Freedom At 4AM
Misadventures in Afghanistan. A true-life tale of cultural clash in Afghanistan, climaxing with an unlikely call to prayer under life-threatening circumstances.
First Edition Editors: Patty Dohle and Lottie Gross
Cover Photo: Marc Perry
Cover Design: Alban Fejzullahi
All Photographs: Marc Perry
Copyright © 2025 Marc Perry. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including digitally, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations used in reviews, articles, or other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
For permission requests, please contact: perryeyes@gmail.com
Freedom at 4 AM is a true-life tale of cultural clash in Afghanistan: from the political to the personal, from the sadistic to the spiritual. Set against a backdrop of history, geopolitics, religion and misadventure, this immersive story climaxes with an unlikely call to prayer under life-threatening circumstances.
Acknowledgements
For inspiring educational experiences: Dr. Roman Gerodimos, and the dedicated staff of Bournemouth University. For steady sturdy friendship and encouragement: Ewan Crichton. For spaces to write, sleep, and think: Jackie Scollen, Gordon Sharp, Allen Dahl, Nasrin and Amere Ahmadi, Xilli Ishmaeli and Chelsea Charles. For helping me feel at home with humour and deep discussion: Ishfaq Khan and Amjad Ali. For reintroducing me to places further afield: Dr. Socrates Stergiadis. For generous editorial input: Darius Shemaria. For pro bono legal representation: Kimberley Motley. For publishing services beyond the call: all at Lena Graphics. Lottie Gross and Patty Dohle for crystal-clear editorship.
Dedicated to Grace: To aid understanding in later life.
Contents
Chapter 1: Kabul
So what brings you to Afghanistan?
Chapter 2: Expats and Afghans
In Thirteen Hundred and Ninety-Two
Chapter 3: Long night's journey into day
Foreword
As long as you don’t invade Afghanistan you’ll be absolutely fine.
(Harold Macmillan to Alec Douglas Hume)
Whenever people ask you a small question with a big answer, they present you with a challenge: do you give them the long answer, the superficial answer, or none at all? This is the long answer to the short question: “What was Afghanistan like?”
Afghanistan is a place of awe, insight, hospitality, and occasionally, utter cruelty. Like all cultures, you will find shadow, light, and shades in between. In recent decades, a spotlight has been shone into parts of Afghanistan’s culture it would probably have preferred remain private. This book continues that trend. We in the west often stand in judgment of other cultures: “We wouldn't behave like that,” we say, but we have and often do. The movie simplification of the good guy and the bad is a destructive one when applied to reality. Good people do bad things and bad people do good things. In arriving at a judgment, it’s not a black and white case of George Bush’s maxim: “You’re either with us or against us.” When we look into the centre of Afghanistan, into the centre of Asia, we look into the centre of humanity; we are afforded an opportunity to look into ourselves, or at least I was. We are challenged to ask questions about religion, gender, sexuality, revenge, development, democracy and the role of the state, to name but a few.
When writing about Afghanistan, there is an omnipresent danger of presenting personal conclusions as facts, rather than opinions. If there are factual mistakes, then they are mine alone. Opinions offered here may change in time but stand as an accurate snapshot of my thoughts at the time of writing. In one sense there are no facts, everything written here is somewhat biased: filtered through my experience and culture. In reflecting on my time in Afghanistan, I have drawn on British historical accounts to compare and contrast with experiences of cultural clash in the past. These, too, reveal both prejudices and insights as relevant today as when they were written in the 19th and early 20th centuries. My small misadventure rides on the back of many.
From the vantage point of 2023 all the work on Women’s rights I was engaged with has been undone.
Some aspects of the events contained here within I was asked not to speak about, to sweep under the carpet. In the immediate aftermath of events that unfolded, they could have potentially caused severe damage to the NGO I was working for and the people involved. I have wrestled with these moral issues and have concluded it is time to commit certain insights and experiences to the public realm. This is because they are likely to represent the tip of an almighty iceberg of issues around sexual deviance and repression in Afghanistan. In order to protect the identity of certain individuals within the narrative, names have been altered. The ideas and themes gathered here were soaked up during what was a short but highly intense three months in Kabul. It is impossible to understand a city – let alone a culture – in such a small time but sometimes it's not the length of the journey but the depth at which you travel that is important. My journey wasn't innately superficial, I walked places few westerners walk and talked with people few westerners talk.
Up until now I’ve usually answered the question “So what was Afghanistan like?” with the flippant answer: “I can’t sum it up in a sentence, you’ll have to read the book!” Well, here it is. Verbally repeating stories gets boring, one gets what psychologists call “narrative fatigue”, so this will save me the bother of repetition. Maybe we only need to tell a story once at its full depth, with full honesty, for the weight of its contents to be satisfactorily communicated. So here it is, warts and all.
Marc Perry,
Prishtina, April 2023.
PART 1: Kabul
Don't want no dead-end job.
(Sting, 1978)
***
γνῶθι σεαυτόν
Know Thyself
(Delphic inscription, Greece)
***
I shall search my very soul for the lion inside of me.
(Van Morrison, 1972)
Enter the police
This is a bad day for Afghanistan, it reflects badly on all of us,” said the yellow-eyed detective, sucking on his teeth, “after all you came here to help us; we are very professional, we will do everything we can to find these people,” he reassures. I nod in agreement; there’s no doubt in my mind about the investigative integrity of these men.
General Mohammad Zahir, the Chief of Kabul CID, enters the scene and addresses the fifteen-men strong investigation crew of detectives, forensics and armed guards crowded into our spacious hallway. Tall and elegant with a kindly sparkle in the eyes, he commands the room as his men gather around him. “If it was up to me I would hang these people!” he says, “but the law is the law.”
Turning to me, he asks, “How is she?”
“The face doesn’t show the wound,” I reply, “it's in here,” I indicate, pointing to my head.
The whole ensemble walks from room to room discussing the events of the night and asking questions:
“Is this what they tied you up with?”
“Tell me again what happened when they entered the room?”
Forensics carefully mark all potential evidence with numbers and take photos. Hashimi arrives and studies the situation in his usual deep, brooding manner. He’s a broad-shouldered ex-cop and colleague with a big, round face, close-cropped beard and short-shaven hair; his stature suggests he could be a descendent of Genghis Khan, but dressed in a casual suit, the type of guy you want on your side. Breathing slowly behind shaded glasses, he rattles off more questions:
“Which room were you in when they arrived?”
“Are you sure about this?”
He’s got that innate cop quality down: the ability to smell bullshit a mile off.
Uniformed police and soldiers crowd the dirt street outside with jeeps. Far from the noise of a usual day, silence descends as people change their usual walk-to-work patterns. A bald, thick-necked personal guard with a chiseled brow and scar down one cheek carefully shadows the Chief of Police. Wearing army trousers and sporting a machine gun, he is every inch a Rambo figure. Suddenly I feel like I'm in an American movie with Afghan actors – a reoccurring theme in Afghanistan.
A chain-smoking cop personifying Colombo crossed with Miami Vice asks me a question. “Was this in here all the time?” he says, pointing to a tire iron. Dressed in a loose, stained white suit, looking as if he slept in it, he takes on the role of the rogue, 'I've got problems at home because I’m obsessed with my job' persona. The deep dark bags under his bloodshot eyes add to the dishevelment, but he's good at his job – when he talks, the others listen. The intruders had been smoking all night and left ash and cigarette butts everywhere. As a consequence, I'm asked not to contaminate evidence by lighting up. To the laughter of the other cops, white-suit lights up another cigarette. It's one of Afghanistan's great pleasures, the readiness to have a laugh, any time, any place.
I'm questioned further by the yellow-eyed cop. Middle aged, with a well-trimmed moustache, dark skin and an occasional eye twitch, he considers his questions carefully, sucking on his teeth as he sucks in information, uttering an occasional guttural “khob” (good) to my answers. Two young detectives, one with alert green eyes and spiky hair and another smooth, slick and shaved, look on. An older cop throws in clarification questions from the sidelines.
My admin manager Raffi, who by now I do not completely trust, translates. He’s nervy and I’ve pegged him as a power-questing bullshitter. His reputation is under question and he will later be arrested under suspicion of playing a part in the crime as an inside man.
‘Friendly’, a younger, companionable cop, big-framed and buoyant, sits opposite: “You look tired, Marc,” he quips. “Well, it's kind’a been a long night,” I retort, raising a laugh. Standing up, I re-enact being body-searched, making a comic “oh shit!” face when miming one of the gunmen finding a puny eleven Afghans in my wallet; the ensemble cracks up. Relaxing, friendly cop wonders why I'm not married? I shrug, it's too long a story and we live in very different cultures. Later, when I say goodbye to the investigators, he offers a cheek, an Afghan sign of closeness, as well as a handshake.
A small, uniformed cop with two front teeth missing, small, rectangular shaded glasses on the end of his nose and a French-style gendarmerie hat appears with two cooked chickens in tin foil. “Afghan hospitality even now!” I laugh. The room falls into silence as yellow eyes grunts at me to eat and opens up a tender slice for me to take with his hands. He pushes a canned drink my way, and everyone in the room devours the meal quietly, Afghan style.
After we’ve eaten, they ask me to recount the events of the night of 29th and 30th April 2013. Two teeth missing wipes the chicken grease off his hands on the rag previously used by armed raiders to tie my hands up. I laugh later, imagining the DNA evidence on the rag: “Sir, we believe the culprit was a chicken.”
Only in Afghanistan.
And only in Afghanistan do people of experience regularly recite the motto…
“Anything can happen, at any time.” Life here is fragile. As they also say: “The pot can only be broken once.”
So what brings you to Afghanistan?
There is a short answer to the question, “What brings you to Afghanistan?”
One word: curiosity.
But in order to fully understand the motivations that finalised with me willingly flying to Afghanistan, a little bit of a background biography is necessary.
Although I have never considered myself a Christian, I received my primary schooling at what is the oldest Christian School in the Diocese of Durham: Whickham Parochial, celebrating its 300th year in 2014. The relevance of the faith of my upbringing didn’t seem to have any conscious bearing on my everyday life, until my life was threatened. Under stress, the lessons of childhood surfaced like an unconscious supernatural dream.
I was a quiet kid at school, silently suffering the confusion that comes with undiagnosed dyslexia. Today, I consider it a creative charm, but back then the cloak of the ‘backward kid’ hung over me like a heavy harness, strapping me down to the burden of low expectations. Well, it took me forty-two years, countless lowly paid jobs and several self-sabotaged relationships, including one that brought my much wanted daughter, Grace, into the world, to start to figure it all out. I'm not complaining, trust me, and some of the places I ended up were entirely different worlds; like polishing silver as a butler for a Duke and Duchess, growing apricots for aristocratic ladies, trimming tomatoes with unemployed miners, selling organic vegetables at a farmers’ market or listening to the often hilarious stories of the sick and dying as an auxiliary nurse.
This was all very well. But there was something missing. None of this was truly me. There was some latent talent struggling to express itself. A nagging anxiety that would sometimes overwhelm me with nausea followed me for many years. My internal compass was broken, smashed to smithereens. Following yet another calamitous failed relationship, I crumbled. In pulling myself together, I determined it was time to take myself a little more seriously and I applied to do an MA in International Journalism. I'd always had a secret belief in my ability to write and it was high time to put the theory to the test. As it turned out I loved it, and it loved me back. Those low self-expectations I’d internalised were well and truly blown out of the water, blasted to kingdom come, buried.
The course often focused on the subject of conflict, and as part of the training we were sent on hostile environment training. All you journos, aid workers and diplomats out there know the score. It was invaluable, and consisted of running round the countryside with a map being barked at by canny ex-army lads. After receiving severe hairdryer treatment following my unprecedented attempt to disarm an ex-military trainer playing an armed hijacker, I was given a compliment: “Geordie, you must have balls of steel.” We covered what to do if you were taken hostage, how to spot a mine, call in an incident report and how to tie a tourniquet. A prospective career covering Aunt Nelly's 100th birthday on the Hexham Courant was never going to be too appealing after that. Following graduation, I scanned the horizon looking for an overseas post, but the advert “Foreign Correspondent, must have gardening experience” never came up.
I was squatting down in temporary accommodation to keep mobile, save money and avoid signing a contract, when a friend sent me a link to an advert:
Media Volunteer. CPAU, Kabul, Afghanistan.
This position is located in Kabul, Afghanistan, and successful candidates will need to relocate there for the duration of their contract. The duration of the contract is set initially at six months with the opportunity to extend for another six months. A stipend of $500 USD will be paid monthly to cover incidental expenses. CPAU will provide safe accommodation in the heart of Kabul and will also provide transportation.
The job was unusual in that it was on an official website that advertises positions within the UK Governmental sector. I wrote in on the spot and was offered an interview with Chairman of the Board Kanishka Nawabi. The interview was conducted via Skype, and Kanishka came across as both relaxed and good-humoured. He had some English education and later laid claim to royal Afghan heritage; his background and education put him in the upper echelons of Afghan society. In the UK he had worked with the Salvation Army and in Afghanistan he served as the senior security advisor to the Ministry of the Interior under Mohammad Hanif Atmar. I didn’t know it then, but Atmar had resigned from office in the wake of Taliban attacks on the June 2010 Afghan Peace Jirga. Kanishka had left following the attack too; perhaps security wasn’t his strong point. The Salvation Army isn’t exactly a crack bodyguard unit and perhaps his previous employer had been confused by his C.V.
I was offered the job. It was all so easy, far too easy. I smelled a rat. As it turned out, the method Kanishka used for writing job descriptions was quite innovative. “Cut and paste from the internet,” he joked when I later complimented him on one I thought he'd written.
My friends joked that no one else would be silly enough to apply. They had a point, but the fear of underemployment in Tyneside, or of not being able to use my newfound skills was worse. Following the hunch that something didn’t quite add up, I travelled down to London to chat with a representative in CPAU's London ‘presence’. It turned out he worked from his bedroom. We met for coffee where he regaled me with stories of how exciting it would all be. It would be, of course; if you've got a journalist’s nature you want to jump at the chance to go and see something of the longest running international war in living memory. I asked him what the downside of all this wonderful experience would be?
Silence.
I chuckled inside, there was the rat, but maybe the rat will make for a good story. I justified it to myself, this was the way in to an Afghan adventure; I could look for other opportunities out there, maybe freelancing. Because of the ease with which it all came together whenever anyone asked me why I was going to Afghanistan I replied: “I didn't choose Afghanistan, Afghanistan chose me.”
Bit of a cop-out, that one.
My father had qualms: “If you have any small doubts don't go,” he wrote in an email. I did have, but adventure beckoned; who, after all, wouldn't have doubts, other than the insane?
Before leaving, a phrase kept recurring to me: Freedom is a word most easily defined by its loss. I contemplated these words over and over, along with my assumption that it may not be possible to walk out in the open once I got to Afghanistan without some prospect of danger. There was something about psychologically preparing myself to go that made me think in the most profound ways. The sound of a skulking blackbird, the sight of waders skirting the River Tyne, or the intense peace of watching a cormorant fly so close to the water without getting wet, took on a profoundness. "You may not enjoy these sights for a long time, so savour every moment," my mind said. There was a chance (slim in my mind) I may not return. There were vague doubts and a sense of unease but they were dismissed. I wrote letters I didn’t send. I took comfort in the assurances I'd had that everyday life was nothing like the concentrated viewpoint focused on by our media. Curiosity had the better of me, I wanted to see for myself, to intellectually marry the two stereotypes of Afghanistan so succinctly put by Journeyman MP Rory Stewart: "A centralised state crawling towards progressive, liberal, gender sensitive, multi-ethnic values based on human rights, democracy and rule of law" on the one hand, on the other "medieval, tribal, regressive."
The reasons I gave myself for going back then are different to the ones I realise on reflection now. No one goes to Afghanistan for a holiday; there’s a good chance something untoward will happen. Maybe there was a part of me looking for danger, for an edge, a wake-up call. I didn’t expect to go to a deeply Islamic country but return with a Christian identity.
