LISTEN: Amin Yaqhobi speaks about his journey with the SBS Pashto program
For seven years, Amin Yaqhobi has been training Australian youngsters in Melbourne in martial arts and Greco-Roman and freestyle wrestling.
But his journey to Melbourne has been long and painful.
Amin was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1981. He never met his father, an engineer, who was brutally murdered by axe-wielding Taliban soldiers just a couple of months before Amin’s birth.
“The Shi’a, Sunni, Hazara, they were always fighting,” Amin said.
“He was innocent, and someone just killed him for no reason.”
It was then incredibly difficult for Amin to accept a job working for the Taliban, training their soldiers, when he was 17 – although as Amin explained, there was little choice.
“It was a very hard decision but you have no choice,” he said.
“If you don’t do it, they’re just looking for an excuse to put you in jail.”
Amin’s small measure of revenge was to “under-train” the Taliban soldiers, telling them little about genuine hand-to-hand combat, which he’d learnt since starting martial arts training five years earlier.
“We just made them run around and do warm-ups,” he said.
“Just something to not teach them anything. They don't deserve it, they're not educated people.”
Then at the age of 19, Amin and his brother Hafiz made the heart-wrenching decision to leave the country of their birth, fleeing to Pakistan.
"We arrived there at 6 o'clock in the afternoon,” he said.
“There you cannot pass the border but we found someone who said give us some money - at that time, 2000 Pakistan Rupees - so we'll pass you over the border after 12 o'clock at night. Up through the mountains."
They waited for six hours, walked for three more to find the border crossing, and then finally hopped in a car at dawn, headed for Peshawar.
“If either side had found us, we were gone,” Amin said.
He started a gym in Peshawar that still runs to this day. It was later taken over by Hafiz, who later sold it to another student.
“It's still going,” he said.
“That was the best investment for a young kid. All the time I am so proud to have made that gym there. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, without mixed martial arts, it's so easy to kids to go to the other side. The suicide blasts, drugs, it's too easy.
“Mixed martial arts and wrestling can keep you from all those problems. I have students here (in Australia), who were bad kids. Doing this has changed their lives."
As Amin explained, now he trains champions, and his students are full of praise.
Nikos Trepca admits he was a troubled child a few years ago. He’s now head of his school.
“Coach Amin changed my life,” Nikos said.
“He helped me improve in life by training me, he helped me become a better wrestler, and he pushed me and believed in me. He's just the best man.”
And Irene Symeonidis said her shyness is a thing of the past.
“My confidence has gone way up,” she said.
“I had my first competition this year and I never thought I could do it."
Now married with two children, Amin has never forgotten where he came from and it’s a message which he constantly passes on to his students.
"Some kids here, I will tell them, you don't know how lucky you are,” he said.
“You guys here cry about iPads and mobile phones, but in the country where I grew up, people are crying for food.”
For more from Amin Yaqhobi, listen to his interview with the SBS Pashto program
