You know what’s really silly, Lily?
...we found father of Jungle boy who made you cry: and he’s an ex-Islamist fighter who sneaked into Britain in back of a lorry, claimed asylum after f leeing Afghanistan ‘in terror’ – then went back there on a three-month holiday!
THE father of the migrant boy controversially championed by Lily Allen sneaked into Britain in the back of a lorry to claim asylum – then returned to the country he fled in terror for a three-month holiday after being given the right to stay here.
Hazrat Gul Sherin, whose son Shamsher appeared with the tearful pop star last week as she ‘apologised’ on behalf of Britain for bombing his country and putting him ‘in the hands of the Taliban’, came to the UK illegally in 2005, having fled war-torn Afghanistan.
His decision to flee the country was prompted not by the Taliban but because as a leading supporter of a brutal Islamist warlord – and an officer in his private army – he was afraid of the US and UK-backed Northern Alliance.
After seven years, Sherin was given indefinite leave to remain in the UK, then promptly returned to Afghanistan to visit his family.
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the 49-year-old was a commander in the Islamist group Hezb-e Islami, led by the Butcher of Kabul, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
In the early 1990s, Hekmatyar’s group of fundamentalist Sunni Muslim Pashtuns clashed violently with other mujahideen factions in the struggle for control of the capital, Kabul.
Hezb-e Islami was blamed for much of the terrible death and destruction of that period and was accused of appalling human rights abuses, including the assassination of intellectuals and throwing acid in women’s faces.
The civil war led to Hekmatyar’s fall from grace and he quickly became one of the most reviled men in the country. And in 1996, when Hekmatyar went into exile, Sherin also began to lead a quieter life.
But his allegiance to the Butcher of Kabul was remembered years later when the Northern Alliance swept to power. It is for this reason that he said he left his wife and four young children in Afghanistan. Sherin now lives in Birmingham and is hoping that 13-year-old Shamsher will be able to join him from Calais soon.
Miss Allen, 31, took a break from recording her new album to volunteer in a charity warehouse at the squalid Jungle camp, where 10,000 migrants live while trying to find ways to sneak into Britain. She told Shamsher: ‘We’ve bombed your country, put you in the hands of the Taliban and now put you in danger of risking your life to get into our country. I apologise on behalf of my country. I’m sorry for what we have put you through.’
Yet the boy’s father, from Jalalabad, revealed the startling truth behind his journey to the UK in an interview with The Mail on Sunday. To reach Britain, he hiked across eight countries before being stowed away by traffickers in a fruit lorry.
He spent seven years living on benefits in Birmingham before his claim for asylum was accepted in September 2012. He then went back to Afghanistan, flying in via Pakistan, for the first of two threemonth visits to the very country that had put him in fear of his life.
After 11 years in the UK, he can barely speak English. Speaking through an interpreter, Mr Sherin said: ‘I was not escaping the Taliban. I had been a commander for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Hezb-e Islami for many years and was put in charge of the village of Shershia in Jalalabad.
‘I had a profile then. Everyone was scared and could not say anything but when the Western-backed government took over from them, the villagers realised I had no power
‘I was a commander... very good at shooting at planes’
and turned on me and our house was shot at. We fled over the border to Nasar Bagh in Pakistan but somebody snitched on me and a bomb was planted at the local mosque intended to kill me.
‘I was injured in the blast and have three bits of metal in my body still. We had to move again to Tira and it was then I knew I had to escape to build a better future for my family.
‘My father had some money and
sold land and I used that to make my way to Britain. I did not know anyone there but I heard they had the best human rights in Europe.
‘It was very hard to leave. My wife Noorbabo had just had our fourth baby but I had no choice if I was to look after their future.’
Of all the warlords who took part in the civil war which killed 50,000 people in Kabul alone between 1992 and 1996, Hekmatyar was considered the most extreme and labelled a ‘war criminal’ by the post-Taliban Government of Hamid Karzai.
His dwindling band of supporters were said to have provided Osama bin Laden and his cronies safe passage to Pakistan after 9/11 and launched attacks on Allied troops but by then, Mr Sherin insists, he was ‘selling vegetables and trying to live a peaceful life’.
He said that he first became involved with the notorious warlord at 15 when he joined the mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation. By the age of 21, he had become a commander in charge of 70 men.
‘I was very good at shooting at planes,’ he explained. ‘Gulbuddin would give us the guns and the orders and I was in control of the area. We would sometimes be told to attack other villages.’
Of his escape to Britain, he said: ‘I paid about £6,000 to the smugglers. They took a group of us overland. We would lie low in forests by day and travel at night. It was hard.
‘I came into Britain in the back of a lorry packed with fruit. There were three of us in there and the first we knew we were in Britain was when the lorry was opened and the police were there.’
He spent 12 days in prison and applied for asylum before deciding to settle in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham, where he shared a house with other Afghans.
‘It was very tough,’ he said, ‘but I was safe and I am thankful to Britain for that. It was a much better life. I would not want to go back. I was given £42 a week to live on and after seven years I was granted my right to remain. I was very happy and managed to get work on building sites.’ It is work he still does.
But he was missing his family who had returned to Jalalabad now their hated head of the family had gone.
‘It was a risk to go back but I so wanted to see my family, I had to do it. I was too scared to spend more than ten minutes in any one room, you could not go safely to the mosque and you thought anyone with a puffa jacket was about to blow up.’
His next trip back, from December to March this year, was even more alarming. ‘Now Daesh (IS) have moved into the province and you had them and the Taliban fighting each other with the Government forces also involved. My wife had become scared that Shamsher would be turned into a suicide bomber. The Taliban tried to take him off to one of their training camps so my wife raised money through the family to pay for him to escape as I had done. ‘When I got over there in December, no-one knew where he was. We feared he had been taken by Daesh.’ Then, three weeks ago, he received a message from a woman in the Jungle saying Shamsher was safe. ‘I spoke to him and felt great pride that he had made the same journey as me,’ he said. ‘I told him to stay in France and not to risk his life climbing on to lorries because we will soon be together the official way.’ And after the news that children in the Jungle with relatives in the UK are to be brought to Britain, a beaming Mr Sherin said: ‘I know we will soon be together and then, we hope, the rest of the family will join us in time.’ As for the millionaire pop star who had put his son into the spotlight, ‘I have never heard of her,’ he said. And on Lily’s view an apology was required for the UK’s role in Afghanistan, he said: ‘This is her opinion. I am just an illiterate guy. I do not know who is the cause. Just that the Americans and Europeans supported the Northern Alliance against the Pashtun people.’