07 June 2024 , 18:31
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Thirty years on, Roh Yakobi is still haunted by the loss of his baby brother Mohammad, who died of starvation at just a year old.
Under brutal Taliban rule, a year on from that family tragedy his people had been massacred, his father was forced into hiding and Roh would later be tortured.
But in 2004, at the age of 16, he managed to flee from Afghanistan to the UK and begin a new life.
And now, 20 years later, to repay the debt he feels towards the country that took him in, 37-year-old Roh is standing as a Labour MP.
“I survived the Taliban, so how bad can it get?” he jokes.
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Roh joined the Labour Party in 2010, the same day he gained British citizenship.
And it is his own devastating experience of hunger that has spurred him on to fight for the children here who go to school on an empty stomach.
Roh is standing as a candidate for The Wrekin in Shropshire – one of the most deprived places in England, where one in five children do not have enough to eat.
Roh escaped torture by the Taliban (Rowan Griffiths / Daily Mirror)“I take my children to school and you can see it in children’s faces when they’ve not been fed properly. It hurts,” he says angrily.
“It’s not because their parents don’t want to feed them, it’s because they cannot, and that is shameful. I can imagine the agony those parents are going through. A society that is not able to feed its children properly has something deeply wrong with it.”
Early life was brutal for Roh. The Taliban’s blockade of the mountainous Hazarajat region in Afghanistan’s central highlands had stopped food from reaching the rural villages and swathes of children were dying.
His brother Mohammad was among the youngsters to perish. He was so malnourished that he had lost his hair and his cheeks were sunken. Roh remembered trying to spoon fried egg – the only source of protein the family had left – into his sibling’s mouth.
Roh Yakobi as a child growing up in the Hazara village of Anguri - here, aged around one, he's pictured playing with an artillery shell brought home by his father (Collect)“It was getting dark, so we had little tea lights on, and he was moaning and groaning, and gritting his teeth,” he recalls, as tears run down his face at the memory. “I was pushing the teaspoon with a bit of egg into his mouth, forcing it almost, and he was in such pain he just bit the spoon.
“I put him back on his blanket. By the time we were having our dinner, he was gone.” Mohammed’s frail body was carefully wrapped and placed in a hastily dug grave in a small corner of the village cemetery that same night.
“Our mother had been sent away because of her untreated epilepsy,” Roh says. “She was seen as cursed, so she was ostracised by the village.” Without her breast milk, little Mohammed suffered.
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Their father, Reza, was a proud Mujahideen commander fighting the Soviets and Soviet-backed Taliban in the late 1980s. Roh has just one photo to remind him of Mohammed, which was taken a month before his death. “This image haunts me,” he says quietly.
Reza Yakobi, centre, fought the Taliban in Afghanistan (Collect)
As a boy, Roh was proud of his fighter father and would wear a matching camo jacket (Collect)It is with Mohammed at the forefront of his mind that Roh takes the fight to Conservative MP Mark Pritchard, who has represented The Wrekin since 2005 and has a majority of 18,000.
Seeing humanitarian charity Unicef stepping in to feed children in Plymouth in 2020 sparked Roh’s sense of injustice. He says: “We used to get Unicef-branded notebooks to the village and the fact that in Britain that same charity has had to intervene to feed people… If that doesn’t make you angry, what does? If that doesn’t make you want to change things for people, what does?
“It’s not about my children, because I want the best for them, like any parent does. But my children cannot have the quality education they deserve, the life opportunities they deserve, unless people around them have.
“We do not grow in isolation, we’re part of communities of people who depend on each other. Unless the communities do well, you cannot do well.” Roh endured torture from Taliban soldiers at the age of 12 and still bears the scars on his stomach from having a heated spoon pressed against his flesh.
Soon after his release from captivity, his family sent him to Helmand province to work on a relative’s opium farm – and from there he was smuggled over the border into Pakistan.
At 13, he found himself working on dangerous construction sites in Iran, destitute and even driven to contemplating suicide.
Roh, aged around eight, in happier times (Collect)
The only picture of his time in Iran, during which he worked on dangerous construction sites and was beaten by a boss for asking for his wages (Collect)But a chance encounter with another cousin put him in contact with his dad, who by then had sought political asylum in the UK.
Roh was overcome with joy when, months later, he was reunited with his father. He lived with him and his stepmum and step-siblings in Wolverhampton.
“At the airport, the guard told me, ‘Welcome to Manchester,’” he recalls. “The red bricks of the houses seemed to have been washed as it had just rained.”
Roh never saw mother Morvarid again after she was sent away when he was just eight. Her parents’ home backed on to his school in the village and he would stand in the bathroom desperately trying to catch a glimpse of her through the window.
When the Taliban came, his mum buried the few photos she had in the garden to prevent them from being destroyed. But Roh managed to reconnect with her over the phone in 2009, shortly after having his own son.
“She always used to call her children ‘lamb’. And her first words to me after all those years were, ‘Hey, my lamb, do you recognise me? I’ve heard you’ve got a lamb of your own,’” he says.
Roh pictured with his mother Morvarid, who suffered with untreated epilepsy. She was sent away when he was 8 and he never saw her again. These pictures were found in her possession after she died - still with traces of dirt where she'd buried them (Collect)Tragically, Morvarid died just weeks after their first call and he now keeps the green scarf she loved and the resurfaced photos she owned in a special place. He still feels he owes an enormous debt to the country that harboured him after his tough start.
“The last Labour government gave us sanctuary, the NHS saved my eyesight, my life and delivered my children. The welfare state was there when we needed it,” he says.
Roh dropped out of college after being bullied and did a few jobs before eventually embarking on an Open University degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
His studies led to him becoming a freelance foreign policy and security consultant. He married NHS nurse Tahira, with whom he has two children – a son aged 15 and a 10-year-old daughter.
“My values are borne from my lived experiences, which have equipped me to fight for those who can’t do it themselves,” he says. "I feel a sense of responsibility and want to give a voice to all those who may not have the opportunity.”