Salahuddin plays a sympathetic major character who aided the heroine of the 2001 film "Kandahar" by director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The heroine of the film is a Canadian woman, born in Afghanistan, who slips back into Afghanistan, before the fall of the Taliban in order to try to rescue her sister. During her travels she is befriended by an English-speaking medic (Salahuddin) who turns out to be an exiled American political activist. The heroine of the film really did travel to Afghanistan, in an attempt to rescue her friend, and Salahuddin is an American in exile for a "political activity".