“Europe is just the greener side of the same hell,” says Rias Ahmed*, a former Afghanistan government official who now lives in a small town in Italy.
Rias is among the 124,000 civilians who left Afghanistan in the weeks after the Taliban took control of the country on 15 August last year. After ten days in hiding in Kabul, he was evacuated to Germany on 25 August, before being resettled in Italy later that day.
For him, and the many other refugees now living in the EU, the past year has been incredibly challenging – with many facing horrific racism, discrimination and economic hardship.
