carefully in a subsequent conversation.
I said something similarly small, something that was not quite what a Muslim would say, and I washed his face.
What I saw on his face was the same thing I imagine was on mine.
Recognition and behind the recognition, fear. And behind the fear, relief. We did not talk openly for weeks after that.
It was a long careful dance, saying a little more each time, watching and listening, making sure we were not misreading each other, making sure this was not a trap.
This is the reality of underground faith. The people you most want to talk to are also the people you most need to be cautious about because you cannot always tell the difference between a genuine brother and someone who is testing you.
This is not paranoia. This is the reasonable response to an environment where the wrong conversation can get you killed.
Eventually, over the course of perhaps two months of careful exchanges, Hakeim and I were able to speak plainly with each other.
Or he had come the faith before me through a combination of a Christian radio program that could be received on shortwave and an experience he described briefly and without much detail.
He was a private man. He had been a believer for about three years by then.
He had never met another Afghan Christian in person. When we finally sat together and prayed together for the first time in his car, parked in a quiet part of the city, speaking very quietly.
I think both of us were surprised by how much emotion came with it. Not because anything spectacular happened, just because of what it meant to not be completely alone in this thing.
Over the next year and a half, through equally slow and careful processes, we found others.
One woman who worked in a medical clinic and had come to faith through a Christian international worker while one young man who had grown up in a refugee camp in Pakistan and encountered the faith there a husband and wife separately neither knowing the other had come to faith and the discovering of that fact between them was something the husband Fared described to us later as one of the most extraordinary moments of his life.
Others gradually at our largest, which was sometime in 2019, we were 14 people. We never all met together at once.
That would have been too obvious. A gathering of that size in a residential home, even disguised as a social event, carries risk.
We typically met in smaller groups, three, four, five people at a time. We rotated locations.
We never use phones for yours to communicate details about meetings. Always in person, always in coded terms, not sophisticated spy codes, just practical things.
Want a phrase that meant there would be a gathering this week. A direction that told you which neighborhood.
The specific address communicated only at the last moment and only directly face to face.
This sounds exhausting and it was. But after a while it became the rhythm of life.
The way any habit becomes a rhythm. You stop noticing how much energy the caution costs because it has become simply part of how you move through the world.
The meetings themselves, I want to describe what they were like because I think people on the outside imagine them as either very sad and desperate things or very dramat dramatic and electric things and the reality was something different from both.
They were quiet. That is the main thing I want to say. The worship, if we sang at all, was done in very low voices.
Sometimes we only hummed as sometimes we only read the words of the songs to ourselves while someone led in a whisper.
Sound travels in Afghan houses and the walls between apartments are not always thick and the neighbors are close.
Quiet was not a choice we made for spiritual reasons. It was a survival requirement that over time became its own kind of spiritual discipline.
The prayers were the heart of it. We would sit sometimes on the floor, sometimes on whatever seating was available and we would pray.
And I will tell you what I noticed about the prayers of people who pray.
Knowing it could cost them everything. There is no filler in those prayers. There is no performance.
When you cannot afford to be in that room when every minute of being there is a calculated risk, you do not spend the prayer time saying words that do not mean anything.
You go directly to what matters. You say the things that are real. You ask for the things you actually need.
And there is a weight to that, a seriousness to it that I have not always experienced in prayer that costs nothing.
We read scripture together. We shared whatever we had a cru at times a single printed portion of a gospel photocopied and worn soft from handling passed among us.
At times sections memorized and recited. We talked about what we read, what it meant for us.
For our lives for the specific and impossible situation of being followers of Christ in this place and this time.
There was no trained theologian among us. There was no seminary graduate. There were just ordinary people trying to understand what they believed and why it was worth the cost.
There was also food. This is something I want to mention because it sounds mundane, but it wasn’t.
Whoever was hosting always made food. Always. Even if it was simple. Even if resources were tight, there was always tea.
And there was always something to eat. And we always ate together. And that eating together was its own kind of communion in the oldest and most straightforward sense of that word.
The sharing of a table, the breaking of bread in the most literal possible way with people who had chosen the same costly thing you had chosen and who you therefore trusted with your life.
And there was laughter. I want to make sure I say this too. There was real laughter in those meetings.
Not the loud kind, always kept low, but genuine. Hakeim was Fenny. One of the women in our group, a woman named Nasarin, had a dry, a fast humor that could catch you off guard at the most serious moments.
We were not only a community of fear and solemnity. We were also genuinely fond of each other.
We looked forward to each other. When someone had been unable to come for several weeks, they were missed in a specific and personal way.
This is what people in the comfortable world of visible Christianity sometimes miss when they think about the underground church.
It is not only suffering. It is also underneath the suffering a particular kind of joy that has been stripped of everything decorative and is left with something surprisingly pure.
Now I need to tell you about telling Mariam. This was the thing I had been most afraid of for almost 3 years.
In that time I had found a small community of believers. I had begun reading, learning, praying.
Had growing into whatever kind of pastor God was making me into. Not because I saw that role, but because someone had to lead and somehow I had become the one.
And in all of that time, the person I shared my bed with, the mother of my children, the woman who knew every other part of me, she did not know this.
I am not proud of the years of hiding. I understand why I did it.
If Mariam had reacted badly, if she had told her family, if she had felt compelled by her conscience or her fear to report what I was, the consequences would have been total and immediate.