Aug 21, 2021 Leaving Afghanistan

Sima stood looking toward the airport in Kabul. All around the tarmac was a wall of bodies pushing forward. People pressed together in a crush of human anguish. Inside Sima, grief was raging. Her hands twitched, searching for something beyond her reach. She was in search of freedom, of something she knew was lost to her. Was it lost forever?

The Taliban were back in control of her home. Soon they would try to control her life. Sima wasn’t ready for this, she wasn’t ready for any of it. How could this be happening? Twenty years ago the Americans and their allies came and drove the Taliban out of Kabul and most of Afghanistan. Now they were back with a vengeance and the armies of the world have left the people of this impoverished nation to the fanatical men who have known nothing but violence their entire lives. 

Violence is all this small mountainous country has known since Sima was a teenaged girl dancing in the streets of her native Kabul. Growing up in the capital of Afghanistan she experienced the heights of prosperity and freedom of the 1960s and early ’70s.

Until the Communists came. 

She was only seventeen when the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan under Daud Khan staged a coup and overthrew the monarchy of King Mohammed Zahir Shah. Afghanistan, until that point, was very much a country of freedom and energy. She thought back to those times as a teenage girl when she could walk wherever she wanted and wear the latest fashions. As a blossoming woman, she felt her future was exciting and bright. They had a television and she was learning to drive.

At first, the government under president Khan was still progressive and she barely noticed the difference from the king to the new Afghan Republic. The Peoples Democratic Party was autocratic in nature, ironic considering the name of the party. At first, they continued many changes that favoured women’s rights and modernized the country. 

On April 27, 1978, it all changed.

That is a day Sima will never forget. She was out for a walk near the presidential palace when she heard the first salvo of shots from the tanks parked outside. At first, she thought it was fireworks. In an instant she knew it was something much worse. The distant screams still haunted her sleep. Thinking back on that time forty-three years ago still brings a heaviness to her heart and a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. 

Her beloved country has been in a state of violence ever since that day when the Soviet-backed army and the insurgent communists murdered Doud Khan and his entire family. They called it the Saur Revolution and with that revolution, her country was plunged into chaos and war that still rages to this day.

Sima shuddered at the thought of all the violence in her land and looked again toward the airport. She returned to her beloved homeland six years before in hopes of being part of a resurgence of freedom and democracy in her native Afghanistan. It looked to be an impossible task…

A tear cracked her eye as she looked behind her in fear of seeing the men with the black turbans come for her. The dreaded Taliban had returned and were on the march to take over the capital city and the airport. The last hope to escape was so close for her and yet so far away.

The Taliban were children when the Soviets purged the countryside of all the people who would resist them. These kids were refugees and spent their childhood growing up in camps and Islamic fundamentalist compounds in neighbouring Pakistan. They grew up with no family and lived amongst themselves indoctrinated by priests to incite jihad against all that was foreign to them. They grew up without any contact from the outside world, they were students of radical Islam and now they were men without conscience or remorse. The Islamic word for student is Taliban… 

Sima shuddered at the thought of those children who returned to control their country.  She remembered living under the Soviets as a young woman. She thought of her friends that escaped with their children over the mountains to Pakistan. She wondered what her life would have been like if she had gone with them on the harrowing trip over the Khyber Pass. 

Instead, she stayed and tried to make a difference. 

Her stomach churned at the memory of the day the Soviets were pushed out of the countryside and into the city. She hid in her home in Kabul and survived on her wits and her will. Yet she could still walk to the market without covering her face. She never thought that anything could be worse than the Soviets. 

In 1989 she had hope for the future of her homeland when the Soviets agreed to leave and almost overnight the troops she was used to seeing on the corner of the streets in Kabul were gone. She couldn’t know then that her life would actually get worse. Her next few years were a blur of hiding and scrounging for existence. A normal life seemed beyond her grasp.

A deep ache rolled through Sima as she thought of how her parents died during the famine that swept her nation while the Muhajadeen fought to control the country. 

By the time she was forty, she had known fear and war for so long that when the Taliban first returned from the camps in Pakistan they seemed like saviors. They promised peace and security. In truth, they were boys robbed of childhood by a senseless war.  In 1995, they returned from Pakistan to seek vengeance.

When the Taliban militants caught her walking the streets of Kabul without a face covering and without a man they beat her. Sima still ducks her head when shadows hover over her. The men, who were only boys inside, struck her down and kicked her for no reason other than they could show their power over a helpless woman. 

That’s when she saw the true evil of the Taliban.

That’s when she decided to leave.

Sima looked for a break in the people pressed against the fence of the airport. She saw a baby being handed to the American soldier on the other side of the wire. She saw the hopelessness of her situation. They promised her that America wouldn’t abandon her. She came home to help, thinking her American citizenship would protect her.

She thought back to her final days in Kabul so many years before. She remembered the terror she felt in the dark of night crossing Khyber Pass to Pakistan and freedom. Her friend who escaped all those years before was in Los Angeles. Her amazing friend sent her a plane ticket from Islamabad to Los Angeles. The ticket was waiting for her at the airport, all she had to do was get there. 

She almost never made it. 

Now she was closer to the Kabul airport than she was twenty-five years before and it felt like a world away.

Sima searched for the man who said he would come for her. The American journalist promised he would help bring her through the crowd. He wanted her story. Sima was so afraid that he would leave her behind. The Taliban would not spare her if they caught her. She was soiled now, she was corrupt according to their twisted beliefs. 

She still couldn’t believe that it had all failed so badly. 

When she came to her homeland then-president Obama promised to help with the transition, help train the Afghan military to stand on their own. Even one month ago when the Americans abandoned Bagram airfield Sima didn’t believe the Taliban would be able to take over so quickly.

If only she had stayed in her new life in America.

She couldn’t just give up, could she?

There he was, the American journalist. 

She saw him coming from the car parked across the street. Relief flooded her body like a wave of cleansing air. She looked at the poor souls pressed up against the fence and wished she could do more. She wished she could help the mothers and the children vying for a new life away from all the pain, away from all the war. She feared for their fate at the hands of the Taliban… The students of Islam were students no more.

The door of the plane closed behind Sima and she collapsed into her seat. At sixty-five years old she felt deep exhaustion and anguish pour through her soul. When she looked out the window for the last time at her wartorn nation, a part of her stayed behind to grieve a county lost. As the plane climbed into the clouds tears of relief and sorrow began to flow.

Sima knew she would never see her home again. 

***

The story of Sima is based on an interview I watched with a woman that escaped after returning to her country to help rebuild it.

It is a tragic story that began all those years ago when the Soviet Union and the United States played a war game with the people of the mountainous country of Afghanistan. There were no winners in that war and the victims have returned with a vengeance to punish everyone. America armed the freedom fighters that fought against the Soviets. These freedom fighters would become the basis for al-Qaida and the Taliban. The Taliban are the children who fled the country because of the war between the Soviets and American-backed rebels. Those children who escaped that war grew up to become the Taliban and returned to retake their country. 

There is no easy solution and the tragedy continues. I hope that the nations of the world learn from this disaster and find a way to avoid repeating it. I hope one day we can find a way to build lasting peace…