An Aberystwyth business owner has spoken about his “traumatic” humanitarian trip to Afghanistan and coming face to face with the Taliban, as he prepares to return next month.

After using all £34,000 of their savings for medicines, surgical tools, and so on, Dr Sándor Hajzer and Dr Katalin Revesz travelled to Afghanistan on 1 September, to provide medical aid after the Taliban took control of the country in August.

Sándor, who owns Hungarian restaurant Paprika alongside his wife, Katalin, spoke to the Cambrian News about their experience: “It was eight days in hell. When we came home it was very surreal.

“I don’t think we fully understood the gamble we were taking until now. We didn’t know when we were coming home. I lost my sense of time, my sense of the reality, I wasn’t thinking – I was like a robot. We kept saying just one more person.

“In the end we felt we had to come home because our son was here alone.

“After what we lived through, we could come home. We have the choice. The people of Afghanistan don’t have a choice. We are very lucky people to live in Wales, it’s our miracle.”

Having been taken to the Afghanistan border from an airport in Pakistan, they walked six hours before coming face to face with the Taliban.

“While we were walking, three Taliban members pulled up in a jeep, they asked us who sent us and what we were doing there.

“It’s not every day you see somebody standing in front of you with a gun like that. I didn’t know if that was the end of my life.

“I didn’t speak any Pashtu, just a few words of Arabic I learnt during our time in Syria. We managed to tell them we were nobody – just doctors.

“Then he told me his arm was hurt and asked me to take a look at it – I think it was a test. It was broken, so I treated him and in return, they drove us to a small village outside Kabul.

“The media paints the wrong picture. Yes they are Taliban, but they are not going to necessarily shoot you on sight. It’s not a massacre. He just saw us as doctors who wanted to help.”

“The ones we met were just Taliban soldiers. It may have been a different story if I had an American flag around my shoulders.”

The Taliban later provided five beds for Sándor, who trained as a doctor in Hungary, and Katalin, to set up a small emergency room. But the pair said the community also need doctors, hospitals, medicines, and reliable medical services.

“We treated 86 people; we saved 14 lives and lost 10,” Sándor added.

“For every one of the 10 people we tried to save and couldn’t, we felt a little bit of ourselves die. Our hearts hurt because we felt sorry for the people. Now we don’t know if those 14 people are still okay. We just have to pray they are.”