My brother, the Taliban fighter from Burnley

At 21, Anwar Khan left his Lancashire home to fight for the Taliban. Three years later, his brother set out to find him. Sue Lloyd-Roberts joined him on an extraordinary journey

In a police station in northern Afghanistan, two brothers fall into one another's arms. Anwar, a bearded 25-year-old Taliban fighter, sobs as he clings to his older brother, Ajmal, a clean-shaven 38-year-old property dealer. Ajmal caresses the head of his younger brother. Like a father comforting a young child, he speaks in soft, reassuring tones: "Don't worry," he says, "I've come to take you home." The emotion of the reunion is intense but perhaps the most extraordinary thing about it is that these brothers did not grow up in Kabul or Peshawar, but in a middle-class household in Burnley, in the north-west of England.

Anwar has not seen a member of his family for more than three years. "Why didn't you write?" he demands. He may not have spoken English for some time, but the Lancashire accent is intact. "I thought you were all dead," he continues. "I heard that Muslims in Britain were being attacked." His brother explains that they had written and sent parcels and done everything possible over the last three years to try and free him. The family have paid large sums in ransom money to con-men masquerading as Anwar's captors; they have pleaded with the British Foreign Office to help and even met with members of the Russian mafia, but to no avail.

Anwar is sweating with fever. He has malaria and pneumonia. He has been held in several prisons since he was captured by Northern Alliance forces in December 1998. Two weeks earlier he helped bury two fellow inmates in his present jail in the far north of Afghanistan. Typhoid, malaria, pneumonia and TB have taken hold of the 112 foreign Taliban prisoners who remain. He was wondering who would be next when he was told he had to go to the nearest town, Cha'ab, to meet a visitor.

Anwar was not surprised when the prison governor sent him and a guard on the 10-hour walk to the town. He assumed that it was another journalist who had come to see "the British prisoner". The local commander, Bashir Khan, would boast about him to anyone who passed through (usually on their way out of Afghanistan via the nearby border with Tajikistan), and would invite journalists to meet the local attraction. It was a German reporter who told the family where Anwar was. Anwar arrived in Cha'ab at night and was taken to the police station. He had no idea that the visitor was his brother.

The family agree that Anwar Khan had been the cleverest of the five sons born to Hashem Khan, who arrived in Britain in 1956 to take up a job at the paper mill in Burnley. But, at 14, Anwar started using cannabis and, by 21, he was addicted to crack cocaine and had a baby with an English girl. In despair, his father sent him back to the village in Pakistan, where the family came from. Tajik, where an uncle still lives, is on the road from Islamabad to Peshawar, close to the border with Afghanistan. Through the influence of his family there, Mr Khan wanted Anwar to kick the drugs habit and immerse himself in traditional Muslim family values and reassess his life.

"I did not send him there to fight," he says in the front room of his terraced house in Burnley, "he was brainwashed, brainwashed." He wants to believe that his son was duped or kidnapped and taken into Afghanistan against his will. No family in post-11 September Britain wants to admit to having a Taliban fighter among them. His eldest son, Ajmal, is more realistic. "In my view," he says, "many young British Muslims have divided loyalties. They feel British but are not accepted by the British. This makes them uncertain and vulnerable and extremist organisations like the Taliban can take advantage of this."

The family in Burnley may not have known that Tajik is just one hour's drive from the Haqqania Madrasa, one of the most notorious religious colleges in the North West Frontier Province. Several prominent members of the Taliban leadership were educated there and the ties with Afghanistan are strong. Anwar attended prayers at the Madrasa and, only weeks after arriving in Pakistan, he fell in with a group who were travelling to Afghanistan. There was no trouble getting across the border. The then pro-Taliban authorities in Pakistan eagerly waved through the busloads of young would-be fighters. The majority of the Taliban's foreign fighters came from the region.

Anwar was soon enrolled on a five-week training course organised by the Taliban in Kabul where he learnt to fire a Kalashnikov and handle anti-aircraft guns and drive a tank. His training completed, he then travelled, crossing back and forth across the Afghan-Pakistan border, enjoying the freedom and relieved to have left his problems behind in Burnley. But, when he returned to Kabul in November 1998, he was told by his Taliban minders that he had to get ready to fly to the north and join the battle for the city of Kunduz.

"I was happy when I first when to Afghanistan, it was fun, what with the guns and all. But then it went too far. It wasn't meant to go too far." Did he believe in the Taliban cause when he joined up? "We were told that we would be fighting the Russians. I didn't feel so bad when I heard it was the Russians. We couldn't see who was in the trenches opposite. We never knew that they were Muslims just like us."

Surely, he must have heard that Afghanistan's war with the Russians was long since over? "They told us that the Russians had invaded again. When we got to see the other side, they had shorter beards, not like the Taliban, and so we believed them. They sent all the foreign fighters right to the front. When things got rough, the Afghan elders retreated up the hill and left us to fend for ourselves." He says they survived three days and three nights on the front line before they were surrounded by General Massoud's Northern Alliance army. "Hundreds were killed," he whispers, his voice choking, "only six of us managed to escape. We were framed."

Although he has received scant news of the outside world over the last three years, Anwar knew that Muslims in Britain were having problems in the aftermath of 11 September. He may also have heard that the British Government had threatened to prosecute all returning Britons who had fought for the Taliban. It is difficult to judge whether this nervous, wide-eyed young man, shivering with fever as he speaks, is simply preparing his defence. He speaks of his adventures with incredulity, as if he can hardly believe what he got into. He may think that the story about the Russians might help.

Ajmal gets upset as Anwar goes on to tell of his incarceration. He was first imprisoned in a container; a familiar story in the Afghan war where there were never enough prisons near the battlefront. There were 25 of them who shared a daily pitcher of water and meagre supplies of unleavened bread. "It got so hot that the condensation would pour off the walls." After two months, he was moved to the first of three prisons in the northern province of Taloqar. He says that the Taliban prisoners of war were routinely tortured by their Northern Alliance guards.

For his older brother, Ajmal, it is the climax of an extraordinary and dangerous journey across Afghanistan. As an ethnic Pakistani from the border Pushtun tribe, he is not welcome in the Northern Alliance strongholds of Afghanistan. Too many people have lost close friends and family to Pakistani Taliban fighters, and people treat him with threatening hostility during his week-long journey to reach Cha'ab. And he is under extreme emotional pressure from home. His mother has already had three strokes since she learned of Anwar's imprisonment. The family are afraid that a fourth might kill her.

By the time they meet, Ajmal has only got permission to visit his brother and not to take him home. Painfully, he explains to Anwar that he has not yet managed to get the release order which can only come from the Afghan Defence Minister, General Fahim. He has been assured that it will be forthcoming and that it is only the chaos confronting the new Government that is delaying things. The Northern Alliance leaders who drove the Taliban and their foreign allies out of Kabul in November, 2001 have no further interest in Anwar Khan. As far as they are concerned, he has served his time and can go home.

A week after the meeting, the release order is issued and the two brothers from Burnley make their way home to the UK from Afghanistan, via Pakistan. But Anwar is arrested at the border and has been held in Pakistan ever since. Those who were sent with such enthusiasm from Pakistan to fight for the Taliban are now the enemy. George Bush paid Pakistan billions of dollars in "aid" to join Operation Enduring Freedom, and border guards working for the ISI (Pakistani military intelligence) are now expected to detain anyone crossing into Pakistan who might be tainted by the Taliban and who might be of interest to American intelligence. The world has become a very different place since Anwar crossed that same border so easily three years ago.

Ajmal is now campaigning again – this time to get his brother released from Landikotal Prison on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Foreign Office has secured consular access to him but there is still a fear that he could get mixed up in the exodus of fighters to the US base in Guantanemo Bay in Cuba. Because he fought for the Taliban well before 11 September, it is unlikely that he will be charged with terrorism or treason when he finally gets back to the UK.

Although Anwar may have nothing to fear from British law, the family are afraid of a hostile reception from another source. The BNP has been doing well in recent local elections in Burnley. His father does not want him to return home. In the police station in Cha'ab, Anwar talks with nostalgia about his old haunts in Burnley, the pool bar, his friends and the members of his extended family. Does he regret his Afghan adventure? "Of course I do. I regret it all deeply." His problems may only just be beginning.

Sue Lloyd-Roberts' film 'My Brother The Taliban Fighter' will be shown on 'Correspondent' on BBC2 this Sunday, 7.15pm