The Naked Don't Fear the Water: A Journey Through the Refugee Underground

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They were handed a situation where there were no good options, but the way that the evacuation unfolded was, you know, catastrophe.

Follow the perilous course of Afghan refugees with this firsthand account Journalist Matthieu Aikins shed his own identity and traveled with his Afghan interpreter along smugglers' routes to reach Europe and escape the Taliban. And when Aikins (traveling undercover as “Habib”) and Omar finally do hit the smuggler’s road to Europe, it’s all false starts and stillborn plans. And so those people who had made it through - later on, when we got to Athens, we'd be walking down the street and suddenly bump into someone we recognized from the island, and be a very happy moment that they had gotten out. The new regime has turned out to be more savvy than the old Taliban leadership of 1996-2001, under the reclusive Mullah Omar. Matthieu Aikins, a journalist partly of Japanese descent, had been working in Afghanistan for seven years when he agreed to make the trip with Omar, his pseudonymous companion.AIKINS: Yeah, Jim and I lived on a street that had formerly been guarded by the police, and now there was Taliban outside our house. Omar decides he's got to get to Turkey first and then, from there, make his way to the Greek islands. And, you know, also when you're on the road in these smugglers' safe houses or in the camps, everyone's kind of hiding something. AIKINS: They came up and rammed us amidships and were trying to sort of push the boat's bow around back toward Turkey while trying to lasso our engine or disable it, which set off sort of a melee between the passengers and these two Turks, who were unarmed as far as I could see.

But because we were freelancers, we were able to choose to stay behind, whereas all the staff had to evacuate.This book is Aikins’s profound act of love — for Omar, for their travel companions and for the beleaguered people of Afghanistan, now irrevocably scattered around the world. Aikins offers a kaleidoscopic view of fragmented families and dispossessed people trying and failing and scheming and planning and hoping and praying to complete the next leg of their journey. Omar nosed the Corolla forward, cursing softly, one hand on the wheel and the other clutching a Pine, from time to time leaving it between his lips to run his fingers through his dark mop of hair.

So there's that, and there's also the fact that Omar - you know, since he was a kid, he had dreamed of emigrating to the West. My ancestors came from Japan and Europe, but I look uncannily Afghan: almond eyes, black hair, wiry beard. AIKINS: I don't think it was very surprising to me because I had spent so many years in Afghanistan. We don't really know where we're going, but it's pretty clear we don't have control of the situation anymore. But I was really trying to understand that and its impact on the people that I was traveling with to see their perspective that, you know, they weren't seeing this as a story or an adventure.People started crossing in numbers that couldn't be prevented without, you know, extreme force against helpless, unarmed people. And if there's a way to stabilize the state and prevent a new outbreak of fighting, you know, it might not be as bad. And I know in my own reporting experiences, when you're out at something where there's a lot of action, like a demonstration, or when you're on the road, it's hard to take good notes, hard to preserve them. When I closed my eyes, I could see his face when he dropped me off that summer at the airport, suddenly pleading, his hand gripping mine: ‘Come back, brother.