Afghan rock band struggles in discordant times in Iran
TEHRAN — The band gathers in a small carpentry shop on the outskirts of Iran’s capital, with sawdust still in the air but the buzzing of the jigsaws now exchanged for the soft feedback of an amplifier.
A drummer strikes his snare four times and Hakim Ebrahimi opens with the first dreamy notes of “Afghanistan,” the group’s Metallica-inspired rock ballad. The four rockers who make up the band, known as Arikayn, are Afghan refugees, and their struggles mirror those of millions of other Afghans who have fled to Iran during decades of war.
They once had to sneak through a Taliban checkpoint to play a gig in their home country, and they face discrimination in Iran, but they say that hasn’t stopped them from playing the music they love.
“This is very hard for all of us, but when we play a song, we become the person that we want to be,” bassist Mohammad Rezai said.
Iran is home to one of the world’s largest and most-protracted refugee crises. More than 3 million Afghans, including over 1 million who entered without legal permission, live in the Islamic Republic, according to United Nations estimates.
Three of the band’s four original members were born in Iran, including female guitarist and vocalist Soraya Hosseini, drummer Akbar Bakhtiary and Rezai. Ebrahimi came to Iran as a child.
They formed the band Arikayn, which is Dari for “Lantern,” in 2013.
Arikayn’s music recalls Metallica’s work. Ebrahimi, who said his idol is Metallica frontman James Hetfield, evokes his guitar work in “Afghanistan.”
By day, Ebrahimi works in the carpentry shop. Other band members have day jobs as well, though Hosseini relies on help from her mother. Like other Afghans, they face challenges in finding work in a country that had high unemployment even before President Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal and began reimposing sanctions.
That stress multiplied when the band decided to play a show at a 2015 music festival in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, where Ebrahimi lived until age 10. They had looked forward to performing beneath the ruins of the great Buddha statues of Bamiyan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.
To get to the area west of Kabul, however, the band had to cross through Taliban-held territory.
“It was wonderful, and words cannot describe our feelings when we performed in a large plain in front of the statues of Buddha and more than 2,000 Afghans,” Hosseini said.
In the time since, however, reality has come crashing down. Some Afghans in Iran are beginning to leave the country.
Bakhtiary left Iran, hoping to reach Europe. After a time in Turkey, he made it to Italy, where he is now jobless.
Rezai prefers his work at a nearby tailor shop to practicing.
For now, Arikayn’s only audience is those who work in Ebrahimi’s carpentry shop. On a recent night, the band tore into its song “Stand Up,” which challenges the Taliban.