Because of ruling Taliban, bodies of three Shia Afghan pilots could not be repatriated to homeland for burial

The global news website “Oregon Live” reported that the bodies of three Afghan pilots—who died in December 2023 in a plane crash—could not be repatriated to their homeland for burial because the Taliban considers former Afghan Air Force pilots the enemy.

The website said in a detailed report seen by Shia Waves Agency that “Muhammad Hussein al-Musawi, who was at the controls of the crashed plane, Muhammad Bashir Safadari, and Ali Jan Fardawsi, were on a training flight to obtain a commercial pilot’s license in the U.S. state of Oregon in mid-December last year, before they died in a plane crash.”

The report added that “the death of these men set in motion a series of events where politics, faith, and fear met, but not in the city of Salem where they settled since 2021, but 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan, where families and friends of the three victims will not be able to mourn them or even mention them publicly because they could be subjected to brutal official reprisal.”

The newspaper, which is based in the U.S. state of Oregon, pointed out that al-Musawi, Safadari, and Fardawsi were military pilots in the Afghan Air Force before the Taliban took control of the country’s power in the wake of the withdrawal of the U.S. army in 2021, which prompted the three pilots to leave their homes and families and immigrate to the United States for fear of the brutality of the Wahhabi movement against anyone who worked for the previous Afghan government.

The report’s author, Tom Hallan Jr., explained that “these men worked in the early days of their new lives as truck drivers in the hope of joining an airline and then transferring their families from Afghanistan to their side.”

He noted that “all these dreams went up in smoke after their sudden death, as it was not possible to return their bodies to their homeland because of their previous work, which would have exposed their families and relatives to be treated as “enemies” by the Taliban.”

Hallan explained that “the other problem that accompanied this case was the small number of Islamic cemeteries in the state of Oregon. The closest thing to this description was the Islamic cemetery in the city of Corvallis in the middle of the state, but the cemetery’s rules state that burial is only allowed for Sunnis, not Shia, which led to the victims’ friends burying them as strangers in the Islamic Center of nearby Portland, after a life spent defending their country against terrorist organizations.”