(AP) When suicide attackers and gunmen massacred crowds flocking to Kabul’s airport, they also severed the escape route that Ali Rezaie hoped would take him to a new life abroad, far from the Taliban and their suspicions of well-educated, middle-class people who worked with foreigners in Afghanistan.
In the chaos, Rezaie couldn’t reach the airport where flight after flight took off without him. The 27-year-old was left with no choice but to take his future into his own leathery hands. Like many other Afghans, he resolved to find another way out and embarked on a forbidding journey of thousands of kilometers to Europe, large parts of it on foot.
More than three months later, Rezaie’s odyssey through five countries has carried him high into the French-Italian Alps, where he is pushing through knee-deep snow to evade border guards, with a journalist from the Associated Press in tow.
