Afghan children on a long and perilous journey

The following is a script from "A Long and Dangerous Journey" which aired on May 19, 2013. Anderson Cooper is the correspondent. Ira Rosen and Gabrielle Schonder, producers.

In the 12 years American forces have been fighting in Afghanistan, we've learned a lot about the war, but we haven't seen much about what life is like for ordinary Afghans. The violence, the poverty, and the fear of the Taliban.

About a year ago we began to hear stories of a massive migration out of Afghanistan: a journey being made by thousands of Afghan children, some as young as nine years old. They often spend years on the road, trying to make it to Europe. To get there however, they have to survive what might be one of the most difficult and dangerous journeys in the world.

You see them all over Europe; small groups of Afghan boys, searching for a better life. Tired and hungry, these Afghan kids are on a Greek island trying to find a bus to Athens, just one more stop on a journey that's already taken some of them years. Police find them hidden under floorboards in vans or smuggled in secret compartments in trucks. Kids fleeing Afghanistan now make up one of the largest migrations of children in modern times.

Starting in Afghanistan the boys go through Pakistan, Iran, then Turkey and Greece and onward to countries throughout Europe. What can be a 10,000-mile journey across six mountain ranges and two seas.

Over the past year we've interviewed dozens of Afghan boys at various stages of their journey. Though they come from all over Afghanistan, their stories of why they're leaving are strikingly similar.

Hayat: In Afghanistan, there are all bullets, guns, people used to kill people for no reason.

Tavab: I couldn't follow my dreams there.

Hamed: I didn't have any future. Any future.

Ali Hassan: We are not safe in Afghanistan. You know the condition. It is always there is a killing, bomb blastings.

Ali Hassan's father was killed in Afghanistan. He fled with his two sisters and brother when he was just 11 to Iran, where he began working in a market.

Ali Hassan: We go from Pakistan to Iran illegally, me, my two sister, and my small brother.

He worked for two months in Iran, until the day he found out his siblings were caught by authorities and deported.

Ali Hassan: My neighbors, they told me that police came here and took your family and they deport to Afghanistan because we don't have any paper. So I'm nervous. I'm crying.

Anderson Cooper: You didn't know where they had been sent?

Ali Hassan: I don't know anything.

Ali Hassan: I was thinking if I go to Europe. Maybe one day I will find my family, and I will bring them here, and we will live a better life.

Ali Hassan: If a person lives with his family it's the best life ever, if a person lives lonely like me, like other boys, it's too difficult.

He says an Iranian man he worked for in the market paid a smuggler to bring him to Europe. The journey would take four years. At one point he was hidden in a refrigerated truck.

Ali Hassan: We are in freezer. Freezer. Two days, two night and four hours, I was in container. After 52 hours, I'm totally freezed. I can't shake my hand, my foot. On that time also I was think that maybe I will die.

Anderson Cooper: You thought you were going to die?

Ali Hassan: Yes, we are like animals for this smuggler. They slapped us. "Shut up. Sit down. Otherwise, I will kill you here and no one knows."

Anderson Cooper: And you believed him?

.Ali Hassan: Yes. They have big, big knives. They have guns.

Ali Hassan: For money they can do anything. For money.

Money fuels this migration. Some kids, like these Afghan boys who are employed in a bakery in Peshawar, Pakistan, have to work for months or even years along the way to pay the smugglers. The trip can cost as much as $15,000. Many of the boys who leave come from Afghan families that have land they can sell to pay for the trip.

Alixandra Fazzina: Most of the world feels that after 10 years of intervention in Afghanistan, things have gotten so much better. Whereas actually most children there don't do to school, they don't have any future. They don't see any hope.

Alixandra Fazzina is a British photojournalist based in Pakistan who's spent five years documenting these journeys. She's creating an ongoing photographic record of some of the thousands of boys who left Afghanistan last year.

Alixandra Fazzina: This journey they are embarking on which is of course highly dangerous, is almost symbolic of just how desperate people are over there. All along the route the boys are very, very vulnerable. They are robbed, they are kidnapped.

But many of them are actually being kept by some of the smugglers as sexual slaves.

Wazir Gul's family sent him out of Afghanistan at 13 to escape the Taliban. He says he often saw smugglers sexually abusing boys.

Wazir Gul: I haven't been raped, but other boys with me were raped.

Anderson Cooper: What would happen?

Wazir Gul: The smugglers used to drag the boys out from the room and hit them with a pistol or with a knife. The boys couldn't do anything. The smuggler then would do whatever they wanted to do.

Hamed, who asked us not to use his real name, crossed Iran with little food, and at one point in the journey hid underneath a moving truck.

Hamed: You remember everything in your life when you're in that moment, that you think that you're going to die. You remember everything.

He was arrested in Turkey for illegal entry and jailed when he was 15.

Anderson Cooper: So you're 15 in an adult jail?

Hamed: Yeah.

Anderson Cooper: What was the worst part?

Hamed: To not see outside. I was about to go crazy in that jai. It felt so-- I don't know how to describe. I felt like a dead person.

He managed to escape, and fled to Greece. But getting into Greece is one of the riskiest parts of the journey.

Smugglers save money and time by taking the boys, most of whom don't know how to swim, at night in small boats.

[Greek Coast Guard: Stop the engine, here.]

This overcrowded boat was intercepted by the Greek Coast Guard.

Many boys die on the crossing. Several months ago, 21 Afghans drowned off the Greek Island village of Mytliene. Their bodies and the few possessions they had washed ashore.

We went to Mytliene's cemetery and found their graves. No one knew the boys' names so they were simply assigned numbers.

The sole survivor of the accident is a 17-year-old Afghan named Murtaza. It was his ninth attempt to cross into Greece.

Murtaza: This what I would say to the boys still in Afghanistan. Don't come towards Europe. It's 100 percent death.

Europe is not what many of the boys expected. In Greece, where economic turmoil has fueled riots, there's little sympathy for unaccompanied Afghan minors. The government rarely grants kids asylum. Police routinely throw them into detention centers like these with adults.

Hayat: I was with adults bigger than me.

Hayat was just 9 when he was detained in Greece.

Hayat: They took us to a prison and they took the other people's fingerprints. They didn't took mine. They told me, "You're too small to take your fingerprints."

After 60 days he was released and told he needed to return to Afghanistan.

Hayat: He gave us a sheet. He said, "You have to get out at this country and that day. If you don't, we can catch you again and then deport you."

Hayat managed to escape to England. He's now 11 and has been granted asylum. Ali Hassan got stuck in Greece for months. He was never arrested, but says he was beaten by police in the port city of Patras.

Ali Hassan: They beat us a lot.

Anderson: Why did they beat you?

Ali Hassan: Why are you here?

Anderson Cooper: That's what they were asking?

Ali Hassan: They are not thinking I'm a 14,15-year-old boy, I'm a small boy. They have big, big shoes. It's very heavy, and they are very big. They beat us a lot.

As difficult as the journey is very few ever willingly turn back. Even when they're forced to scrounge for food and sleep in abandoned buildings and parks. Parents rarely learn the truth of what their children are going through.

Anderson Cooper: They can't tell them the truth?

Alixandra Fazzina: No, the truth is very much hidden. When they do ever phone home they would never tell their family, "I'm really having a hard time here." Because often the families have paid so much money and put everything they have, their property, their land is at stake, for the future of this one child. That they're never going to tell them that "No, we're really in a bad condition and we need some help."

If the boys can't prove their age or the details of their story, in many European countries they'll be deported. Wazir Gul who says he escaped Afghanistan to flee the Taliban made it to England, but unable to prove his age and details of his story, it's unlikely British authorities will allow him to stay.

Anderson Cooper: If the British government says you can't stay here, what will you do?

Wazir Gul: I have no choice, but to kill myself here.

Anderson: You wouldn't go back?

Wazir Gul: If I go back to Afghanistan, I know I will be killed, so why wait? It's best to die here.

The country that grants asylum to the highest percentage of unaccompanied Afghan minors is Sweden, a place that is about as far removed from Afghanistan as possible.

Over the years the journey for thousands of Afghan teens has ended here in Stockholm's central train station. Moved by their plight, the Swedish government has granted the teens asylum giving them free accommodations, education, even financial support to begin new lives.

Last year, nearly 2,000 Afghan minors were granted asylum here. Hamed was one of them. He's now enrolled in high school. So is Ali Hassan, who's 15 and already fluent in Swedish. After four years on the road, he now lives near Stockholm in a government run group home with other Afghan boys.

Ali Hassan: Swedish people is for me the best people. For me. They feel us.

Anderson Cooper: They feel you?

Ali Hassan: When they look they are laughing, they're like, "Hey, how are you?" This is the goodness of the Swedish people. They are feeling us.

Ali Hassan just discovered that his brother and sisters, deported from Iran, four years ago, are alive and living as refugees in Pakistan. He doesn't want them to make the same difficult journey he made, but hopes one day they'll all be reunited.

Ali Hassan: I'm thinking that now I am alive.

Anderson Cooper: Because?

Ali Hassan: Now I am alive. My heart is beating now. Because I hear that my family is alive.

Anderson Cooper: You felt alive because you knew for the first time that they were alive?

Ali Hassan: Yes.

Ali Hassan: Now I'm going to school and I'm trying to learn something. To do something for my family. For myself. Nothing else.

Anderson Cooper: It's nice to see you smile.

Ali Hassan: Thanks.