Last year I was working on an article about foreign fighters and volunteers in Ukraine. The article focused on people who were not eligible to be near the battlefield in the US-led war and yet were fighting on the front lines against Russia, having access to weapons and military equipment.
Some of the people I interviewed include: Ryan Wesley Routh, a 58-year-old man who is being investigated by the FBI for allegedly attempting to assassinate former President Donald J. Trump on Sunday.
I was put in touch with Mr. Routh through an old colleague and friend in Kabul, Najim Rahim. Through the strange alliances of fighters that form when one war ends and another begins, he learned from a source in Iran about Mr. Routh, a former Afghan special operations soldier who was trying to escape Iran and fight in Ukraine.
Mr. Rauth, who had spent some time in Ukraine trying to drum up support for the war, was looking for recruits from among Afghan soldiers who had fled the Taliban. And so the former Afghan soldier thought Mr. Rauth could get him to the Ukrainian front. (For Afghans, anything, even war, was better than the conditions they found themselves in in Iran after the Taliban retook Kabul in August 2021.)
There were some complications. Mr. Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, North Carolina, said he had never fought in Ukraine — he was too old and had no military experience.
But like many foreign volunteers who arrived on the Ukrainian border in the early months of the war, he was eager to leave his old life behind and pursue a more exciting one, and make a name for himself.
“In my opinion everyone should support the Ukrainians,” he told me over the phone, his voice tinged with urgency, desperation and a bit of doubt.
When I spoke to Mr. Rauth in March last year, he had drawn up a list of hundreds of Afghans scattered between Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan whom he wanted to send to Ukraine somehow. Mr. Rauth told one Afghan he was helping: “I’m just a citizen.”
My conversation with Mr. Routh was brief. He said he was in Washington, D.C., and had planned a two-hour meeting with some congressmen about Ukraine. (It is unclear whether that meeting ever took place.)
When I finished talking to Mr. Routh on the phone a few minutes later, it was clear he was extremely upset.
He spoke of doing everything possible to buy off corrupt officials, forge passports and send his Afghan cadres to Ukraine, but he had no real way of accomplishing his goals. He once mentioned arranging a US military transport flight from Iraq to Poland with Afghan refugees ready to fight.
I shook my head. It sounded ridiculous, but Mr. Routh's voice said otherwise. He was going to support Ukraine's war effort no matter what.
Like many of the volunteers I interviewed, he disappeared off the map again. Until Sunday.
Nazim Rahim Contributed reporting.