BritCits

Aisha

'My partner and I met in August 2005, in Birmingham.  We were in our early twenties - young love.

'He's Afghan, from Wardak. It's a dangerous area - the Taliban cause a lot of problems.

'We were never apart. He lived in Birmingham, I lived in Nottingham, but he would come here to visit and I would go there. He was an asylum seeker - he started to see people bing deported. He was afraid.

'He moved to Manchester to live with his cousin. But nothing was going to stop us from loving each other. He kept moving around, living with members of his extended family. He survived.

'I was working as a carer, full-time, living with my grandparents who brought me up as their own. I never knew my mother properly, but they looked after me.

'I became pregnant. Sadly I had a miscarriage. But I became pregnant again and we had a son.

'He said he wanted to look after me - I'm a man, and it should be that way. I'm an Afghan.

'His mother became really sick, in Afghanistan. She begged him to come home - she hadn't seen him since he left, and she'd cry, thinking that she would die, never having seen him.

'In 2010 he applied to go home to Afghanistan. I begged him not to do it, for our sake, but I knew how he felt about me not knowing my mum properly. So in 2011 I relented - I let him volunteer to go home.

'He left the UK the day after Eid, 2011.

'I went to Pakistan in January 2012, without our son. I saw my husband - he'd lost weight, and so so depressed. I was desperate to make an application for my husband and...

'SNAP! The rules changed, just like that! Right in front of us... and now I can't bring him home, because I don't meet the income requirements.

'Well, a lot has happened since then. The Taliban thought that he was working for the soldiers because they heard him talking to me on the phone in English. They shoot at him. He's scared of the special forces too - they have been kidnapping people his age, saying they are Taliban. He's caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea.

'He's got money on his head. He's not safe in Afghanistan. He hides from them in Kabul and in Pakistan too, but it's so hard there (he can't get a hotel room because he doesn't have a Pakistani id card). When I went to visit, the police robbed us as every checkpoint, because they thought I was rich because I came from England. It was horrible - so much hatred. We ended up staying in a filthy room with cockroaches and lizards.

'Our son came back to England with a rash all over, and blood spots. But he was so happy to be with his father!

'We've been together for 8 1/2 years, and we're still trying to stay together. The Foreign Office advice is that no British citizen should enter Afghanistan - it's too dangerous. But my husband is facing this, in his own country.

'He was a right to a family life here. But we can't see the light at the end of the tunnel.

'I'm so worried that he will be killed. I cry so much.

'What the government is doing is so wrong.

'From a desperate mother and a desperate wife.