Suliman Zafarkhil

Afghan evacuee from Kabul. Bard College senior in Philosophy and Politics, May 2026. AI engineer. Pashto and Dari translator. I read Arendt on the right to have rights, and I think about what dignity actually means when you’ve been on the wrong side of a sovereign border.

This site is the public record. Not a founder page. Not a refugee story. The canon — what I’ve read, what I’ve built, what I’ve argued for.

See the work · Read the writing · About · Contact

What I do

Translation — Pashto, Dari, English

USCIS forms. Medical intake. Asylum affidavits. Legal depositions. Academic transcripts. Native Pashto, fluent Dari (دری — the Afghan variety, not Iranian Persian), fluent English, conversational Urdu. I went through the US immigration system myself, so I know what an attorney needs and what a USCIS officer actually reads. Most services hand you a sworn cert and a Word doc. I hand you a doc that won’t get rejected on round one. Hire me.

AI engineering — production stacks, not demos

I build things that stay up. FastAPI backends, Next.js frontends, Cloudflare Workers, multi-agent orchestration, LLM routing layers that fall back gracefully when the paid lane is down. The Sulimania stack is my own infrastructure — but the same patterns ship for clients. If you’re a small operator who wants AI leverage without becoming a Kubernetes person, I’m useful. What I’ve built.

Writing — A Compass to an Absurd Existence + Kochi

The senior thesis (Nietzsche, Camus, Arendt — submitted April 29, 2026) lives at /writing along with course-derived essays on the right to die, the right to have rights, philosophy of language, and truth in politics. The newsletter Kochi (کوچی — Pashto for nomad) is the practical wing: AI tools, diaspora workflows, no hustle bro energy.

Proof grid

Why I’m here

I left Kabul on August 23, 2021, on a US Air Force C-17 out of Hamid Karzai International. Backpack with three changes of clothes and the Quran. The plane took off heavy. We landed in Doha, then Ramstein, then Fort Dix in New Jersey. I saw snow for the first time that winter.

Eight months later I had a Bard application in. A year after that I was reading Hannah Arendt in a senior seminar on totalitarianism, which felt like a joke the universe was telling me on purpose. The chapter that hit hardest was the one on the decline of the nation-state and the rightless: people who fall between sovereign borders and discover their “natural rights” do not, in fact, hold up without a state to enforce them. Arendt calls them the scum of the earth. The phrase is not casual. I had been one of those people for a few weeks.

That’s the line my thesis pulls from — not “the immigrant story” but the philosophical question underneath it: what is dignity when the political community that confers it has collapsed? Arendt’s answer (the right to have rights) became the spine of the work. So did Camus on the absurd, and Nietzsche on what we owe each other after God dies. I’m graduating in May 2026 with a BA in Philosophy and Politics.

In parallel I taught myself to ship software. Not “took a Coursera class” — I built the things on this site. Backend, frontend, infrastructure, AI orchestration, deployment. Production services running across two machines on my Tailscale network. None of it is theoretical. None of it is impressive in Silicon Valley. All of it works.

The reason I tell you this story isn’t to ask you to be impressed. Refugee narratives get used to manufacture sympathy and I’m not interested in being a sympathy product. The combination is what makes me useful. Someone who’s been a refugee, has read Arendt closely, and has shipped a multi-service backend is a small set. If your problem lives in any of those zones, you’ll probably get a better answer from me than from someone who’s only ever lived in one of them.

What I’m building

Sulimania — my multi-division operating system. FastAPI + Next.js + Cloudflare Workers + LLM routing across paid and self-hosted models. The infrastructure I run my life and my work on. It’s also the proof-of-stack for the consulting work.

Kochi (کوچی) — diaspora-operator newsletter. AI tools, immigrant context, practical workflows. Beehiiv. Slow growth on purpose. The longer-term plan is for Kochi to absorb low-resource-language AI work, language evaluation, and a public tool layer for Afghan diaspora users — separate from the personal canon that lives here.

Claude Skills marketplace — three skills shipping at an $87 catalog floor. Distilled templates I actually use.

Diaspora-SaaS customer discovery — a 30-prospect interview pipeline with Afghan-origin small businesses in the US. In field. First synthesis report due late summer.

Afghan land cartography — a personal QGIS atlas of inherited family parcels in Ghazni, Paktia, Paktika, and Nangarhar. The deeds are qabaala-style (قباله) — described by markers, not coordinates. A small private war against forgetting. Hobby, but the most honest piece of work I do.

Available for

Translation work — Pashto, Dari, English. Sworn certifications, USCIS-grade affidavits, medical, legal, academic. Turnaround in days, not weeks. translate@zafarkhil.com.

AI consulting — Especially for small operators, immigrant-owned businesses, nonprofits doing refugee or diaspora work. I’ll either build the thing or teach you to build it. consult@zafarkhil.com.

Speaking and writing — Refugee experience as a serious philosophical subject (not inspiration porn), Arendt on rightlessness and statelessness, AI for the underrepresented, what immigrant English teaches us about meaning and translation. press@zafarkhil.com.

Advisory — Founders working on diaspora-facing products, immigration tech, refugee resettlement, or AI for translation. Limited slots. advise@zafarkhil.com.

Find me

• Newsletter — kochi.beehiiv.com
• GitHub — github.com/zafarkhil
• LinkedIn — linkedin.com/in/zafarkhil
• Twitter / X — @zafarkhil
• Email — hello@zafarkhil.com
• Bard College — Senior, Philosophy + Politics, Class of 2026

Why this site exists

The public footprint on me is currently thin — a LinkedIn page, a Bard student-government mention, a squash roster, a Whop listing. That means this site has to function as the first canonical source. Not press release, not pitch deck. Public dossier of someone who used Bard to build an intellectual base for dignity, truth, rights, institutions, and statecraft, and is now turning that base into tools, systems, and work.

If you got something out of any of this, forward it to one person who’d find it useful. That’s how this stays small and real.