He invited me in through the kitchen, where his wife, who was pregnant with their fourth child, was baking traditional Afghan bread with flour from Aldi’s. The trip downtown to buy groceries was among the greatest challenges of Hayanuddin’s new life in Pittsburgh. It involved hauling heavy bags back home on foot and in multiple city buses, whose schedules were unknowable since he didn’t speak English and had not downloaded the relevant app.

“It is difficult to descend from a very strong position to a very weak position,” Hayanuddin told me. In Afghanistan, “we had value. It was our country, and we were making sense for that country. But now, even our generals and commanders, everyone is in the same position.”

In Afghanistan, it was impossible to talk at any length to members of the secretive commando forces known as the Zero Units. They hunted the Taliban in night raids and were widely accused of killing civilians, including children. But last September, Hayanuddin and his Zero Unit comrades were the beneficiaries of the most successful aspect of the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan: the CIA’s rescue of its allied militias. Their arrival in the U.S. over the last year has cracked open one of the war’s blackest boxes.

My conversations with Hayanuddin and several other militia members yielded new details about the command structure, operations, and final days of shadowy units that were nominally overseen by the Afghan intelligence service but were in fact built, trained, and in many cases fully controlled by the CIA. Their fighters hold clues to many of the war’s mysteries, including how U.S. intelligence engineered and oversaw years of deadly night raids that contributed to the Taliban’s ultimate victory, and how a secret deal between longtime enemies may have hastened the lightning collapse of the Afghan security forces last August.

Celebrated as heroes by their American handlers and some Afghans who oppose the Taliban, militiamen like Hayanuddin were feared and detested by many rural Afghans, who bore the brunt of their harrowing raids. While hundreds of Zero Unit members and their closest relatives made it to the U.S., they left behind extended families who have suffered abuse, imprisonment, and death threats under the new government.

The CIA did not respond to detailed questions about its role in overseeing, evacuating, and resettling Zero Unit members and whether the agency would do more to help militiamen and their families left behind in Afghanistan. “The United States made a commitment to the people who worked for us that we would create a concrete pathway to U.S. citizenship for those who gave so much to assist us over the years,” an agency spokesperson told me in an email. “It will take time, but we never forget [our] partners and are committed to helping those who assisted us. We are continuing to work closely with the State Department and other US government agencies on this effort.”

“With regard to allegations of human rights abuses,” the email continued, “the U.S. takes these claims very seriously, and we take extraordinary measures, beyond the minimum legal requirements to reduce civilian casualties in armed conflict and strengthen accountability for the actions of partners. A false narrative [exists] about these forces that has persisted over the years due to a systematic propaganda campaign by the Taliban.”

Hayanuddin said that he and his comrades took care to avoid harming bystanders during their raids, even using loudspeakers to warn women to stay inside or shelter in basements before the fighting began. “For me, it was like a holy war,” he said. “I was there to target bad guys.” But he also described lingering feelings of rage, guilt, and remorse, and connected his struggle in Pittsburgh to his past. At one point, he wondered aloud if he was being punished.

“Sometimes I can’t control my anger and my anxiety,” he told me. “My heart is so sad, like someone is squeezing it very hard. I don’t know why. Maybe because of what happened back home or what is happening here.”

Reversal of Fortune

I met Hayanuddin last spring, at an Afghan New Year’s celebration in a park in Pittsburgh, where we had both recently settled as refugees. I had worked for the New York Times in Kabul for five years and made many trips to the front lines to report on the Afghan security forces, including in the days before the Taliban captured the Afghan capital last August. I was evacuated with other Times staffers to Houston, where I lived in a hotel for several months before getting a job as a visual journalist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and moving north.

At first, Hayanuddin didn’t want to talk to me. But after several attempts, he grew more comfortable, in part because he thought he was talking about an episode of the war that was closed, and in part because we were both exiles from the same place, trying to start new lives in Pittsburgh while still longing for home.

Hayanuddin had served six years with a unit known as 03, fighting the Taliban across Afghanistan’s southern deserts from his base in a compound previously occupied by the one-eyed former Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. U.S. special operators had commandeered the property when they arrived in Kandahar in 2001 and turned it into a redoubt for American and Afghan intelligence forces. With hundreds of other Zero Unit fighters, Hayanuddin crossed shifting front lines in the final days of the war to get to Kabul’s CIA-controlled Eagle Base. From there, he was airlifted to the Hamid Karzai International Airport, where he briefly worked security before being handed $8,000 in cash — half a year’s salary — and flown with his wife and three young children to Fort Dix.

At 37, with a seventh-grade education, Hayanuddin, along with his comrades, is facing a reversal of fortune that is humiliating, infuriating, and utterly intractable. After almost two decades as an American proxy — from guarding U.S. bases to killing Afghans in partnership with the world’s most powerful intelligence agency — he has landed, as a poor and vulnerable refugee, in a three-bedroom apartment with flowered curtains he had to harangue the resettlement agency to install in keeping with Pashtun culture, which dictates that a woman must be shielded from the eyes of passing strangers.

The Zero Units, also known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, were born soon after the first U.S. military and intelligence operatives arrived in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Formed in 2002, they operated entirely under U.S. control until 2012, Gen. Yasin Zia, Afghanistan’s former chief of Army staff, told me in August from London, where he leads an anti-Taliban resistance force. “The government of Afghanistan had no interference in these units,” said Zia, who spent many years in senior roles in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, including as deputy director of the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, which nominally oversaw the units in recent years.

The first of what would become the Zero Units operated in eastern Afghanistan, in a mountainous area along the Pakistani border where the Taliban and other militants often sought refuge between attacks on U.S., NATO, and Afghan government forces. That militia, known as the Khost Protection Force, or KPF, covered the southeastern region of the country. Later, the CIA created and trained at least three more units: 01, which operated in Kabul, Logar, and Wardak provinces in central Afghanistan; 02, based in Jalalabad, which fought in the east; and Hayanuddin’s unit, 03, based in Kandahar and fighting across the south.

In 2010, under pressure from then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai, U.S. officials agreed to transfer oversight of the Zero Units to NDS “physically, but not technically,” Zia said. “We had the names and ranks of members of Zero Units,” he told me. “But their salary was paid by Americans, their targets were given by Americans, and until the end the Americans were with these units.”

“Their salary was paid by Americans, their targets were given by Americans, and until the end the Americans were with these units.”

As the Obama administration transitioned from combat operations to a counterterrorism and advisory mission in Afghanistan after 2011, the U.S. handed control of several Zero Units over to the Karzai government, Zia said. But the CIA retained control of other key units, including the Kabul-based 01; the KPF; and Hayanuddin’s 03.

The units targeted the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and Al Qaeda, but they were not accountable to the Afghan government — not even to the president. In 2019, Afghanistan’s then-national security adviser, Hamdullah Mohib, responded to allegations of extrajudicial killings by 01 — including massacres of children in madrassas — by noting that the unit operated “in partnership with the CIA.”

Hayanuddin had a front-row seat to the shambolic American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and now he can describe what he saw and heard in the war’s final months. The Zero Units were built to work in tandem with U.S. air support, but in August 2020, a year before the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani collapsed, U.S. forces began to radically scale back their air support for his unit, Hayanuddin said.

“Our American advisers left our bases for Kabul, and the choppers that would wait in our base on the edge of Kandahar City left with them,” he recalled. “Our commanders would only report to Americans about our operations, and the Americans would just say, ‘Go ahead.’ We were not working as closely as we used to.”

When the Americans took away their planes, the Afghans’ missions grew much more treacherous. “The American surveillance aircraft would tell us how many people were inside a building and how many of them were armed, and what weapons they have,” Hayanuddin said. “But those details were not there anymore.”

With U.S. air support gone and the fledgling Afghan Air Force unable to provide comparable intelligence, more Zero Unit members got hurt. The planes that had once ferried them to field hospitals in minutes were gone too. In February 2020, when U.S. drones and other aircraft circled over their operations, one of Hayanuddin’s comrades, Akmal, was blown up by a roadside bomb. The Americans airlifted him to a military hospital and he survived, Hayanuddin said, though he lost both his legs. But eight months later, another unit member, Shahidullah, was shot twice in the abdomen. This time, there was no airlift, and Hayanuddin’s unit was stuck in enemy territory. Shahidullah died on the spot.

After President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the CIA gave the NDS a year’s budget for the Zero Units and said the agency would no longer support them, Zia told The Intercept from London. But the final Zero Units were not transferred to Afghan control, he said, until after Biden announced the full U.S. withdrawal in April 2021 and the last American forces and intelligence operatives began to leave.

“Like Committing Suicide”

The Zero Units were designed to capture and kill in targeted raids, not to fight on battlefields. They were widely known as among the most effective elite units in the Afghan security forces, and last summer, as the U.S. military pulled out and the Taliban advanced, many in the Ghani government and the Afghan military looked to them for salvation.

“I am not sure if our commanders got some money in bribes from provincial officials or the government in Kabul,” Hayanuddin said. “But they started turning a blind eye to our standards and sending us to several missions a day and making us suffer heavy casualties.”

Sometimes seven or eight unit members were killed each month, he said, an unprecedented rate for the elite unit. “Once, I remember that all our unit members started crying and protesting because of being overused. Our commanders never listened to that. They would still force us to go to operations all over the south.”

As casualties rose and the war intensified, the morale of Zero Unit members cratered, an Afghan doctor who fought for 02 told me. Like Hayanuddin, the doctor was evacuated last summer; he asked me not to use his name for fear of repercussions now that he and his family are in the United States.

When his commander would ask militia members to go on operations, the doctor told me, some would faint. They would say that “going to an operation is like committing suicide,” he recalled, “as there is no air support and not enough weapons and equipment.”

Rumors that U.S.-Taliban peace talks in Qatar had yielded an agreement to essentially give Afghanistan to the Taliban didn’t help. “The Taliban would send tribal elders to different security forces and tell them that it was decided in Doha that the province where they are stationed should be handed over to the Taliban, so better you don’t fight and avoid the casualties,” the doctor said. “The security forces would accept that and give up fighting.”

The Afghan security forces couldn’t keep up with the losses. In May 2021 alone, more than 400 pro-government forces were killed. Afghans were no longer willing to join the security forces because the job had become too dangerous.

“We had very smart people in our unit,” Hayanuddin said. “I remember that on a single day, one of our guys, without proper equipment, cleared nearly 30 roadside bombs” in Maiwand District, a Taliban stronghold west of Kandahar. Fighters with 03 repeatedly forced the Taliban out of Kandahar’s Arghandab District in the spring of 2021, he said, but when the regular Afghan army and police took over, the Taliban surged back.

Both Hayanuddin and the doctor from 02 suspect that the Afghan security forces largely surrendered the south not because they were defeated on the battlefield but as part of a political deal. They were not alone in thinking this. In the summer of 2021, the Taliban took control of dozens of Afghan police outposts in the districts surrounding Kandahar.

“It was a political deal which led to a wave of collapse of hundreds of outposts first in the south of the country.”

“The leadership of the Afghan security forces asked ground forces in many provinces across the country to stop fighting. We have seen videos on social media that soldiers were crying when they were told to leave their outposts and drop their weapons,” Mirza Mohammad Yarmand, a former Afghan deputy interior minister and military analyst, told me. “This means that it was a political deal which led to a wave of collapse of hundreds of outposts first in the south of the country.”

Soldiers who insisted on fighting found their supply lines cut and didn’t get the support they needed, Yarmand said, adding that when Afghan forces in the northern province of Takhar wanted to stand their ground, they were given a choice: surrender to the Taliban or drive to the mountains of Panjshir, where the last forces resisting the Taliban were holed up.

Near Kandahar, Hayanuddin’s unit ran into police officers trying to flee. “They said their outpost was captured by the Taliban,” he recalled. “We took them with us, and there was no Taliban in their outpost. When we asked why, they said their tribal elder told them to leave the outpost to the Taliban. This is only one example, but it happened many times.”

In June 2021, 03 was deployed from one front line to another as district after district fell to the insurgents. By the end of that month, nearly half of Afghanistan’s districts were under Taliban control.

As the fighting intensified, other Afghan security forces pinned their hopes on the Zero Units. On August 4, 2021, I was with the Afghan National Police Counter Resistance Unit outside Sarposa Prison, one of the main front lines in Kandahar. The fighting picked up on one edge of the city just as the police machine gun stopped working. I asked Shafiqullah Kaliwal, a unit commander, what they were going to do.

“The 03 will come,” he told me, “and they will push back the Taliban to their original outposts.”

The next day, Kaliwal told me that 03 had indeed come to their rescue and forced the Taliban to retreat. But when the Zero Unit moved on, the Taliban quickly recaptured the territory.

Zia confirmed that the pressure on Zero Units was unsustainable. In the last four months of the war in Kandahar, Zia said, “the casualties of Zero Units were very high. It was not comparable to the past 20 years of war. The reason for that was that they were not used professionally.”

A Secret Deal

One of the many mysteries of the war’s final days was how the Zero Units managed to make their way through Taliban-held territory to Kabul, where they were evacuated to the United States and other countries. An apparent agreement between the Taliban and the U.S. helps explain their unlikely escape.

On August 11, 2021, one of the main government lines of defense in Kandahar City collapsed to the Taliban. Hayanuddin was on leave at the time, but the next day, he said, his comrades in 03 and other security forces drove to Kandahar Air Field, which by then was in Taliban territory. There, they spent two days waiting to be flown to Kabul.

On August 14, the Taliban captured Jalalabad City, the provincial capital of Nangarhar Province, where Hayanuddin was spending his leave with his family. Terrified, he and his younger brother, who had also served in 03, stayed up all night, trying to contact Hayanuddin’s commander for orders. When they finally reached the commander, he told them to get to Kabul. The next morning, they climbed into a taxi and set off on an anxious two-hour journey through territory now controlled by their enemies. If anyone identified them, they thought, they would be killed.

But the trip was far easier than they’d expected as, one after another, the Taliban fighters manning checkpoints let them pass. “We didn’t know what was happening,” Hayanuddin told me. “They were our enemy. We were intensively fighting just a day before the collapse, but now we were staying in their territory or driving through it. We thought we were taking a big risk, but now as I think about it, it seems the Taliban didn’t want to attack us as part of their deal with the U.S.”

It wasn’t just a few guys in taxis who managed to cross Taliban checkpoints with ease. On August 15, the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, the doctor from 02 told me that he drove from Jalalabad to Kabul with his fellow unit members in a convoy of hundreds of military vehicles packed with weapons and equipment. The doctor thought they would have to fight their way through the checkpoints, but each time, the Taliban soldiers called their commanders and waved him and the other Afghan militiamen through.

The Taliban allowed Zero Unit members to safely cross their front lines in the final days of the war because they had agreed with the U.S. government to do so.

The Taliban allowed Zero Unit members to safely cross their front lines in the final days of the war because they had agreed with the U.S. government to do so, according to the doctor from 02 and two former Afghan intelligence officials, who asked not to be named because they feared repercussions from the Taliban for speaking to a journalist. The U.S. evacuation plan depended on Zero Unit members working security at the Kabul airport, and the Americans had told those fighters to get passports shortly before the republic collapsed, Zia, the former senior security official, said.

The CIA declined to comment. The Taliban did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Hayanuddin and his brother made it safely to Eagle Base, the Kabul headquarters of the CIA and 01, where they spent three nights. One by one, the Zero Units boarded Chinook helicopters and left the base for the Kabul airport: first 01, then 02, and then Hayanuddin’s unit, 03.

Hayanuddin spent five nights in the airport, providing security for the evacuation of thousands of desperate Afghans. In those days and later, Zero Unit members were accused of firing over the heads of crowds and beating Afghan civilians who were trying to leave. Hayanuddin denied mistreating people at the airport, but my own encounter with a Zero Unit fighter on August 19 suggests there is truth to the charges. As I made my way through crowds in front of the airport terminal, trying to reach my American colleague and the U.S. Marines, a member of the Zero Units stopped me. I explained who I was and where I was going, but the fighter ordered me to sit down. If I didn’t, he said, he would shoot me with dozens of bullets, and no one would question him.

At last, it was Hayanuddin’s turn to call his family to join him on a flight to the U.S., via Abu Dhabi and Germany. Like many Afghans, Hayanuddin was married to two women. He had moved one of his wives, who he asked me not to name, to Nangarhar with their three kids several months before the collapse, and one of his brothers managed to escort them to Kabul to meet Hayanuddin at the airport. But Hayanuddin’s other wife was still in his home province of Kunar with their four children when the republic fell.

“My first wife, who was in Kunar, couldn’t make it to Kabul,” he told me, “because there was no one to accompany her.”

Hayanuddin also left his parents and siblings behind, including the brother who had served alongside him in 03. The Americans refused to evacuate him, Hayanuddin said, because he had left the unit a year before the Taliban took control.

Thankful, but Angry

In Pittsburgh, Hayanuddin and several other Zero Unit members found work at a halal grocery. One of them was Khan Wali Momand, a former school principal who started working for 02 in Jalalabad as a security guard in 2017. Momand now lives with his wife and children in Section 8 housing in Duquesne, a Pittsburgh suburb. When I met him, he was unloading boxes; he has since gotten a different job at another local grocery store, which he prefers because it doesn’t involve as much heavy lifting.

Momand started working with 02 through his brother, Inayatullah, who he says served 16 years with the unit but left just days before the government collapsed because his wife was ill. Like Hayanuddin’s brother, Inayatullah was left behind when the Taliban took over, and he and Momand’s other relatives immediately became targets for retribution. Inayatullah went into hiding, and when I spoke to Momand this spring, he was consumed by grief and worry. “Every time I receive a call from home,” Momand told me, “I think it will be bad news.”

This spring, members of the Taliban kidnapped two of Momand’s teenage nephews and held them for five days in an attempt to force the family to hand over Inayatullah. The nephews were released after tribal elders in the area promised to help the Taliban find Inayatullah. He has applied for a Special Immigrant Visa to come to the United States, Momand said, but has not heard back.

“We were so loyal to Americans that we wouldn’t leave their bags behind in the battlefield, but now they are leaving behind my brother, who helped them for 16 years,” Momand told me. “It happened many times during missions with 02 that an American adviser or soldier would get shot, and we would risk our life to take them out of the battlefield. Look at our level of loyalty and their level of loyalty.”

Momand is deeply conflicted over his role in the war. When he began working with the Americans five years ago, he drew the enmity of the Taliban and many acquaintances. In his conservative village, he had a hard time defending his decision and explaining how helping the Americans would benefit his country. Now he wonders whether he made the right choice — whether it was worth it, given the price he and his family have paid. He’s an outsider in Duquesne and may never be able to go back to Afghanistan. Did he join 02 for the wrong reasons, he wonders, or was he used? Did he betray his country, his people, after all?

Momand said he is grateful to Biden. “He hasn’t left us to the Taliban. If I had been left behind in Afghanistan, my whole family and I would have been killed by now,” he said. “But there is no one in the U.S. to rescue me from the tough situation here.”

As our conversation drew to a close, Momand’s anger flared. He had told his story many times, he said, to workers from resettlement agencies and other relief organizations. “Everyone comes here and asks about my problems and the problems of my family, but I don’t see any outcome of telling these stories,” he said. “Do you enjoy hearing my painful life story?”

Only in the Darkness

At Hayanuddin’s house that rainy May morning, an oilcloth was spread over the living room carpet, and we sat around it while his wife and 9-year-old daughter, Simina, brought out loaves of hot fresh bread, eggs, warm yogurt, and a giant thermos of sweet, milky black tea.

As we ate, Hayanuddin kept an eye on his phone. At 9 a.m., an alarm sounded, and Simina brought him a pair of white athletic socks, a jacket, and an umbrella. Back in Afghanistan, his American advisers had stressed the need for punctuality, often arriving 15 minutes early for meetings with their Afghan counterparts. He feared that if he were late to work, he’d get fired. And he needed this job.

He took home about $1,600 a month after taxes, he told me. The resettlement agency was covering the first three months of rent on his apartment in Pittsburgh; after that, he’d have to spend $1,500 a month, nearly his entire paycheck, on rent and utilities. He was getting food stamps, but the family budget was tight.

His house was about five miles from the halal grocery, an easy 15-minute drive. But the bus ride, including a transfer downtown, could take more than an hour. On this day, he would work for nine hours, arriving home between 9 and 10 p.m. The family, including the children, would eat a late dinner together. After that, they’d call Afghanistan, so Hayanuddin and his wife could talk to their parents, and the parents could speak to their grandchildren.

It was his father, Hayanuddin says, who had convinced him to go to the U.S. last year. “If the Taliban come and they behead you in front of us or shoot you in the head in front of us, that would be a very big trauma for us for our whole life,” his father told him last August. “So if you want to spare us that pain, you should leave.”

He sometimes regrets it. “We didn’t voluntarily come here, and it is not easy here,” he told me. “That’s the everyday struggle. And then you have a family that is staring at you and hoping that you will fix everything.”

At 9:20 a.m., Hayanuddin pulled on a black jacket and headed out to the bus stop, a wooden pole with a metal sign at the edge of a busy road. He hunched his shoulders against the rain and took a drag on his Marlboro Red. The resettlement agency gave him transit cards, but when they ran out, he’d have to spend his own money on bus fare.

Back in Afghanistan, he drove heavy military vehicles over mountainous terrain wearing night vision goggles. But in Pittsburgh, he couldn’t get a driver’s license. The test was offered in Urdu and Arabic, but not Persian or Pashto, Afghanistan’s two main languages, and at the time, translators were not allowed. (Several months later, after the local Afghan community complained, the DMV added a test in Persian.)

“If I would stand in a bus stop in Afghanistan, I would just wave to a taxi and they would stop and take me to where I wanted to go,” he said. “There is no country as good as Afghanistan around the world, if only it were safe enough to live in.”

After 15 minutes, the bus arrived. Hayanuddin, thoroughly soaked, donned a surgical mask, climbed the steps, and settled into an empty seat. As the bus heaved along the twisting roads, heading downtown, he surveyed the other passengers.

“Only poor people like me are using the bus,” he noted.

Back at his apartment, he’d shown me a stack of military ID cards and commendations from the Americans he’d worked with, each signed by a different soldier or officer, praising his service and making promises they couldn’t keep.

“Your exemplary actions demonstrate your overall commitment to not only safeguard your Village, your District, and Province from those who inflict harm upon the innocent, but also to ensure a better future for all current and future Afghan citizens,” read one certificate, signed by “Master Sergeant Scott” and “Commander Josh” of Special Forces unit ODA 3115.

“His expertise, unfaltering dedication to duty and work ethic have far exceeded my expectations and he is an inspiration for all who work with him,” said another, marked QSF — for Qandahar Strike Force — National Security Unit 03 and dated March 2021. “Over the past 6 years, He has demonstrated his total loyalty to his unit. His service to the country is a shining example for all his fellows’ unit around him and he demonstrates an unfailing commitment to a free and prosperous Afghanistan.” It was signed by “Mac,” a U.S. adviser.

“Mr. Ayanudin will be a great asset to the SRF-03,” read a commendation from 2015, “and will make a significant contribution to a free and prosperous Afghanistan.”

What to make, now, of those papers, those words?

More than an hour after leaving his house, Hayanuddin disembarked on a desolate street corner and walked a block to the halal grocery, a sprawling brick warehouse complex with murals paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr.: “Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”

Inside, he traded his jacket for a white apron and reappeared behind the meat counter, where he used a mechanized blade to slice chicken breasts.

The post The Evacuation of the CIA’s Afghan Proxies Has Opened One of the War’s Blackest Boxes appeared first on The Intercept.

On a normal morning, Asadullah Akbari, a colonel in the Afghan National Army, would arrive at his office in Kabul to coordinate online meetings between Afghan officials and their U.S. advisers based in Qatar. After years of fighting across Afghanistan, Akbari had helped set up his country’s special forces training program and risen through the ranks. He now worked near the highest levels of the military, side by side with Afghanistan’s political leaders. Morning teleconferences with Western partners were part of his daily routine.

He had grown accustomed to this relatively quiet life. But as the U.S.-backed Afghan government imploded last summer, a thick cloud of fear descended on the Afghan capital. Rumors spread that Taliban fighters were going house to house, hunting down Afghan military officials. Akbari stayed home, texting anxiously with his military and defense ministry colleagues, all of them trying to make sense of the sudden changes. Akbari’s future had seemed relatively predictable; now it was difficult to see even a few days ahead.

On August 20, 2021 — five days after Kabul fell to the Taliban — Akbari headed to a well-known mall with his kids. Walking the streets of Kabul, where he’d spent most of his life, he had the distinct feeling that these could be his last days on earth. When his children begged him for candy and ice cream from the vendors on the street, he bought everything they wanted.

Akbari knew in his heart that he and his colleagues had been left to their fate. Many of the senior Afghan officials they’d served under had already made their own arrangements and fled the city. People who had supervised Akbari for years suddenly stopped responding to his messages. It was the last betrayal, after years of corruption and double-dealing that he had personally witnessed from his perch in the Ministry of Defense. The Afghan government they’d spent two decades helping to build had collapsed. Now, its ruins were raining down on top of millions of ordinary Afghans like him.

The fall of the Afghan government triggered a tidal wave of anguish and soul searching among Afghans and Americans who had invested years of their lives in the U.S. mission there. It was also personal for me as an Afghan journalist. For seven years, I worked at Etilaatroz, one of Afghanistan’s leading investigative news outlets. I reported and wrote scores of articles on politics and security in Afghanistan, including more than a dozen major investigations. Across all this reporting one theme stood out above all the rest: corruption. The greed, self-interest, and amorality of Afghan elites was like an acid that ate away at the institutions ordinary Afghans had sacrificed so much to build. In the end, that corruption would prove fatal to our hopes for building a free and independent nation.

I was among tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated by the U.S. government when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan last summer. Since then, during the nearly 10 months I spent with other refugees in a hotel in Albania and now in the United States, I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to my country and why. Like everyone, I watched in horror as my Etilaatroz colleagues still in Kabul were beaten by the Taliban for the crime of covering a protest. How could the gains of the last 20 years have evaporated so quickly?

This remains an agonizing question for both Afghans and Americans. In April, the Senate Armed Services Committee announced the creation of an Afghanistan War Commission aimed at establishing why the U.S.-backed Afghan government and its security forces dissolved so spectacularly. The commission plans to provide a “comprehensive review of key decisions related to U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan” and to deliver a final report to Congress within three years, around the time President Joe Biden will complete his term in office.

Eight months ago, I began calling Akbari and other sources in the former Afghan security forces. There were many questions about why the army did not fight that continued to bother me and other Afghans. Why, after years of grueling struggle, did soldiers in many parts of the country put down their guns in the face of the enemy? To find the answers, I started interviewing former military officers and government officials.

They told me that corrupt, inexperienced commanders as well as leaders who valued loyalty above capability had weakened the chain of command. Tens of thousands of Afghans had given their lives for their country. In the end, ordinary soldiers were betrayed by leaders who failed to give them the tools they needed to succeed against a brutal insurgency.

On August 20, the day Akbari walked to the mall, the Taliban were rushing to establish themselves across Kabul, flush with excitement over their victory. They had fought for years, suffering terrible losses themselves, and were now almost certain to take revenge on their enemies. Their knock on his door seemed inevitable. As Akbari walked into his home, he received an unexpected text message on his phone from a U.S. military adviser based in Qatar with whom he had regularly teleconferenced from Kabul.

“Asadullah, where are you?”

Within a few days, Akbari and his family were packed into the cargo hold of a plane with other Afghans who had been lucky or connected enough to make it out. The flight took him from Kabul to Qatar and then on to Jacksonville, Florida, where he and his family are the only Afghan residents in a rundown apartment complex. The speed with which his life had transformed gave it all an air of unreality.

Akbari had spent decades at war, lost many friends, and suffered scars that he will carry for the rest of his life. Looking at Afghanistan today, he cannot escape the feeling that it was all for nothing.

The Fall of the Three-Man Republic

The U.S. is believed to have spent upwards of $2 trillion in Afghanistan — money that was, in many cases, eaten up by graft or funneled back to politically connected U.S. government contractors. Afghan military officers like Akbari saw the rot up close. In the final years of his government, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and a close circle of advisers were widely criticized for monopolizing decision-making and personnel appointments and gradually losing touch with the people they governed. Akbari regularly briefed Ghani, his senior advisers, and the Afghan defense minister; their constant changes to military leadership and their obsession with personal loyalty overshadowed efforts to prevent a Taliban takeover, he says.

“I was 18 years old when I joined the army. I never saw happy days in Afghanistan, only war, blood, fighting, and clashes. And in the end, our leaders betrayed the country,” he told me. “I saw myself that we had no honest leaders and no one who was thinking of the national interest. They were only thinking of their own benefit and appointing those who were loyal to them.”

“I never saw happy days in Afghanistan, only war, blood, fighting, and clashes. And in the end, our leaders betrayed the country.”

Top former Afghan officials painted a picture of increasing paranoia on the part of Ghani and his aides, who feared not just disloyalty, but even a possible coup by officers of the Afghan military. Lt. Gen. Sami Sadat, the last commander of the Afghan National Army Special Operations Command, described Ghani to investigators for the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, as a “paranoid president … afraid of his own countrymen,” adding that Ghani was “changing commanders constantly [to] bring back some of the old-school Communist generals who [he] saw as loyal to him, instead of these American-trained young officers who he [mostly] feared.”

During the last two years of the Ghani government, power was held by a triumvirate: the Afghan president; his national security adviser, Hamdullah Mohib; and his chief of administrative office of the president, Fazel Mahmood Fazly. Many Afghans referred derisively to this group of power brokers as the “three-man republic.” Neither Mohib nor Fazly had experience in security or national defense. Mohib had been the Afghan ambassador to the United States, and Fazly was a surgeon who had previously been a political adviser to Ghani. Both men played a critical role in the catastrophic decision-making that led to the collapse of the army, Akbari said.

“What I witnessed was that Hamdullah Mohib was given the widest authority in appointments. All the corps commanders were personally appointed by him and were doing whatever Mohib commanded,” Akbari said. “All orders were issued by Mohib and a group of officials in the presidential palace.” Mohib, meanwhile, has blamed Western countries for leaving their Afghan partners too abruptly, claiming that the sudden departure of American troops and contractors sapped the Afghan military’s morale and deprived it of the material support it needed to fight.

When reached to comment for this story, Mohib referred me to an interview from earlier this year, in which he attributed the collapse of the Afghan government to U.S. political concessions made to the Taliban and Biden’s decision, in the summer of 2021, to announce a final withdrawal. While denying that he had enriched himself with Afghan government funds, Mohib pointed to the corrupting impact on Afghan institutions of “exorbitant amounts of unmonitored money” dumped into the country by the international community since 2001.

The final Taliban offensive that toppled the government laid bare this corruption, which my colleagues and I had documented for years at Etilaatroz. At the moment of their country’s greatest crisis, many top officials and commanders simply abandoned Afghan soldiers and civilians, focusing instead on their own safety and grabbing whatever resources they could as they fled the country.

By the end, the people in charge had given up on other factors and were making personnel appointments based entirely on what they thought would be their own interests, said Saleh Jahesh, a former head of the strategic planning office within Afghanistan’s National Security Council. “The major corps commanders were all known to have luxury houses in Dubai,” Jahesh told me.

A Great Crime

Accusations from Biden and others that Afghans failed to fight the Taliban stung Akbari, whose job for years involved maintaining accurate statistics on Afghan security force casualties. The numbers of dead and wounded were sobering. Many of the elite commando units he’d worked with took heavy casualties in the last days of the war; in total, at least 66,000 Afghan police and military service members are estimated to have been killed since 2001.

The U.S. had built an Afghan security infrastructure that was almost entirely dependent on foreign military and contractor support for its own maintenance and logistics. When the U.S. withdrawal began, Afghan soldiers found that they were suddenly unable to call in airstrikes or receive resupply by air, although their U.S.-led combat training had included these as critical components of their style of fighting.

By the end, many Afghan soldiers were stuck holding positions that were impossible to defend and lacked even basic logistical support. The U.S. withdrawal only highlighted the unsustainable nature of the giant Afghan military apparatus that had been built over 20 years.

“It was a myth that the Afghan security forces didn’t fight in the weeks before the collapse of the government. A lot of them stood and fought, and they died in huge numbers,” said Jonathan Schroden, an Afghanistan expert with the Center for Naval Analyses, a nonprofit military research and analysis center in Virginia. “But once word started getting around that if you stood and fought the Taliban there would be no cavalry to come save you, defections and surrenders began. The Taliban were then able to highlight these instances of security forces surrendering as part of a very successful psychological warfare campaign.”

Long before the final collapse of the government, the Afghan security forces had already been struggling under the weight of high casualty rates, corrupt leadership, and low morale.

“The number of new recruits became very low because people were not ready to send their sons to the Afghan National Army. They were aware of the situation and knew that if they send their sons, then they won’t go back home alive,” Akbari said. “Some soldiers were not able to go to their homes and see their families for more than a year.”

Those Afghan soldiers and police who stayed in the fight had to deal with chronic shortages of food, fuel, warm clothing, and ammunition. Corruption in the procurement process steadily ate away at the military’s capacity, a systemic problem that SIGAR documented in real time throughout the war but which was never fixed. A 2017 SIGAR report on efforts to reform the procurement process said that the creation of a National Procurement Authority, which centralized contracts under Ghani’s office, was “one bright spot” in a system otherwise rife with corruption and graft. But according to Jahesh, the centralized authority slowed resupply missions, reducing transparency and creating more opportunities for corruption.

Contracts sometimes took more than six months to be approved, Jahesh said, and prices were wildly inflated. In one instance, he recalled that the procurement authority approved a contract to buy watermelon for the Afghan army at 70 Afghanis per kilogram, while watermelons in the market cost about 1.4 Afghanis per kilogram, meaning the army paid 50 times more than the going rate.

“The soldiers did not receive anything on time and they had no energy to fight simply because they had no vegetables, fruit, or meat to eat to meet their basic needs for calories,” Jahesh told me. “Commanders were being forced to sell military equipment from bases because they were receiving nothing from the government on time. Despite these shortages, on paper senior officials were making it look like everything was being provided for the soldiers.”

“Once word started getting around that if you stood and fought the Taliban there would be no cavalry to come save you, defections and surrenders began.”

I had witnessed supply shortages and other problems for years in my own reporting on the Afghan military. In October 2018, I visited a military base in a suburb of the city of Ghazni, which had recently been the site of fierce clashes between the Afghan military and the Taliban. Instead of training to fight, the Afghan soldiers I met were forced to spend their time gathering firewood to cook their meals as the government had failed to deliver propane and other vital supplies. A 2020 video shared on social media showed a group of wounded Afghan soldiers surrounded by the Taliban in Wardak Province, just south of Kabul. “We don’t have water, we don’t have food,” one of the soldiers said, addressing Ghani. “We have morals to fight if we receive support.”

On top of the brazen economic inequality between themselves and top officials in the Afghan government, the sense of abandonment that many soldiers felt made it seem logical to return to their families rather than die for leaders who they expected would flee to safety in Dubai or Turkey in case of a Taliban victory. Afghan soldiers had been fighting and dying pointlessly for years. Those who perished in what had become a futile effort to stop the Taliban received little dignity, even in death.

“We had many wounded personnel on our bases with wounds that became infected and who later died as a result,” Akbari said. “Some of these soldiers were temporarily buried inside the bases and dug up again when transport planes arrived to take them.”

In some cases, the bodies of Afghans who died on the battlefield were even returned to the wrong families. “The family held a funeral ceremony for them,” Akbari recalled. “But after a while they were found to be alive and returned home.”

While some families were mistakenly told that their sons, brothers, and cousins were dead, the bodies of others who had actually died were sometimes simply lost. Akbari says this ate at his conscience, even as he continued serving a government that he saw as the only hope of saving his country from the Taliban. “It was a great crime committed against them and their families,” Akbari told me.

Haunted by the Past

Though we came from different walks of life and served Afghanistan in different ways, Akbari and I are now both refugees in the United States. His days are spent looking for work and running through the bureaucratic gauntlet necessary to build a new life for his family. Like many other refugees, he spends his free time on WhatsApp, trying to learn about developments back in Afghanistan. Many nights he can’t sleep for thinking about the war.

“Many of my colleagues from special forces units have been persecuted, tortured, and martyred by the Taliban. Their families have been tortured. A number of them are alive in Afghanistan and cannot leave the country; neither can they work nor can they stay in their homes,” Akbari told me. “They have a lot of financial and security problems. None of the defense ministry authorities worked for their evacuation to a safe place. These authorities are thinking about how and where to buy a house or car, and they do not think about soldiers, lieutenants, and officers who were on the front lines.”

In Akbari’s mind, the failure of the war was not due primarily to the Americans, who could have withdrawn in any year since 2001 and seen the Afghan government collapse just as quickly. Instead, it was a product of a corrupt Afghan political class that has still not been held accountable for its failures. Recent news reports of former Afghan officials driving expensive luxury cars and living lavishly in Gulf Arab countries, Turkey, and the West do not surprise him. They are only the crowning insult to the efforts of ordinary Afghans who gave their lives in a tragic two-decade attempt to rebuild their country with international support.

The corruption and mismanagement of Afghanistan by its own elites, enabled, in many cases, by their U.S. partners, has plunged the country into a new era of suffering under the Taliban. One day, Akbari and I both dream of returning. For now, we can only try to learn from what went wrong.

“If I say that Afghanistan was a country during the Ashraf Ghani government, it would not be fair,” Akbari said. “Afghanistan was like a joint stock business company, in that every partner exercised as much authority as their share.”

The post I Watched the Afghan Government Collapse Under the Weight of Its Own Greed appeared first on The Intercept.

Marked as enemies of the new Taliban regime by his work with Westerners and his family’s Hazara ethnicity, Hamid, his wife, their 8-year-old daughter, and their new baby move furtively from place to place, living under assumed names. Their year in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan echoes Hamid’s own war-torn childhood as he tries to guarantee his daughter’s future. Suddenly, an escape route opens: Will they finally make it out?

Transcript

Hamid: After the crowd subsided, we leave the scene in clothes full of dirt and blood and bare feet.

Summia Tora: That’s Hamid, the man I tried and failed to help leave Afghanistan last year. After the suicide attack at the Kabul airport last summer, Hamid and his family went back home. They huddled there, keeping their heads down. They kept using the nicknames Hamid had come up with when the Taliban took control. I’m not using their real names because they are still in danger.

Hamid’s wife, Jamila, has a master’s degree in sociology. She was pregnant when the government collapsed. And then there was their daughter Eliza, who was just outside the blast radius of the bomb that killed more than 180 people at the airport.

Hamid: As a father, everyone hopes for their children, the first thing is to be safe. And then they should have access to at least basic life facilities. Like, the first thing is education. Good nutrition. We cannot provide the basic needs. When we cannot provide it today, so the future, it worries us the most.

Summia Tora: On December 2, 2021, Hamid got an email from Geres, the French NGO where he’d worked for four years.

Hamid: “France does not wish to expand its reception capacity for political asylum. It is therefore with great sadness that we have to acknowledge that we cannot, today and without the support of France, help you to leave Afghanistan.”

Summia Tora: So how did you feel, knowing all of this and receiving a rejection letter?

Hamid: Hopeless. I lost the only option I had in my life to get out of this country. So I missed it. I missed the only hope for myself, for my family, for my kids.

[Theme music]

Summia Tora: I’m Summia Tora, a human rights advocate. This is No Way Home, a production of The Intercept and New America.

In this four-part series, you’ve been hearing stories that were found, developed, and reported by Afghans like me, who have been forced into exile. Our stories reflect what we saw with our own eyes and what we and other Afghans have experienced firsthand since the U.S. military pulled out, the Afghan government collapsed, and the Taliban took over last summer.

This is Episode Four: “Getting Out Alive.”

[Theme music ends]

Like everyone, Hamid and Jamila knew the Taliban’s history of denying basic rights to girls and women. It was one of the main reasons they risked their lives trying to leave last August.

Jamila (translated voiceover): You know, it all happened so suddenly. There were fights in the provinces, and you would hear about it on Facebook that this province or that province has fallen. In that moment, the first thing I remembered was my daughter. I looked at her, and she was sleeping, and then I cried intensely and said, “My daughter’s future is over and ruined.”

Summia Tora: But something else was even more threatening to Hamid and his family. They are Hazaras, an ethnic minority that has faced decades of discrimination in Afghanistan. Hiding is difficult: Their ethnicity is clear from his and his family’s facial features and their accents, and they practice Shia Islam in a place that is mainly Sunni.

Hamid was born in Kabul and spent his early childhood in a mainly Hazara neighborhood called Dasht-e-Barchi. That’s where he and his family lived last year, when the U.S.-backed government fell.

Hamid: I went to school until two grades in Dasht-e-Barchi, in west of Kabul. So I felt that it was obvious for everyone that like other people, except Hazaras, they had a good life. They had access to more facilities in their lives. They had cars, they had bicycles, they had motorcycles — all these things that most of the Hazaras didn’t have at that time.

Summia Tora: Hamid was 8 years old when the Soviet-backed Afghan government collapsed — the same age his own daughter, Eliza, is now.

When the mujahedeen factions that had been fighting the Soviets with backing from the U.S., Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other countries took Kabul, each group seized control of a different part of the city, and they began fighting each other. The country fell into civil war.

The mujahedeen factions were dominated by different ethnic groups. A Hazara faction called Hezb-e-Wahdat-e-Islami controlled Dasht-e-Barchi. Hamid and his family spent about six months in Dasht-e-Barchi, while the mujahedeen fired artillery at each other, destroying Kabul’s buildings and killing many civilians. Then his parents decided to take the family to Bamiyan, a mountainous province north of Kabul that is known as the Hazara homeland.

Hamid: So when we left Kabul for Bamiyan, it was a very tough time. All the roads linked to Bamiyan were closed at that time, and everyone was detained and questioned.

Summia Tora: Bamiyan has remained relatively peaceful over decades of war. But getting there was hazardous.

Hamid: So when we were going in this route and passing these route, we were questioned. We were insulted, like Hazaras, for our features and our faces. And all the kids were, everywhere that the kids were around the street and when we were crossing, they were shouting at us and laughing.

So many checkpoints were on the road and stopped our car many times and asking, “Who are you? Where you going?” And even they made us to pay them some money to allow them to cross the road.

Summia Tora: The Taliban’s leaders grew up fighting the Soviets, and the group came to power for the first time in 1996 by defeating other mujahedeen factions.

One of their most notorious acts, in 2001, was to destroy the giant 5th-century Buddhas carved into the mountains in Bamiyan. The Taliban blew up the towering sculptures with rockets, tank shells, and dynamite. When the Taliban took over Afghanistan last summer, some said they had changed. But much remained the same — including their attitude toward Hazaras.

Last July, the Taliban killed nine Hazara men in Ghazni, a province southeast of Kabul. In August, just after the Taliban gained control of the country, Amnesty documented another massacre in the central province of Daykundi. The Taliban killed 13 Hazaras there, including a 17-year-old girl.

Around the same time, some Taliban decapitated a statue of renowned Hazara leader, Abdul Ali Mazari, in Bamiyan city, the capital of the province that Hamid had fled to as a boy.

Rabia Khan: Mazari was actually killed by the Taliban in 1995 when he went to meet them for peace talks. So I think, symbolically, the fact that you are destroying a statue of an important political leader for the Hazaras kind of shows what your intentions are and the direction of your rule on what it means for these people going forward.

Summia Tora: That’s Rabia Khan, an academic in the U.K. who did her doctoral research on the Hazara community. In the late 1800s, Khan told me, Hazaras had their own self-governing region in the central part of the country, an area known as Hazarajat. But at the end of the 19th century, the Hazaras’ circumstances suddenly — and drastically — changed.

Rabia Khan: The rhetoric of religion was used to justify a really horrific and severe war against the Hazaras, which started around 1890 and lasted for several years. And then in that time, countless Hazaras were massacred. And many Hazara women were raped.

Summia Tora: Many were forced to flee to Iran and the part of British-occupied India that is now Pakistan. In the 1920s, a new Afghan king outlawed slavery — but for Hazaras, the practice continued.

Rabia Khan: They were the cheapest slaves in Kabul. So what we see in the earliest 20th century is, although the war has ended for some time, perception of Hazaras as the slave class and having a low social status is something very prevalent in the wider society. So that’s something very widespread in the early to even mid-20th century, and that perception you can even say it persists to this day when we started to see more Hazara visibility in more recent years.

Summia Tora: The 1990s, when Hamid was growing up, was a pivotal period for Hazaras in Afghanistan.

Rabia Khan: And again, they’d be mocked and ridiculed for their appearance. So even the word “Hazara” was used as a pejorative. Not only in the 1990s, but even now “Hazara” is used as a pejorative by some people. And that there are even specific racial slurs that are used in reference to Hazaras only and not other ethnic communities. The most common one that came up in my interactions and discussions was with the Hazara community was a racial slur, which I won’t say in Persian, but the translation in English is “rat eater.”

Summia Tora: After the United States forced the Taliban from power in 2001, Hazaras welcomed the new Western-backed government and embraced opportunities, particularly for education. They routinely scored at the top of the national university entrance exams, and Hazara-majority areas recorded among the highest voter turnout in elections. Many went to work for Western NGOs and the government. But with that progress came risks.

Rabia Khan: So you see this very strange situation unfold post-2001, in terms of visibility and representation, but how that’s also almost a threat for the community. Because in having this heightened visibility, there’s now this perception that “Hazaras are now a threat, so something needs to be done about that.”

Summia Tora: I thought of the story my dad had told me about the killing of Hazaras in northern Afghanistan. My parents left Afghanistan in the 1990s to escape persecution and give my siblings and me a better life. That’s what Hamid wanted for his kids, and especially for his daughter, Eliza.

Eliza: I am 8 years old.

Summia Tora: Aww.

Summia Tora (in Dari): What subjects do you like to study?

Eliza (in Dari): I like Dari and math subjects.

Summia Tora (in Dari): Why do you like Dari and math?

Hiding and Surviving

Summia Tora: After we failed to get Hamid and his family out of Afghanistan, I kept in touch with him through my colleagues at Dosti Network, an organization I founded last year to help Afghans get aid and support, and to leave the country if necessary. But after the U.S. pulled out, many countries refused to help more Afghans evacuate.

Hamid worked for a French nonprofit organization, Geres, which focuses on climate and the environment.

Michael: The French government, I think, turned their backs on a lot of the civil society workers that they funded through their programs. Which is a shame because if you really think about it, it’s like the whole idea of trying to build up Afghanistan really was the idea that you tell people not to, say, pick up guns and fight through politics.

Summia Tora: That’s the American I’m calling Michael, who worked with Hamid and tried to help him and his family leave last year.

Michael: The whole idea of having a peaceful civil society was what NATO was trying to push, right? To build up this country. You can’t just say that it’s just the military members that were the ones that were at risk here. It was actually a lot of the civilian and civil society workers who were really a critical part to any kind of Afghanistan that would be peaceful and would actually be built under the principles that NATO was trying to achieve.

Summia Tora: On March 24, I sent Hamid a text message to find out how he was doing and if he was still in Kabul.

NBC: A missile striking an industrial park in western Ukraine [explosion]. A helicopter assault on an airport outside of Kyiv, close intense fighting. And there are civilian casualties.

Summia Tora: The war in Ukraine had started a month earlier. Europe, Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. had welcomed thousands of Ukrainian refugees, while Afghans still had to jump through hoops and fill out endless forms. Hamid sent me a voice memo while standing in line at the passport office.

Hamid (Dari translated): Salam, Summia Jan, I hope you are doing well. Sorry for the delay in responding, as I was standing in the passport line.

Summia Tora: Hamid told me that he was still in Kabul, and that he and Jamila recently had a baby boy. Hamid was trying to get their travel documents in order when Afghanistan suddenly burst into the news again.

Ari Shapiro (NPR): Three blasts rocked the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Tuesday. They appeared to target schools, and six people were killed.

Summia Tora: On April 19, a school called Abdul Rahim Shahid — known for its students’ educational achievements — was attacked. Hamid had studied there himself years earlier.

Hamid: The recent attack in Abdul Rahim Shahid high school. It reportedly killed about 200 schoolchildren. This attack also was called the series of ISIS attacks that targeted Hazara Shia ethnicities in west of Kabul, particularly schoolchildren in this area.

Summia Tora: Dasht-e-Barchi had gained a reputation as a place where Hazaras could get a good education for their kids and lift their families out of poverty. But since 2015, deadly attacks like these had grown common. 

Rabia Khan: That status and reputation of the area really changed post-2001, because there were so many targeted attacks against Hazaras there. Although there have been great achievements, and the community has really worked hard to lift themselves out of their previous circumstances, there were outside elements that made it very hard to just live a normal life as a Hazara in Kabul since 2001.

Summia Tora: Bombings were occurring so frequently the shock of them wore off.

Hamid (in Dari): Whenever there is a bomb incident and you find out, you are shocked, but when it keeps repeating often, you either become courageous, you don’t feel scared, or you try not to think about it because you know it will happen again.

Summia Tora: Hamid would try to find out who was killed, how many people were injured, if any of the victims were family members. There were times where he was close — 500 meters from a targeted school. Bomb attacks had become a part of everyday life for them.

So far, the Taliban has allowed education for girls up to sixth grade in schools that are segregated by sex. But Hamid and Jamila moved often to avoid being found by the Taliban, and they were too scared to send Eliza to school most days because of the threat of violence. After the attack at Shahid school, Hamid decided he’d had enough. He would take his family to Bamiyan.

So this past May, they fled Kabul and made their way north. Bamiyan was familiar, but it was far from the life Hamid and Jamila had imagined for themselves and their children.

Jamila (translated voiceover): We don’t have hope; we don’t have motivation. We are always thinking about how can we leave. We don’t feel free. Even now, when I am at home and my head is not covered, I constantly make sure the curtains are closed so that the Taliban don’t see and send [the Ministry for the] Propagation of Virtue to inspect. “Why is this woman walking around at home without her head covered?” I have no interest in going out. I am at home all day.

Summia Tora: Hamid had managed to renew his and his family’s passports and to get one for his son. But they still couldn’t leave.

Hamid: Having a passport is one side of the matter. The visa to leave the country is another side of the problem. So it is the only two countries we have, Iran and Pakistan, they give us visas. So if we go to Iran or Pakistan, we cannot accommodate. We don’t have, like, our expenses to live there. That is why we prefer to be here under the Taliban rule.

Summia Tora: In Bamiyan, Hamid registered Eliza for school. But like Jamila, he felt lost.

Hamid: Staying in Afghanistan, it is also scary here. And also everything is unknown. We don’t know what happens next, what is waiting for us. We don’t know, days and nights, what will happen, what our future would be. What should we do, which way we should follow to reach to our goal or to at least to stay safe. And it is a kind of advice for myself just to be patient. It is the only option right now.

A Door Opens

Summia Tora: Last month, I messaged Hamid to see how he was doing. He replied with amazing news: He and his family had made it to Pakistan. I reached him by phone there on August 15, exactly a year after Kabul fell to the Taliban.

Summia Tora: Hello? It’s great to hear that you’ve heard back about your P-2 application. I had completely forgotten that you had applied for that. Would it be possible if you could share about the process of the P-2 application for the U.S.?

Hamid: When I received the approval for my P-2 application for the U.S. program, I got so happy. It was a cheerful moment sharing this good news with my wife and my little kid.

Summia Tora: A few months after the final U.S. withdrawal last year, Hamid had applied to come to the United States through what’s known as the Priority 2, or P-2, program. It’s a visa program for Afghans who worked as employees, contractors, or interpreters for U.S. and NATO forces, for U.S.-funded programs or projects, or for U.S.-based media organizations and NGOs. I knew Hamid had worked for Geres. But it turns out he’d also worked for an Afghan NGO that was funded by the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

On August 2, about a year after he applied, he got an email from the U.S. government saying that he and his family met the eligibility requirements for the program.

Hamid: When I received the approval for my P-2 application, actually it was in the morning. When I shared this good news with my wife, she suddenly stood up. She got so happy to express her feelings by shaking her hands and head to dance. And she got so hopeful, and also she got surprised. She was hopeful that we would be able to leave this country finally.

Summia Tora: Hamid and his family drove from Bamiyan to Kabul and then took a taxi to the Pakistani border. The crossing was hot and crowded, and Hamid worried that his kids might get sick or overheated. But after 12 hours, they made it.

They stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights in Islamabad, then found a house to rent. The U.S. makes Afghans go to a third country to await the next stage in their immigration process. Hamid and Jamila don’t speak Urdu, and they don’t have visas that allow them to work in Pakistan.

Summia Tora: Do you have any thoughts about living in Pakistan and how long you’d be able to live there because you have to wait for a couple of months until the P-2 process moves forward?

Hamid: Our concern is the unemployment for refugees. For sure, I’m looking for a job for myself and my wife too. And in Pakistan, particularly in Islamabad, it is very difficult to find a proper job. And also it is very low-paid job that does not cover the family expenses and it is very difficult to afford.

Summia Tora: Leaving Afghanistan, as anyone who’s done it knows, comes with its own difficulties. Just ask my father.

Summia Tora: So you are now in Virginia. What is it like living there?

Sayed Tora: Living there have some benefits, and some it’s good. On the other side, it’s hard to live in USA. You have to work. You miss your friends, family. Now you can speak, but [laughs] there are no people to listen to you. [laughs] This is the difference. [laughs]

Summia Tora: My father is safe, but his life isn’t the same, and it never will be. And it never will be for Hamid and his family.

Summia Tora: Does getting this email and now moving to Pakistan, waiting for this process of P-2 — is it giving you hope about being able to have a future that you hope for, for yourself and for your family?

Hamid: Actually it is not very certain that I can move to U.S. one day because I am right now in the third country. So I hope so, that it will happen one day to go to U.S. It is the only chance I have right now. And I hope so it will happen one day.

[Credits]

Summia Tora: No Way Home is a production of The Intercept and New America’s Afghanistan Observatory Scholars program.

This episode was written and reported by me, Summia Tora.

Our executive producer and editor is Vanessa Gezari.

Supervising producer and editor is Laura Flynn.

Candace Rondeaux is the director of Future Frontlines Program-New America and project editor.

Ali Yawar Adili, is the Afghanistan Observatory Project Coordinator.

Laura Flynn and Jose Olivares produced this episode.

Rick Kwan mixed this episode.

Zach Young composed our theme music.

Legal review by David Bralow.

Fact checking by Emily Schneider.

Awista Ayub is the director and project manager of New America’s Fellows Program.

Voiceover in this episode by Humaira Rahbin.

To learn more, visit theintercept.com where you can find transcripts and show art.

Philipp Hubert is our visual designer and Nara Shin our copy editor.

Roger Hodge is editor-in-chief of The Intercept.

If you want to give us feedback or have any questions, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks, so much, for listening.

The post No Way Home, Episode Four: Getting Out Alive appeared first on The Intercept.

Maryam Barak, an Afghan journalist, made it to Italy with her family last summer. In Rome, she met Qader Kazimizada, another newly arrived Afghan who is helping refugees find community in an alien place.

Transcript

Qader Kazimizada: Come ti chiami?

Nargis: Nargis.

Qader Kazimizada: No, you have to complete it. Io mi chiamo —

Nargis: Io mi chiamo Nargis.

Qader Kazimizada: Quanti anni hai?

Nargis: Sette anni.

Qader Kazimizada: Complete it: Io ho sette anni. OK, very good. Da dove sei?

Maryam Barak: Qader Kazimizada is playing with his 7-year-old daughter, Nargis, in their temporary home, a spacious apartment in central Rome. They have been living in Italy for about a year, and the children are learning the language.

They’re picking it up more easily than their parents, who fled Afghanistan after Kabul fell to the Taliban. Qader and his family made it out and ended up in Rome, where they are trying to start a new life, in a new country and a new culture.

[Theme music]

Maryam Barak: From The Intercept and New America, this is No Way Home. In this four-part series, you’ll hear stories that were found, developed, and reported by Afghans like me, who have been forced into exile. Our stories reflect what we saw with our own eyes and what we and other Afghans have experienced firsthand since the U.S. military pulled out, the Afghan government collapsed, and the Taliban took over last summer.

This is Episode Three: “Born Again.”

[Theme music ends]

Maryam Barak: I’m Maryam Barak, an Afghan journalist.

I left my home, my identity, and everything on August 23, 2021. But still, I consider myself more fortunate than many other Afghan refugees: I am with my family in Italy. 

What I’m about to tell you is a different kind of Afghan refugee story. It isn’t about the struggle to get out of Kabul or a dramatic life-and-death journey. Instead, it’s about adapting to life in a new country, about finding hope — despite all we have left behind. These quieter stories are just as common; they are stories of resilience.

I met Qader Kazimizada as I was also trying to learn Italian and integrate into this new society. Qader already spoke English when he arrived in Italy with his family last fall, but he struggled to learn Italian. He soon realized that other Afghan refugees were having the same problem. He created a WhatsApp group to communicate with them. 

Qader Kazimizada: So I created a group, and called them. “Are you ready? Do you need my help? I want to have a class for you.” They were surprised and really felt very happy: “Oh, that is wonderful, please! That is good.”

Maryam Barak: Despite the fact that he himself was just beginning to learn Italian, Qader began teaching Afghan refugees what he had learned in his own classes, offering both support with the language and a sense of community. He taught the classes in languages Afghans could understand, like Persian. 

Back in Afghanistan, Qader worked as a finance officer for Jesuit Refugee Services, an international nongovernmental organization that at the time provided education, vocational training, and emergency services to people in Afghanistan. Qader had been worried about the worsening security situation in the country, but like many others, he thought he and his family would be safe in Kabul, the country’s cosmopolitan capital. 

Sitting in his living room in Rome, with his children playing near him, Qader told me about the day everything changed: August 15, 2021. He was at his office in Kabul when he learned that the Taliban had entered the city. He grabbed his laptop and immediately rushed home. When he got there, he realized the Taliban were already in his neighborhood. Suddenly, the lines of people rushing to the airport made sense.

Qader Kazimizada: They have entered, and there are many people, many people, many young boys. They are clicking pictures with the Taliban.

Maryam Barak: Working for a Catholic organization put Qader in danger. Leaving Afghanistan suddenly seemed like the only way to save his family. When the government collapsed, he started contacting every foreigner he had ever met, asking for help. Eventually, Jesuit Refugee Services said they could evacuate Qader, his wife, and two kids, Nargis and Firdaws. 

But they couldn’t take everyone. Qader would have to leave his parents and siblings behind. He and his wife took their 7-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son to the airport. The Italian government agreed to take in the group. With no notice, Qader and his family were now headed to Rome.

Qader Kazimizada: We didn’t have even any choice. There was no choice because at that moment, the only thing important was to get out from Kabul.

Maryam Barak: When Qader and his family arrived in Italy, they spent two weeks in a hotel, quarantining because of pandemic-related restrictions. Then they were sent to a camp for refugees and migrants in Vibo Valentia, a city in the south of the country. The camp was crowded and isolated, and Qader’s wife and children struggled. 

Qader Kazimizada: It was not a good place for the family. We were four families among 18 single refugees from Africa, from Pakistan, from different parts of Africa. And also we were not provided the keys, and there we had no actual privacy.

Maryam Barak: Qader didn’t feel it was safe for his family. 

Qader Kazimizada: They were drinking, shouting, fighting during the night at the corridor. I was always awake and standing behind the door, in order to avoid if they come at the door, because my family is here, my wife is here, my children are here. They will be scared.

Maryam Barak: With the help of his former employer, Qader was eventually able to move his family out of the refugee camp and into an apartment in Rome, one of several homes made available to Afghan refugees through Italian charity organizations.

That’s where we’re sitting. It’s April 2022, and Qader’s wife Habiba, who is nine months pregnant with their third child, plays with the kids. Qader’s daughter is attending an Italian school and loves her new home. 

Qader Kazimizada: Fortunately, she found Italy very nice. And now she’s very happy. 

Maryam Barak: And she is going to school? 

Qader Kazimizada: She is going to school. She has found many, many friends. She goes to her friends’ houses. They are inviting her in order to play, to do homework together. Yesterday, one of these families took her to the sea. And she was very happy. She went with them.

Maryam Barak: The Italian government evacuated 5,000 Afghans after August 15. Like other refugees resettling in Italy, they were given food and accommodations. Once they receive official refugee status, they begin the “reception and integration” process, including Italian language classes and employment training.

The Italian government is paying for Qader’s apartment, and he receives about 380 euros a month for food and other expenses for his family of four, as well as a transit pass. Through the program, he has also started learning Italian. 

In Afghanistan, Qader mostly spoke English at work to communicate with colleagues from around the world. He thought that would be enough to get by in Italy too. But he soon learned that was not the case at all. 

Qader Kazimizada: It was something that really surprised me, oh my God, it is something that it is a little difficult, but anyhow I will cope with later. It was difficult, only the language, because many were not speaking in English, only Italiano. While we didn’t know anything in Italiano.

Maryam Barak: Not speaking the language was a huge challenge for him, particularly as he needed help to navigate his new city. 

Qader Kazimizada: I asked two police officers in English, “Where can I get bus 75 to go to Monteverde? They did not speak English, and they got very angry, said, “Qui Italia, Italia.” And now I understand that they were saying, “Where is this?” And asked me, “Where [are we]? Italia, Italia. Italiano, italiano.” And this was, for me, OK, no problem. I said, “Thank you.” I knew only one word: grazie.

Maryam Barak: From then on, Qader became more serious about his Italian lessons. 

In Italy, several refugee NGOs offer language classes, but a challenge for many Afghans learning Italian is that their teachers often rely on English as an intermediary language, which some Afghans don’t speak. As Qader continued his lessons and started studying more, it dawned on him that many Afghans would face even greater challenges than he did picking up the language. 

Qader Kazimizada: We are learning Italiano, trying to get integrated with the people, with Italian people. How they can manage to learn Italian, while they have no English background?

Maryam Barak: Qader was particularly worried about two Afghan families he knew who had a hard time settling in. 

Qader Kazimizada: So I thought better to start a class for them. Because I knew English, so I was trying to do self-study. Then I thought, “OK, I can teach them!”

Finding Hope Through Teaching Others

Maryam Barak: Qader started teaching other Afghan refugees what he had learned in his own classes. His wife and children also joined his lessons.

Qader Kazimizada: I told them that I will explain everything in Persian, and I will teach you very slowly. They said, “Yeah, that’s good.”

Maryam Barak:  Word spread fast, and the number of participants increased day by day. He shared an open Zoom link, and as the classes continued, more Afghans called in from all around Italy. Then at a gathering organized by the Afghan community in Rome, Afghans introduced him as an Italian teacher.

Qader Kazimizada: They said that Qader is an Italian teacher. And everyone was shocked! “How can it be possible?” I said, yeah, this is my motivation — that I can help. I help Afghan families as much as possible, but I have learned I can pass it to them, so they feel comfortable. They can learn a little bit, if not a lot, at least few things they can learn. It could be a basic step for them. 

Maryam Barak: Inspired by Qader’s work, others jumped in to help, including Sitara, an Iranian refugee who had been living in Italy for several years. Because of privacy, she only wanted to use her first name.

Qader Kazimizada: She came to me, said that “I’m really impressed by what you said, and I’m really interested to help you, if you want my help.” I said, “That is wonderful! I appreciate anyone who can help me. Welcome.”

So she explained, “I used to teach in Iran, at a university, Italian for one year or one year and a half.” She said, “Here also I have a class teaching others, so maybe I can help you.” I said, “That is wonderful, please!”

Maryam Barak: In 2015, Sitara had traveled to Afghanistan to film a documentary. She fell in love with the country and realized there was a huge disconnect between the reality of Afghan life and the ways in which the country was often portrayed by the international media.

Sitara (translated voiceover): A country where we have always heard of war and terrorism, adversity, misery and extremism — here I met really lovely people. People [in] civil society who had tried to work on culture and art. I met them in person, up close. The efforts and struggles they, especially women, especially artists, had been making. There were poets, poetry nights, film festivals, and women filmmakers. It was all very strange to me, and it was an image that would not be transferred outside Afghanistan.

Maryam Barak: After the collapse of the Afghan government, Sitara wanted to help Afghan refugees. When she met Qader, she thought this was the opportunity she had been looking for. So she started teaching Italian, using Persian as a go-between.

Sitara (translated voiceover): The level of students, their age, their family situation, from where in Afghanistan they came, their background, and where they live now are different as night and day. It’s very different. Because we have a link open to people who want to introduce it to their friends, and we welcome all of them. And the door is open to all with a condition, the only condition. These classes are completely free and charitable: Be present and study.

Maryam Barak: Sitara, a refugee herself, can relate to the challenges her students face.

Sitara (translated voiceover): I may say migration is like being born again, or I may say it is a kind of death. That is, you die from a human being you were, from everything you had, from your previous life, and are born in a new world — especially when it is not self-imposed migration and it’s forced. In the case of Afghans, it happened overnight. They are still in shock, and I am sure that they are still digesting, processing the psychological consequences of what happened, the volume of violence that was inflicted on them, and the fear and horror that was imposed [on them].

Maryam Barak: Qader’s Italian classes have helped him not only to learn and teach the language, but also to find a purpose in his new life, and a way to remain connected to other Afghans and build community. The classes also helped him overcome some of the emotional challenges that often accompany becoming a refugee — including a bout of depression in his first weeks after arriving in Italy. In those early days, he would walk around Rome by himself, trying to make sense of his new life. 

Qader Kazimizada: I experienced depression in the beginning, so I was always thinking how to come out of that depression. Sometimes I used to go to Gianicolo, even during the night after 10 [p.m.] to walk and just see Rome, come back and sometimes get engaged with other things with my lessons.

Maryam Barak: Afghan migrants from all over Italy are joining Qader’s classes today. 

Mohammad Tahir is one of them. He lives in Ancona, a port city on the Adriatic Sea. Mohammad Tahir and his wife can’t read and write, so they worried that would make learning a new language even harder. Not speaking Italian made them feel cut off from their new community. 

Mohammad Tahir (translated voiceover): There is a supermarket here that issues cards and where we go for shopping. At the counter when they count and tell us the amount of money, we just give the card [to pay]. When my children are with me, it’s a bit better. For me it is very hard, and my blood pressure goes up. When you cannot speak [the language], you feel dumb and it is very hard to bear.

Maryam Barak: For the first five months in Italy, Mohammad Tahir’s family did not have access to language classes. But now they’re taking weekly lessons from native Italian speakers, and three of their children have started school. They also call into Qader’s Zoom classes for additional practice. This is Tahir’s wife, Latifa:

Latifa Tahir (translated voiceover): Now it’s very good. Our anxiety has decreased significantly. In the past, when our electricity was gone, we could not tell our neighbors, who are all Italians, [that we didn’t have power]. We remained without electricity even for two days. We ate dinner in front of the telephone light. We could not turn on the central heating that had been out of commission and went through much trouble.

Maryam Barak: Recently, I sat in on one of Qader’s Zoom classes. The lesson began with him greeting his students in Italian.

Qader Kazimizada: Ciao buona sera. Ciao a tutti, come state?

Ali Hussain: Bene grazie.

Qader Kazimizada: OK, OK. 

Student: Bene grazie.

Qader: Come sta, Murtaza? Murtaza, come sta?

Murtaza: Bene.

Maryam Barak: The students I met in Qader’s class deeply appreciate his efforts. And Qader is happy to be helping people cope with the stress and anxiety that comes from leaving behind their country and adjusting to a whole new culture and language.

He recalls a recent memory from class.

Qader Kazimizada: During the class, the teacher asked him in Dari, in Persian, [say], “We have eaten dinner, and we have done our dinner.” Then, immediately, a little boy, he said, “Abbiamo, I think like that?” And another phrase, he said, “Abbiamo mangiato.” For me, immediately, without any thinking, I really got happy that, oh, thank God, I have done something. And this is what the fruit is: They are learning.

Maryam Barak: Qader knows that learning Italian is only the first of many challenges ahead for him and fellow Afghans. For now, he is focused on finding a job, so that he can take care of his family in Italy and back in Afghanistan. 

Qader Kazimizada: I am ready [for] any job, but in fact, this is important for me, the job which has a little more payment. [laughs] Now the first priority is this: At least I can stand on my feet. I can support my family here, and I can support my family there, if I can bring them here. I’m also thinking about starting maybe a small business, maybe cafe, coffee shop, restaurant, or whatever.

Maryam Barak: The Italian classes he runs have helped him envision a future for himself and his family here. Qader hopes helping others can help him chart his own path in this new home. 

Qader Kazimizada: I have been always thinking that I am a human being. I have to be — how to say? — I have to be a person who can at least help others, not harm others. I know that today, many, many people are harmed by each other. So I was always thinking that I have to be like this: My path has to be very defined, very clear that I have to help others if I can.

[Credits]

Maryam Barak: Next time on No Way Home. 

Hamid: About staying in Afghanistan it is also scary here. Everything is unknown. We don’t know what happens next. What is waiting for us? We don’t know, days and nights, what will happen, what our future would be. What should we do, which way we should follow to reach to our goal or to at least to stay safe.

Maryam Barak: No Way Home is a production of The Intercept and New America’s Afghanistan Observatory Scholars program. 

This episode was written and reported by me, Maryam Barak. 

Our executive producer and editor is Vanessa Gezari.

Alice Speri also edited this story. 

Supervising producer is Laura Flynn. 

Candace Rondeaux is the director of Future Frontlines Program-New America and project editor. 

Ali Yawar Adili is the Afghanistan Observatory Project Coordinator.

Jose Olivares helped with production. 

Rick Kwan mixed this episode.

Zach Young composed our theme music.

Legal review by David Bralow.

Fact checking by Emily Schneider. 

Awista Ayub is the director and project manager of New America’s Fellows Program. 

Voiceovers by Humaira Rahbin and Mir Miri. 

To learn more, visit theintercept.com where you can find transcripts and art of the show.

Philipp Hubert is our visual designer and Nara Shin our copy editor.

Roger Hodge is editor-in-chief of The Intercept. 

If you want to give us feedback or have any questions, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks, so much, for listening.

The post No Way Home, Episode Three: Born Again appeared first on The Intercept.

As the Taliban claimed territory last summer, Mir Abdullah Miri and his cousin Aziz both planned to flee their homes in Herat, a city in western Afghanistan. Mir, an educational researcher, made it to the Afghan capital and tried to get on a flight, while Aziz, a cellphone programmer, decided to cross into Iran on foot with his wife and two young children, hoping to reach relatives in Germany. After Aziz and his family set off through Afghanistan’s southern desert, Mir was left to untangle the mystery of what really happened to them in that desolate wilderness, where thousands of Afghans have risked their lives in search of a way out.

Transcript

A quick warning: This episode includes descriptions of a traumatic experience. Please listen at your discretion.

Leila (translated voiceover): I couldn’t walk. My toenails were completely ripped off. All my toenails were torn off on the way. I felt it myself. I couldn’t sit down to take off my shoes, but I could feel that my toenails were coming off.

I had to take care of my children. I had fallen in several places, and my eyes were closed. All I could hear was my daughter and son crying.

Mir Abdullah Miri: When the Taliban seized Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, Leila’s husband, Aziz, quickly started planning the family’s exit from the country. Their attempt to leave would irreversibly change their lives — and mine.

Leila (translated voiceover): I don’t know who had given me water. It was a stranger. One of them offered to carry my daughter, but I didn’t trust them. I was worried he might take my daughter and run away or something.

[Theme music]

Mir Abdullah Miri: This is No Way Home, a production of The Intercept and New America.

In this four-part series you’ll hear stories that were found, developed, and reported by Afghans like me, who have been forced into exile.

Our stories reflect what we saw with our own eyes and what we and our families have experienced firsthand since the U.S. military pulled out, the Afghan government collapsed, and the Taliban took over last summer.

This is Episode Two: “The Desert of Death.”

[Theme music ends]

Mir Abdullah Miri: My name is Mir Abdullah Miri. I’m an educational researcher living in the U.K. Around this time last year, I was still in Afghanistan, fighting to get out. And so was my cousin, Aziz.

The last time I saw Aziz, he was standing in front of the cellphone store where he worked in Herat, the third largest city in Afghanistan. Located in the western part of the country, the city has been home to many renowned poets, writers, and artists. A jewel along the Silk Road, Herat has long been coveted by conquerors and occupiers.

[Sounds of gunfire]

In July of 2021, Taliban fighters were intensifying their attacks in Herat. This was about a month before they would take control of the capital, Kabul.

That day in front of the cellphone store, Aziz and I had a short conversation. He told me about his plans to leave the country and settle in Germany. He had an uncle and cousin there. His wife, Leila, said Aziz wanted a better life for their kids.

Leila (translated voiceover): He would say, “I don’t like raising my son here. My son should go and study somewhere he deserves.” Because our son knew the English alphabet and was smart.

Aziz: Ice.

Amir: Ice.

Aziz: Ice.

Amir: Ice.

Aziz: Cream.

Amir: Cream.

Aziz: Ice cream.

Amir: Ice cream.

Aziz: Cookie ice cream.

Leila: Aziz would say, “He is a waste here. I want to raise my son somewhere he deserves.”

Mir Abdullah Miri: Aziz wanted to raise his children somewhere where they could go to school, play, and have fun. But getting to Germany was going to be more difficult for Aziz and his family than I realized the last time I saw him.

For reasons that will become apparent, I’m using pseudonyms for all of the subjects in this story.

Leila (translated voiceover): Both Aziz and I had passports. Our passports had expired. Our son and newborn daughter didn’t have a passport.

Mir Abdullah Miri: The original plan was to get to Germany through Iran, then Turkey. But because Aziz and his family didn’t have passports or proper travel documents, their options for getting there were limited.

[Sounds from passport office]

Following the collapse of the government, Afghanistan’s passport offices were flooded with people. They were forced to close because of malfunctioning biometric equipment, leaving thousands of Afghans stranded.

Leila (translated voiceover): Aziz would say, “I can’t afford to go illegally from Islam Qala border. I will go from Nimroz with my uncle because he has taken this route before.”

Mir Abdullah Miri: Islam Qala is a town in Afghanistan on the border with Iran. It’s much closer to Herat than Nimroz, but also more heavily patrolled.

Nimroz, a province in the southwestern part of Afghanistan, borders Iran and Pakistan. It’s a well-known smuggling hub, where drugs, people, money, and more are trafficked between borders.

Leila (translated voiceover): I think he would not have taken this illegal route if the passport office had been open.

Mir Abdullah Miri: To make the journey, Aziz sold his laptop. He learned from relatives that his uncle Ahmad wanted to go to Iran, so he would come along too. Leila’s dad knew a smuggler in Herat who could help them get there.

The day Aziz decided to leave the country, he wrote on Facebook, “Goodbye Afghanistan, Goodbye Herat.”

That same day, Aziz visited his aunt to say goodbye and ask for her blessing. They waited to hear from the smuggler.

Leila (translated voiceover): We were supposed to exactly go at 4 o’clock on Friday. Our bags were packed in the morning. We were ready to go, but it did not happen, and the smuggler called us and said that we would go tomorrow. The next day, again, it did not happen and was delayed to the next day, which was Sunday, when he called and told us that on Monday at 4:00 p.m., he would definitely move us from Herat to Nimroz.

Mir Abdullah Miri: On Monday, August 30, 2021, two weeks after the Afghan government had collapsed and the Taliban had taken control of the country, Aziz posted on Facebook: “O God, send blessings upon Muhammad and the Progeny of Muhammad.” Perhaps a sign that he was nervous about the journey ahead.

The Journey Begins

[Sounds of the Herat bus terminal]

Mir Abdullah Miri: Later that day, Aziz, his wife, their 3-year-old son, and infant daughter, and his uncle, along with his wife and their baby, went to the Herat bus terminal.

Leila: We only had taken one extra set of clothes, because I had a little daughter who was a newborn. So I took a small bag with medicines and syrups for my son because he had dust allergies, and formula milk, boiled water, and a baby bottle for my daughter. I knew that there might not be water and food available during this trip, and I may not be able to breastfeed my daughter.

Mir Abdullah Miri: The smuggler was supposed to take Aziz’s family across the border, but they only had about a third of what they needed in cash to pay him. They also needed money to cover travel expenses like food, lodging, and transportation along the way.

They told the smuggler they would pay the rest when they arrived in Iran. They set off to Nimroz to meet the smuggler.

[Sounds of crowds in Nimroz]

Leila (translated voiceover): Once we arrived in Nimroz, all the crossing points were closed. It was very crowded in Nimroz. There was no car that we could take. We stayed there four nights. After four nights, I told Aziz that it was not possible: “Now that it is impossible to go, let’s return home.” He told me that he would not return even if he died during this journey.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Fearing life under the Taliban and economic collapse, hundreds of thousands of people across the country have tried to flee. Although the desert and mountainous terrain is treacherous, Nimroz is easier for people to cross into Iran illegally.

Hotels were packed. The deserts and mountains were crowded with people. Everyone wanted to leave. While they were waiting for the smuggler, Leila and Aziz got into an argument.

Leila (translated voiceover): I told him that we have our house; we have everything. We don’t care if others leave. Let’s return. Aziz said, “Had I known you are like this, I wouldn’t have married you.” He even told me, “Even if I get killed, I won’t return home. Bury me in Iran next to my father’s grave if I die. I won’t return to Afghanistan.”

Mir Abdullah Miri: Migration from Afghanistan rose in the months before the Afghan government fell to the Taliban.

VOA: The number of Afghans crossing the border illegally has increased by 30 to 40 percent since May, when international forces began withdrawing from Afghanistan and the Taliban increased its attacks.

Mir Abdullah Miri: The number of people trying to leave was still high at the end of August last year.

Afghans make up one of the largest refugee populations in the world. Over 2 million Afghan refugees are registered in Iran and Pakistan, which together are home to about three-quarters of Afghan refugees. At least 1,500 Afghans have lost their lives on migration routes across Asia and Europe since 2014, according to the International Organization for Migration; most of those deaths occurred while crossing into Iran.

Since there is so little official data on the deaths of migrants, the actual figure is probably much higher. Most of these deaths occur along the Afghanistan-Iran route that Aziz and his family chose.

Afghan refugees have had devastating experiences in Iran. In May 2020, 23 Afghan migrants who were trying to cross the border to Iran drowned in the Harirud River after Iranian border guards beat them and forced them to jump into the water. A month later, Iranian police shot at a car carrying Afghan migrants. The car burst into flames; three people died.

[Sounds from the streets of Qom, Iran]

Aziz had grown up in Qom, Iran. His parents had migrated there during the Afghan civil war in the 1990s. When Aziz was 7, his dad died in a traffic accident. At the time, Aziz’s mom was only 20 years old, left to raise three kids. To make ends meet, she cleaned their neighbors’ houses. As a kid, Aziz would work half a day and go to school the other half. After finishing high school, he was no longer eligible for free education in Iran.

In 2008, seven years after the U.S. military arrived in Afghanistan, Aziz and his family moved to Herat. It took Aziz a few years to get used to living in Afghanistan. He started working as a software programmer at a cellphone store. Leila and Aziz married in 2015. A few years later, he got his bachelor’s degree in computer science.

Aziz grew to love Herat. He used to call himself Aziz HRT — short for Herat — a nickname he chose to show his regard for his new home. Even his Facebook pictures had the caption “Aziz HRT.” For several years, Aziz lived a normal life in Herat, until insecurity and conflict in the country increased, leading many Afghans to flee their homes.

As the economy weakened, Aziz struggled to make ends meet. He began thinking about getting a new job or a part-time job, but he didn’t succeed because almost everyone had a similar problem.

[Sounds from Nimroz]

Mir Abdullah Miri: Back in Nimroz, Leila and Aziz were growing impatient. They still hadn’t heard from the smuggler. They had no information about their border crossing or know what to expect.

When they finally got a hold of the smuggler the next day, he told them to keep waiting. Aziz, Ahmad, and their wives and children were sharing a space with five other families.

Leila (translated voiceover): It is a place where you cannot make a call, and no one helps you [if you] cry out of pain.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Leila described their time in Nimroz.

Leila (translated voiceover): We lived on fruits like melon and watermelon. During the four nights in Nimroz, in our initial place, we could make calls and were in contact. The internet also worked but not properly. We were told to hide our phones. I even took my marriage ring off my finger. I was told to hide my ring because we would be chased.

From Smuggler to Smuggler

Mir Abdullah Miri: After four days and no progress, Aziz found a new smuggler, Khalil, with the help of a family friend.

It’s not hard to find a smuggler in Nimroz who will agree to take you across the border for the right price.

Leila (translated voiceover): The smuggler said, “It’s up to you. You have a choice to make: All border crossings are closed, except Kalagan, which requires four hours of walking.”

Mir Abdullah Miri: Khalil, the new smuggler Aziz found, warned that the only route open to them was not safe for a family with two young children. But Aziz insisted.

Leila (translated voiceover): It was Friday, and the smuggler himself moved us to a new lodging place. He didn’t charge us for the place, but he charged us for the food. The food was like what you’d cook for a small child. And because the food is not enough, the child won’t get full. He would charge us 200 Afghani per person for that food.

Mir Abdullah Miri: It was very expensive for them, and the accommodations were sparse.

Leila (translated voiceover): The new place was inside the city. It was inside the city but in the backstreets. It was a ruined house and had two floors. Married people were on one floor; singles were on the other floor. The women and children were on one side of the room, and the men — whether their husbands, brothers, and everyone else — were on the other side of the room. There was only a curtain between men and women.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Before I continue, let me explain how smugglers work in this part of the country.

Smuggling networks work with sarafs: basically freelance financial agents. The sarafs act as intermediaries between smugglers and migrants. Migrants usually pay the sarafs in advance, but the money is only handed over to the smuggler once the client has reached his destination.

Migrants are usually divided into groups of 5 to 10. They rely on their guides for information about the geography and length of the trip. Throughout the journey, they’re passed from one smuggler to another, all part of the same network.

The new smuggler gave them a phone number and told them to use it if they got lost. Khalil told them that they were now Abdullah Kaj’s people, another smuggler. He told them what to expect from the journey.

Leila (translated voiceover): He told us to put the phone number in each child’s pocket, so they could be found in case they were lost along the way.

Mir Abdullah Miri: By rickshaws, the smuggler took Leila, Aziz, their two children, his uncle, and his uncle’s family to a place where another set of smugglers would meet them.

Leila (translated voiceover): The weather was unbearably hot. We were in a desert. It was not in our control. We didn’t have the choice to decide [when to go and how to go]. When you say “smuggling,” it’s clear from its name. It’s not for you to say. You have to bear it.

All the children were crying; even my son and my daughter were crying. I didn’t know how to calm them.

Mir Abdullah Miri: In the desert, they arrived to find pickup trucks and cars.

Leila (translated voiceover): The cars were not that comfortable to sit in. They were worn-out Toyotas. It was me, my two children, my uncle’s wife, two other women — who were our distant relatives — with a child each, plus the bags we had. We were crammed into the second row of the cabin with difficulty. The men had to sit on the back of the truck.

Mir Abdullah Miri: After about nine hours, they were dropped off near a tent in the desert in Pakistan. About an hour later, another car drove them through the desert and hills.

Leila (translated voiceover): Around 2:00 to 2:30 am, I had a Nokia phone with myself, and I was able to check the time. He stopped near a hill and told us to rest there, and they would move us again at 5:00 a.m. There were so many people sleeping there who had arrived earlier. There were cars and one tent there. They were all migrants. When we stopped there, the vehicle remained with us and the guy went somewhere else. There, my daughter was crying a lot and did not take anything. I mean, I couldn’t sleep from 2:30 am — when we arrived there — until 5:00 am until they moved us.

There, it was full of sand, thorns, and thistles. Because we were so bone-tired and exhausted, we laid down there without even thinking if it was sand, rock, clumps of earth, or whatever. My son didn’t eat at all during the way. Whatever I give him, he would throw up. He would even throw up a drop of water I give him.

Mir Abdullah Miri: The next morning, they left at 5:00 a.m. The driver spoke Balochi on the phone, a language spoken in the region they were passing through between Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

It is known as Dasht-e Margo, or the Desert of Death. Leila and Aziz didn’t realize this.

Four hours later, they were dropped off at a site with little shade, just a few palm trees and no water.

Leila (translated voiceover): After an hour, two cars came. They asked, “Who are Abdullah Kaj’s people?”

Mir Abdullah Miri: That’s the smuggler.

Leila (translated voiceover): “We are,” we said. The men raised their hands. The smugglers said that the men would go in one car and the women in another.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Aziz didn’t want the families separated. He insisted on being able to travel together with his wife and children.

Leila (translated voiceover): The smuggler told Aziz, “Wait here. Once you’re burnt in the sun here until the evening, then you will regret it.”

Mir Abdullah Miri: And so they were left in the desert.

Leila (translated voiceover): But we didn’t know that the weather would get that hot under those palm trees.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Every few hours, they would change places, chasing the shade of the palm trees. Finally, about eight hours later, a pickup truck pulled up, and people crowded around it. Aziz and his family were allowed in. They were put on the back of the pickup truck.

Leila (translated voiceover): The driver would drive so fast. He told us to hold fast. If anything like the bags, our kids, or ourselves fall, he would not stop for us to take our kids because there are patrol cars all around us.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Along the way, each family had to pay people at different checkpoints.

Leila (translated voiceover): Most of our money was spent paying the Taliban and the Baloch tribespeople along the way. They would take money from everyone, both families and singles. Those who did not have money, they would hit them.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Leila shared a story about a young man traveling with them.

Leila (translated voiceover): He gave his bag and his phone to us to hide because the poor man said, “These are all I had. Hide them because I have nothing else, and I might end up hungry and thirsty.” When the Taliban searched and couldn’t find anything, they hit him as much as they could.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Around midnight, they arrived at a place called Abbas Hostel, where they would be staying for the night. It had no roof — so they huddled under the desert sky.

Leila (translated voiceover): It wasn’t a hostel. It was a big compound with four walls and two doors. I should tell you, it was like a moat. It was water and dirt. There was no place to sit. We finally decided to sit next to a toilet on the dry ground, in the dirt. We had no option except to sit there. There, we ate no food and drank no water — nothing.

Mir Abdullah Miri: The next stop was at the mountains on the Pakistan-Iran border. By that point, two nights had passed since they had left Nimroz. They reached the mountains in the evening and were told to rest for two hours. They had a long walk ahead.

Leila (translated voiceover): Once he dropped us off there, we walked a few steps. We sat at the top of the mountain. Aziz was too tired to sit. He lay there on the rocks. Our son was also lying there, next to his dad.

There was no one we could buy food or water from. We had taken only some dried bread with us since we knew that dried bread doesn’t go bad easily.

[Sounds of motorbikes]

Mir Abdullah Miri: A few smugglers on motorbikes showed up at 9:00 p.m. and divided the group in two and assigned each to a different smuggler: “Mojib Baloch” and “Asmaan.” Aziz and his family were told that Asmaan would be their smuggler.

They were told to shout “Asmaan! Asmaan!” whenever they were lost, since the route was dark and crowded.

Leila (translated voiceover): All of us had to walk. It was too dark to see anything. In fact, we couldn’t see ahead of us. Our small mobile phone had a light, but the smuggler even told us to [keep it] off because if police patrols saw it, they would follow and find us.

The smuggler was on a motorbike, and he would himself go two, three mountains ahead of us and stand on the top of a mountain and signal us with his big light, asking us to follow him. He told us if we didn’t follow him, we would be left behind.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Aziz had a backpack and carried his 3-year-old son, Amir. Leila carried their baby daughter in her arms. Aziz and Leila walked together, holding hands.

Leila (translated voiceover): My son was crying a lot. As Aziz walked, he would put Amir down, held his hand, and asked him to follow him. Within minutes, he’d put him back on his shoulder. I held my daughter’s hand. Amir would cry a lot and say things like, “Daddy, I’m sleepy. Daddy, I’m hungry. Daddy, I’m dying.” His daddy was silent.

Mir Abdullah Miri: They hadn’t walked more than 30 minutes before Aziz couldn’t go any further.

Leila (translated voiceover): Once Aziz couldn’t walk, in the dark, a man approached us and offered to carry our bags because my son was crying a lot and my daughter had also started crying at this point. We even stopped and sat down to rest in a few places. But the guy took our bag and soon disappeared with our water and food.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Leila called for their uncle, Ahmad. The route was crowded with donkeys and motorbikes that typically smuggled gas, but since nearly all the borders were now closed, the business of smuggling humans was booming.

Aziz was in pain.

Leila (translated voiceover): Aziz would moan and cry “Aakh, aakh.” [expression of pain]

Mir Abdullah Miri: They stopped a man on a motorbike to ask about taking the family the rest of the way.

Leila (translated voiceover): The motorbiker looked very scary. Aziz talked to the motorbiker and asked how much he would take us. The guy said, “400,000 tomans per person.” Aziz said, “I don’t mind. It’s me, my wife, and my children.”

Mir Abdullah Miri: Aziz agreed to pay the fee, which was around 1,200 Afghani or $14, but they needed to make it down the steep mountain first. Uncle Ahmad helped Aziz down. Leila and the rest of the family followed closely.

Leila (translated voiceover): When the motorbiker stopped there, he would shout out, “Amir? Leila? Amir? Leila?” I would reply, “We are here. We are here.” He was worried about us a lot.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Once they reached the bottom of the mountain, Aziz sat on the ground in pain and even more exhausted.

Leila (translated voiceover): He was conscious, but he couldn’t find people to help him get on the motorbike. I implored some people to get him on the motorbike. Six people put him on the motorbike.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Ahmad would accompany Aziz on the motorbike with the smuggler. Leila was left with the children and her uncle Ahmad’s family. The plan was to meet at the next hostel in Iran.

Leila was growing tired too, now carrying her two children on her own. After two and a half hours, the motorbike driver came back alone. He told Leila that they took Aziz to the hospital.

Leila (translated voiceover): I got worried and I asked, “What has happened that you took him to the hospital?” “His blood pressure had gone up,” he replied.

He lied to me.

Mir Abdullah Miri: The smuggler had come back to take her and the children down the mountain. Initially, she refused to go with him. But she was so tired, she ultimately gave in.

Leila (translated voiceover): The smuggler forced my son on his motorbike. Then I sat on his motorbike with my daughter. I was crying and asking him, “Where did you take my husband?” “We took him to hospital. Now I will take you there,” he replied. My son was crying a lot. He would tell my son to stop crying, as he would take us to his dad.

Mir Abdullah Miri: The smuggler didn’t take them to the hospital as he had promised. He took them here and there, Leila said it felt like he was stalling.

They had crossed the border into Iran. But it would be awhile before she would see their Uncle Ahmad again.

Leila (translated voiceover): Suddenly I saw Uncle Ahmad from behind us.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Ahmad told Leila that he would take her to see Aziz. He took her to Zahedan, a city in Iran. Once there, Ahmad told her, Aziz was in a hospital in Afghanistan. So they would need to return.

Leila was overwhelmed, anxious, and frustrated. She had been told so many contradictory things about Aziz. No one was giving her clear answers. Her children were crying, and she cried with them, begging others to tell her what happened to her husband.

In order to get back to Afghanistan, they had to turn themselves into the authorities in Zahedan. Because they didn’t have the proper travel documents and crossed into Iran illegally, they had to be deported back home.

After spending a few days and nights in Iran, they were deported to Afghanistan on September 12, 2021.

No Clear Answers

I was sitting in a Kabul hotel when I received a call from my brother, Omid. My family and I had received word that the U.K. government would evacuate us. I was told that I was eligible to be relocated to England because I was working as a trainer with the British Council. But chaos at the airport, and then the suicide bombing, grounded commercial flights.

Omid told me that Aziz was missing after trying to cross the Afghanistan-Iran border. Together we began trying to find Aziz.

Omid, who lives in Herat, had an Iranian visa. He set off to look for Aziz in Iran. Ahmad had told Omid that he wasn’t sure if Aziz was still alive. Ahmad had told other relatives that Aziz was in Khash, a city in Iran.

But while searching for Aziz, Omid learned that his body was actually in a hospital in Saravan, a city in southeastern Iran, 100 miles away from Khash. The hospital staff told Omid that Aziz’s body had been discovered by villagers in Saravan, which wasn’t far from where he was supposed to meet Leila.

Aziz’s body had been in the desert for a couple of days before it was taken to the hospital on September 9, 2021, they told Omid. According to the hospital report, Aziz died of three things: the first, being hit by a hard object; the second, head injuries and concussions; and the third, a cerebral hemorrhage. His brain was bleeding. When Omid saw Aziz’s body, he noticed that his clothes were torn.

Aziz’s death remains a mystery. What happened to him? Did he fall? Was he pushed? Was he beaten? Did he suffer a heart attack? Did anyone help him, or did they leave him behind? Did he have time to realize what was happening? Was he alone when he died? And why was Ahmad giving conflicting stories?

I’ve talked to those who were directly or indirectly involved in this trip and who had information about Aziz and his decision to leave the country. We all have tried retracing Aziz’s steps.

When I asked Ahmad what happened to Aziz, he revealed more than he had told Leila:

Ahmad (translated voiceover): Finally, as we approached the hostel, I saw Aziz have three hiccups on the motorbike, like someone who was breathing his last breaths. I took him to the hostel. When I took him to the hostel, I put him on my lap and called him nephew, nephew, breathe, breathe, but he didn’t breathe at all.

There were 3 to 4 people in the hostel. I asked them to check him, he is my nephew, why he is not breathing. I was pushing his chest to help him breathe, but nothing helped; he couldn’t breathe.

A guy at the hostel told me Aziz had died. May he rest in peace.

I was told not to tell Leila about Aziz’s death because if she cried, all the travelers would be fucked up.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Meaning it could put them all in danger of being captured by the police.

Ahmad (translated voiceover): I asked the smuggler what happened to my nephew. He told me, “We took him to the hospital to give electric shock, we took him to the morgue.”

Mir Abdullah Miri: Leila doesn’t understand why Ahmad wouldn’t tell anyone what really happened. When they got back to Herat, everyone would ask Ahmad to tell them everything, and according to Leila, Ahmad would say, “This was everything.”

She has her own theories.

Leila (translated voiceover): I think Aziz fell off the mountain because Ahmad was so frail, and as he was helping Aziz get off the motorbike, he must have fallen.

Mir Abdullah Miri: The mystery surrounding Aziz’s death has torn our family apart. We’ve all been left to speculate about what actually happened and whether anyone could have helped Aziz or saved him.

Illegal migration is a difficult decision. Many uncertainties await the traveler. The journey becomes even harder when you start from a war-torn country like Afghanistan, at a moment when power is shifting, when many people are terrified and running for the exits.

Afghanistan has had confusing policies to prevent or discourage the use of smugglers. Only recently has the Taliban ordered a ban on migration from Nimroz to Iran. But it’s been reported that those who pay bribes to the Taliban border guards can continue their journey.

Leila (translated voiceover): Aziz was someone who loved his family. He loved his children. He always said, “Leaving home is like leaving your soul.” When he left home, he indeed left his soul behind.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Since Aziz passed away, his family has been struggling. Leila and her children live with Aziz’s mom and brother. They don’t have any source of income and rely on the little money Aziz’s brother gives them to cover living costs.

Leila: When Aziz died, my daughter was two and half months old. I had to pay for diapers, medicine, and doctors. Once we got back, I had to spend a lot on my kids’ health. My son has a blood infection. Even now, if he gets a microbe in his body, we have to pay a lot for his treatment.

Mir Abdullah Miri: Leila worries about the future of her children.

Leila (translated voiceover): All the dreams Aziz and I had as a couple were buried. Now, the only dream I have is for my children to get educated in a good place.

Mir Abdullah Miri: When I talked to Leila about this, she fought back tears.

Leila (translated voiceover): I just want from my God that whatever good or bad memories I had here in Afghanistan, I leave them in Afghanistan. I even just want to be somewhere where I can put up a tent, where I can live with my children, because there are no good memories left for us from Afghanistan. And even today my son cried for about an hour, saying, “Mommy, I want to see my dad’s clothes. Open dad’s closet so I can see my dad’s clothes.”

Mir Abdullah Miri: She worries about the trauma her son, Amir, still carries. He’s scared all the time. When he’s sleeping, even when Leila is next to him, he wakes up and cries, “Where’s my mommy?”

Leila (translated voiceover): Every night when he goes to bed, he does not fall asleep until he recalls those days. He says, “Mommy, when I grow up, I won’t take you to the mountains. I’m afraid of mountains.”

[Credits]

Mir Abdullah Miri: Next time on No Way Home.

Maryam Barak: What I’m about to tell you is a different kind of Afghan refugee story. It isn’t about the struggle to get out of Kabul or a dramatic life-and-death journey. Instead, it’s about adapting to life in a new country, about finding hope — despite all we have left behind.

Qader Kazimizada: We didn’t even have any choice. There was no choice, because at that moment, the only thing was important was to get out from Kabul.

They were drinking, shouting, fighting during the night at the corridor. I was always awake and standing behind the door in order to avoid if they come at the door, because my family is here, my wife is here, my children are here. They will be scared.

We are learning Italiano, trying to get integrated with the people, with Italian people.

Mir Abdullah Miri: No Way Home is a production of The Intercept and New America’s Afghanistan Observatory Scholars program.

This episode was written and reported by me, Mir Abdullah Miri.

Our executive producer and editor is Vanessa Gezari.

Supervising producer and editor is Laura Flynn.

Candace Rondeaux is the director of Future Frontlines Program-New America and project editor.

Ali Yawar Adili is the Afghanistan Observatory project coordinator.

Jose Olivares helped with production.

Rick Kwan mixed this episode.

Zach Young composed our theme music.

Legal review by David Bralow.

Fact checking by Emily Schneider.

Awista Ayub is the director and project manager of New America’s Fellows Program.

Voiceovers by Humaira Rahbin and Ali Yawar Adili.

To learn more, visit theintercept.com where you can find transcripts and art of the show. Philipp Hubert is our visual designer and Nara Shin our copy editor.

Roger Hodge is editor-in-chief of The Intercept.

If you want to give us feedback or have any questions, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks, so much, for listening.

The post No Way Home, Episode Two: The Desert of Death appeared first on The Intercept.

Ahmadi’s boss, Special Mission Wing Cmdr. Gen. Hamidullah Ziarmal, was ordering him and the other pilots to get to Hamid Karzai International Airport immediately. On any other day, Ahmadi wouldn’t have thought twice. After eight years in the Afghan Air Force, responding to a direct order from a superior officer was as natural as breathing.

But on that day — the day the Taliban streamed into the heart of Kabul and plunged the city into chaos — every move Ahmadi made seemed like a fateful choice between his family and his country.

He understood well what was being asked of him. If he followed the order, there was a good chance that he might never see his wife and 3-year-old daughter again. If he disobeyed, he could be considered absent without leave and insubordinate for failing to heed a direct command. Flouting the order to muster at the airport could also mean that millions of dollars’ worth of helicopters and airplanes paid for by U.S. taxpayers would fall into the hands of the Taliban. Either way, Ahmadi’s life might soon be at risk.

Shershah Ahmadi is not his real name. In exchange for speaking frankly to The Intercept, the former Afghan Air Force pilot asked to be identified by a pseudonym because he fears retaliation and potential complications to his visa status, and that of his family, in the United States.

Born and raised in Kabul, Ahmadi had enrolled in Afghanistan’s National Military Academy in 2008, when he was 17, at a time when the Taliban’s hold on territory was mostly confined to the south and east of the country. Thirteen years later, as they returned to power, he was one of dozens of Afghan pilots whose decisions would have consequences for Afghanistan’s security, as well as that of other countries in the region and the U.S.

Today, more than a quarter of the former Afghan Air Force fleet is in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and the status of the aircraft has become a critical sticking point in a three-way diplomatic dispute between the Taliban regime and its northern neighbors. The decision many Afghan pilots made to fly military aircraft across the country’s northern borders last August has effectively blocked any near-term chance that the Taliban can fully secure the country’s rough and mountainous terrain. But the status of the Afghan air fleet is far from resolved, and Taliban leaders have said that they are determined to reconstitute the country’s military.

Maj. Gen. Yasin Zia, Afghanistan’s former chief of Army staff, said that he and Afghan Air Force commanders were left with few options after former President Ashraf Ghani surreptitiously fled the country last August. In an interview with The Intercept last month, Zia explained that only the Air Force’s Special Mission Wing remained relatively intact. The SMW, established in the summer of 2012, had at least 18 Mi-17 helicopters and five UH-60 Black Hawks; the fleet also included 16 PC-12 single-engine fixed-wing cargo planes, providing Afghan forces with assault, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. “The president had fled, and the defense minister was escaping,” Zia said. “The chain of command no longer existed among the forces.”

Zia, who also served as Afghanistan’s acting minister of defense from March to June 2021, now leads an anti-Taliban resistance force. He told The Intercept that he, Ziarmal, and Afghan Air Force Cmdr. Gen. Fahim Ramin ordered Ahmadi and the other Afghan pilots to fly the country’s aircraft across the border to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan last August.

“I made the decision based on two main reasons,” Zia said. “To save the lives of the pilots who had fought the Taliban and who were left alone — this was the least I could do for my colleagues as a veteran Army officer. And to keep the Air Force fleet from falling into the hands of the Taliban. Imagine if the Taliban had gotten those aircraft — how they would have been used against the people resisting them today in Andarab, Panjshir, and other parts of the country.”

Zia’s account, which was backed up by interviews with three Afghan Air Force pilots and two former Afghan security officials, suggests that the United States, which had invested billions in the Afghan Air Force over more than a decade, had no plan in place to prevent the Taliban from gaining control of the aircraft, highly trained pilots, and other support staff if the republic collapsed. A team of U.S. military personnel hastily located and destroyed dozens of aircraft in the Kabul airport two days after the country fell to the Taliban.

In response to questions for this story, a Pentagon spokesperson said that the U.S. military planned to back the Afghan security forces it had built. “Senior U.S. officials repeatedly informed the Ghani government and [Afghan security forces] that the U.S. intended to continue to provide critical support to the Afghan Air Force, including salaries, maintenance, logistics, pilot training, likely through contracting and from outside of Afghanistan,” Lt. Col. Rob Lodewick, the Pentagon’s Afghanistan spokesperson, told The Intercept in an email.

The U.S. “continued to fly missions in support” of Afghan operations “into early August” of last year, Lodewick added, but he did not say what happened between early August and the middle of that month, when the Taliban took control of Kabul — a critical period in the war. Former Afghan security officials and pilots told The Intercept that U.S. air support had stopped by the time the Taliban were advancing toward Kabul. Even experts working for the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction noted that by mid-August of last year, “U.S. forces had withdrawn; even ‘over-the-horizon’ U.S. air support had ceased — and the Afghan Air Force (AAF), a crucial part of a security force that the United States had spent two decades and $90 billion building and supporting, was nowhere in evidence.”

Lodewick, however, doubled down on the Biden administration’s refrain that Afghans’ “lack of a will to fight” led to their defeat by the Taliban.

“They had the people. They had the equipment. They had the training. They had the support,” Lodewick wrote. “Long-term commitments such as these, however, can only accomplish so much if beneficiary forces are not willing to stand and fight. One needs only to look at the current situation in Ukraine for an example of what an equipped, trained and resilient force is truly capable of achieving.”

Still reeling from the swift turn of events in Kabul, Ahmadi had reached a terrifying crossroads. There in the market bazaar in Foroshgah, the world clanged noisily around him. Cars honked. Shopkeepers slammed their windows and locked their doors. Police and soldiers surreptitiously slipped out of their uniforms while civilians whizzed by shouting into their cellphones. Time was running faster than Ahmadi’s thoughts. He had to decide to return to his family or follow the orders of a military that was crumbling by the hour.

Afghan Boots, Foreign Wings

Ahmadi’s dilemma was not a new one. Afghanistan’s military history is replete with stories about pilots who either helped would-be rulers secure power in Kabul or spirited them to safety when their political strategies failed. King Amanullah Khan first established the Afghan Air Force in 1921 with aircraft donated by the Soviet Union, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

In the decade following the 1979 Soviet invasion, the Afghan fleet grew to 500 aircraft, all Soviet-made. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, infighting between mujahideen factions backed by the United States destroyed most of the planes and helicopters. But some of the aircraft survived. When the Taliban took power the first time around in 1996, they did so with the help of about two dozen Soviet-made Mi-21 helicopter gunships that they had captured during battles with forces loyal to the late Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud and the government of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani.

But then, as now, the aircraft quickly fell into disrepair; the Taliban’s pariah status meant that they could not import parts or rely on the highly skilled labor and expertise of foreign military advisers to maintain the air fleet. Then, as now, Termez International Airport in neighboring Uzbekistan briefly served as a way station for Afghan pilots who flew over the border when the Taliban seized control of Kabul. In at least one case after the Taliban took the capital in 1996, the Uzbek government turned over an aircraft to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan Uzbek warlord and leader of one of the most notorious jihadist factions of the 1980s and ’90s. The Taliban still had the upper hand, albeit with a small air force, including about 20 Soviet-made fighter jets.

In the first 10 years after U.S. troops swooped into the country following Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, American and NATO jet fighters, helicopters, and drones dominated the Afghan skies. Yet it wasn’t until nearly a decade later that the United States began to substantially invest in building the Afghan Air Force.

Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, was a vocal advocate for building the new Afghan military along the lines of NATO nations. His obsession with American-made F-16 jet fighters was a regular talking point whenever he met with Pentagon officials. It was an expensive proposition: Even under the best circumstances, the cost of operating the Lockheed Martin-made F-16 Falcon would be about $8,000 an hour, according to at least one estimate.

Beyond the financial barriers, there was the practical challenge of setting up a permanent U.S. training and equipment mission. It wasn’t until 2005, four years after U.S. and allied Afghan forces routed the Taliban, that then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the establishment of a dedicated command structure for the U.S.-led mission to train and equip Afghan security forces. But that entity did not turn to building up the Afghan Air Force until two years later.

There were other problems as well. In Washington, a major political transition was underway between the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who sent thousands of American troops surging into Afghanistan in a renewed attempt to pacify it. It was only in 2009, as resurgent Taliban forces swept from their southern redoubts ever closer to Afghanistan’s heartland around Kabul, that Afghan pilots could begin providing air support to the country’s ground troops — and then only with help from American military advisers.

Corruption affected everything from fleet maintenance to fuel suppliers, flight performance, and capacity-building. For instance, Afghan officials often awarded training slots based on patronage and family relations, according to a 2019 report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR.

Another challenge was a string of “green-on-blue” attacks in which Afghan soldiers attacked their U.S. and NATO counterparts. A turning point came in April 2011, when an Afghan Air Force pilot fatally shot nine Americans at the air base command headquarters in Kabul. An inquiry led by the U.S Air Force Office of Special Investigations indicated that some American military advisers on base at the time believed that the shooter, Col. Ahmed Gul, had been secretly recruited by the Taliban to infiltrate the Air Force.

The massacre of the American advisers to the Afghan Air Force was one of the deadliest of its kind. It changed the way the Pentagon provided air support to Afghan forces, former Lt. Gen. Sami Sadat, the last commander of the Afghan National Army Special Operations Command, told The Intercept.

“Before 2008, the U.S. Army had quite casual rules of engagement with the Afghan Army. At that time, we did not have the green-on-blue attacks, and the risk for the U.S. and Afghan soldiers working together was very limited,” Sadat, who now lives in the U.K. and runs a security firm, recalled in an interview in July. “It was after 2008 that the green-on-blue matter increased, and the partnership between the U.S. and Afghan officers became difficult due to the huge risk.”

While some Afghan military officials lobbied for a NATO-style air regiment, others argued that sticking with Warsaw Pact equipment was more pragmatic. In the end, the Pentagon split the difference, despite concerns about the costs and risks of relying on foreign suppliers like Russia and Ukraine.

In 2013, the U.S. said it would pay $572 million to Rosoboronexport, the export wing of Russia’s state-owned arms company, Rostec, for 30 Russian-built Mi-17 military helicopters. But the Pentagon canceled the deal after a furor erupted in Congress over the purchase of Russian aircraft at a time when the U.S. was pressing Russia to stop supplying Syria with weapons. After the U.S. sanctioned Russia over its annexation of Crimea and military incursion in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the Pentagon stopped supplying Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters to Kabul altogether.

In 2016, the Obama administration ordered a halt to all dealings with Russian arms manufacturers, including Rostec. A year later, the Pentagon began transitioning the Afghan Air Force from Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters to the U.S.-made Black Hawk attack helicopter. It was a jarring change for most Afghan Air Force pilots, who had decades of experience flying and fixing Russian aircraft. Black Hawks were notoriously difficult to maintain and couldn’t operate as well at high altitudes.

The U.S. ban on Russian weaponry and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, meanwhile, also made it next to impossible for the Afghan Air Force to repair and maintain its remaining Russian-made aircraft. Russia objected to the scheduled overhaul of the Mi-17s by Ukrainian companies, calling the deal “illegal.” Russian companies also accused Motor Sich and Aviakon, the two Ukrainian firms contracted by the U.S. to repair the Afghan aircraft, of poor oversight and of endangering the lives of American and Afghan soldiers.

This was the story of the Afghan Air Force under the Americans: Suspicion, mistrust, start, stop, start again, and reset the strategy. By July 2021, according to a May SIGAR report, the Afghan Air Force had 131 usable aircraft and another 31 in various states of disrepair.

Abandoned and Afraid

In January 2021, eight months before Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, SIGAR warned the Defense Department in a classified report that the Afghan Air Force would collapse without continued U.S. training and maintenance.

The report came as Afghan security forces sustained increasing casualties amid an aggressive Taliban offensive. Battlefield medical evacuation missions that had been critical to the Afghan military’s continued capabilities grew far more challenging. A year after the Taliban takeover, interviews with more than a dozen former Afghan military and government officials and Western diplomats confirm what many Afghan pilots like Ahmadi already knew: The Afghan Air Force was struggling to stay alive in those final weeks and was wholly unprepared to hold the line against the Taliban when President Joe Biden decided to move forward with the Doha agreement that his predecessor Donald Trump had negotiated.

By July 2021, a month before the Taliban surged into Kabul, one in five Afghan aircraft were out of service, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, an estimated 60 percent of Afghanistan’s UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters were grounded with no plan by the Afghan or U.S. governments to fix them, according to a senior Afghan Army officer interviewed by SIGAR. As the Taliban advanced in the summer of 2021, most of the 17,000 support contractors were withdrawn from the country.

“The system wouldn’t have collapsed if the logistical support that was promised by the U.S. military continued.”

“The system wouldn’t have collapsed if the logistical support that was promised by the U.S. military continued,” Sadat told The Intercept. “For instance, when the first province fell to the Taliban, in the entire [Afghan Air Force] there was only one laser-guided missile.” (Lodewick, the Pentagon spokesperson, declined to comment on supply levels without “knowing the specific airframe or munition being referenced … nor a specific date window” but said that the Afghan Air Force “had a significant number [of] aerial munitions in its inventory,” including “a small number of GBU-58 laser-guided bombs which afforded the AAF precision strike capabilities from their A-29 aircraft.”)

The pace of the Taliban advance surprised many Afghan pilots interviewed for this story, including Ahmadi. The Afghan Air Force’s three major airfields in the western city of Herat, the southern city of Kandahar, and the northern city of Mazar-i Sharif fell like dominoes to the Taliban on August 12, 13, and 14, respectively, leaving some Afghan Air Force pilots and staff scrambling to get to Kabul, while others flew their aircraft to neighboring Uzbekistan.

“In the last year preceding the Taliban takeover, the military turned into defense mode and only in the last few weeks were allowed to launch attacks,” Ahmadi recalled. “By that time, the Taliban had already made major territorial advancements.”

Choosing Flight

On August 15, 2021, the situation grew more tense by the hour as rumors spread about the Taliban’s advance into the capital. Ahmadi, convinced by the growing chaos around him and the urging of his commanders, turned and started running toward the airport.

He was one of dozens who heeded the order to quickly muster at the Afghan Air Force’s operational headquarters at the main airport in Kabul. Once there, at around 11 a.m., he found a number of his colleagues in uniform, standing near their aircraft.

A few hours later, news broke that Ghani and his aides had flown out of the country. At the Air Force headquarters, panic set in. Ghani’s departure meant the end of everything. Days after his escape, on August 18, Ghani posted a video on his Facebook page in which he said that he’d left the country to avoid bloodshed. The former Afghan president, who is now in the United Arab Emirates, stands accused of taking millions of dollars in cash, though a recent report by SIGAR indicates that Ghani and his entourage may have taken only around $500,000 with them.

Ahmadi looked around at his fellow pilots as they absorbed the news that the country’s commander in chief, the man who by law held their fate and that of 38 million Afghans in his hands, had abandoned his post. In an instant, all their years of hard work seemed to evaporate.

Ahmadi picked up his phone to call his wife, an engineer and civil servant. He tried to keep his voice calm as he told her that he did not know where he would end up or whether he would see her and their daughter again anytime soon. His wife had burned all of Ahmadi’s military service documents and his uniform and buried his service weapons in their backyard garden. Ahmadi could not stop thinking about what would happen if the Taliban came knocking on the door of their family home in Kabul after he had flown over the border, leaving his wife and daughter behind.

Ahmadi boarded a PC-12 surveillance plane with eight other Afghan Air Force staff. His boss, Ziarmal, and Zia, the former chief of Army staff, ordered Ahmadi to fly to Uzbekistan, where Ghani and other senior officials of his government had landed only hours earlier. The U.S. military controlled the Kabul airport at the time, meaning that American air traffic controllers would have been aware of the Afghan pilots’ flight routings.

But Uzbek officials on the ground, overwhelmed by an influx of hundreds of Afghan military personnel, refused to grant Ahmadi entry to Termez International Airport, he said. The government of Uzbekistan did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Ahmadi was forced to turn back to Kabul and refuel before preparing to fly out again near midnight on August 15. By then the Taliban had consolidated control over most of the Afghan capital, but following a tenuous deal struck with U.S. officials in Doha, they had largely stayed outside the airport.

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Telling Afghanistan’s Stories — in Their Own Words

Ahmadi thought about how at least seven of his colleagues had reportedly been killed after Taliban squads hunted them down in their homes. That’s when he made up his mind to go to Tajikistan. He contacted Tajik authorities, asking if he could land; they said yes.

Ahmadi felt a rush of relief when he touched down hours later at Bokhtar International Airport in southern Tajikistan with eight staff members of the Afghan Air Force onboard. Nearly 143 Afghan pilots and Air Force personnel, who flew in on three planes and two helicopters, reportedly landed at Bokhtar in the early hours of August 16. As Ahmadi disembarked from his plane, he thought that the worst was over. But the feeling was short-lived. Once the Afghan pilots were on the ground, Tajik authorities confiscated their mobile phones and other belongings and transferred them to a dormitory at Naser Khosrow University.

Ahmadi said that Tajik officials soon came to him with a demand: Join the “resistance forces,” a group of armed men, including some members of the former Afghan Army, who were fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan’s northern Panjshir province near the Tajik border under the command of Ahmad Massoud. The son of the legendary mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who fought the Soviets and the Taliban before he was assassinated by Al Qaeda in 2001, the younger Massoud had openly called for the U.S. and NATO to arm his fighters, known as the National Resistance Front, or NRF. But there weren’t many takers among U.S. officials, and some Afghan pilots were equally skeptical about joining the resistance.

Exhausted and disillusioned, Ahmadi and most of his colleagues could not imagine getting into another war and returning to the hell they had just fled. Suddenly, the Tajik government’s warm reception for the Afghan pilots turned chilly. After refusing to fight for the resistance forces, Ahmadi and his fellow pilots were transferred to a sanitarium on the outskirts of Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, where they had to go down to a nearby river for drinking water. Tajik authorities had seized their cellphones, meaning that they had no way to contact their families back home. Ahmadi’s story lines up with similar reports published in the days and weeks after the U.S. withdrawal.

The Tajik government did not respond to requests for comment, but Zia, the former chief of Army staff, denies that the Afghan pilots in Tajikistan were pressured into joining the NRF. Most of the aircraft flown into Tajikistan were fixed-wing planes like Ahmadi’s, Zia told The Intercept, and would have been useless in mountainous Panjshir province, where there were few suitable landing zones. “Pushing the pilots to join the resistance forces was not demanded by the Tajik government nor by the resistance leadership,” Zia said, adding that a number of pilots in Tajikistan aspired to join the resistance forces and had talked about it with their colleagues.

The only thing that kept Ahmadi sane during his days in Tajikistan were surreptitious calls to his wife on a cellphone that one of the pilots had somehow managed to hide from the Tajik authorities. Eventually, the pilots used the phone to call their old U.S. military advisers and ask for help in securing their release and safe passage out of Tajikistan. Ahmadi and his colleagues were ultimately evacuated and flown to the UAE with help from officials at the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe, he said. Three months later, in April, Ahmadi was allowed to emigrate to the U.S.

A Double Betrayal

In the days leading up to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, videos and photos of the Taliban flying U.S.-made Black Hawk helicopters cropped up on social media. At the time, the Taliban claimed to have captured more than 100 Russian-made combat helicopters. But the makeup of the Taliban’s air fleet remains unclear. Taliban representatives did not respond to requests for comment from The Intercept. Without a fully functioning air force, the Taliban cannot suppress ongoing resistance in the north or fend off what the White House calls “over-the-horizon” attacks, like the drone strike that killed Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul in late July.

While there is always a chance that Pakistan, Iran, China, or even Russia might consider helping the Taliban replace the aircraft that Afghan pilots flew out of the country last year, doing so would not be without risks. Since the United States has sanctioned most of the Taliban’s key leaders, any move by another country to materially assist the current Afghan government would raise the prospect of additional U.S. sanctions on the Taliban’s suppliers.

In the months since Ahmadi settled in the United States, the Taliban have continued to fixate on rebuilding the Afghan Air Force, calling on former Afghan pilots to return to service, promising that they would be granted amnesty. But those guarantees ring hollow to Ahmadi and many of his fellow pilots. Since the Taliban’s declaration of general amnesty for Afghan security forces, hundreds of former government officials and Afghan soldiers have been forcibly disappeared and assassinated, according to Human Rights Watch.

Meanwhile, an estimated 4,300 former Afghan Air Force staff, including 33 pilots, have joined the Taliban. Some of those pilots have since been captured by National Resistance Front forces. In a video taped by the NRF and posted on YouTube in June, one Afghan pilot said that he was captured by the group while on a mission to provide Taliban forces with tents and other supplies. The pilot also said that he had served the Afghan Air Force for 33 years irrespective of the ruling political regime. More recently, the Islamic State’s Afghanistan affiliate claimed responsibility for an assault on Taliban vehicles in Herat and an IED attack in Kabul that killed two Taliban military pilots.

Ahmadi and the pilots who helped keep Afghan aircraft out of the Taliban’s hands are now grappling with a double betrayal: Let down by their Western allies after years of joint warfare, they sacrificed the safety of their families for a government that abandoned them.

Today Ahmadi lives in New Jersey, sharing a one-bedroom apartment with an Afghan Air Force colleague. A federal program for refugees covers his rent, utilities, some transportation, and other costs for up to eight months, but Ahmadi is desperate to supplement his income.

“I have a family who I haven’t been able to send a penny to since I left Afghanistan,” he told The Intercept. “I hope that when people and authorities in the U.S. read this story, they understand what we are going through and they will hopefully help me reunite with my family.”

He spends his days searching Google for aviation jobs — flight attendant, flight operations, ground crew — and filling out applications. Having lost the career he spent his life building, he hopes to fly again someday. While he’s grateful to be in the United States, he remains concerned about his wife and daughter, now 4. They have moved twice since Ahmadi left to ensure their safety.

“My daughter no longer speaks to her father on the phone as easily,” Ahmadi’s wife told The Intercept. “It’s as if she doesn’t recognize him anymore.”

The post When the Taliban Took Kabul, an Afghan Pilot Had to Choose Between His Family and His Country appeared first on The Intercept.

When the Afghan government collapsed last summer, Summia Tora, Afghanistan’s first Rhodes scholar, used her connections to get her father out. But when she tried to evacuate a longtime NGO worker named Hamid, his pregnant wife, and their young daughter, a suicide bomber intervened.

Transcript

A quick warning: This episode includes descriptions of violence. Please listen at your discretion.

[Sounds of crowds at the Kabul airport and an explosion.]

Hamid: My eyes were burning. I could not see anyone. My ears could only hear the crowds. I tried to open my eyes to know about my wife and daughter. I could not open my eyes. I shouted their names with my eyes closed.

Summia Tora: About a year ago, I met a man I’ll call Hamid. He and thousands of others were trying to leave Afghanistan after the government collapsed and the Taliban took Kabul.

Hamid and his family were navigating through the large crowd outside of the Kabul airport, trying to reach one of the checkpoints, when he heard a loud explosion.

Hamid: The resulting wave hit me in the face and threw me into the crowd.

Summia Tora: He was about 20 meters, or 60 feet, from the gate where the American military stood.

Hamid: I don’t know how many minutes or seconds I spent in there.

Summia Tora: Disoriented, Hamid didn’t know how much time had passed or what was going on until he was able to open his eyes.

Hamid: And realized that an explosion had taken place. At that moment, American forces began firing. Their shooting was so intense that I couldn’t lift my head up. The ground was full of blood and human organs.

Summia Tora: An estimated 170 Afghans were killed by the suicide bomb. Thirteen U.S. service members were also killed in the attack.

Hamid: My wife was missing among the wounded and killed.

Summia Tora: The explosion and ensuing chaos separated Hamid from his wife and 7-year-old daughter. He found his wife in the crowd and pulled her closer to him to protect her from the gunshots. But he couldn’t find their daughter.

Hamid: And I searched for her with my eyes very desperately. Until I found her among the crowd, screaming scaredly and covered with full blood and flesh. The shooting stopped a few minutes later. I ran to my daughter to hug her.

[Theme music]

Summia Tora: I’m Summia Tora, a human rights advocate. This is No Way Home, a production of The Intercept and New America.

In this four-part series, you’ll hear stories that were found, developed, and reported by Afghans like me, who have been forced into exile.

Our stories reflect what we saw with our own eyes and what we and our families have experienced firsthand since the U.S. military pulled out, the Afghan government collapsed, and the Taliban took over last summer.

This is Episode One: “Life and Death.”

[Theme music ends]

I’m going to tell you about how I met Hamid, but first I need to tell you a little bit about me and Afghanistan.

Last June, I watched from afar as the Taliban seized territory.

Deborah Lyons (United Nations Special Representative): More than 50 of Afghanistan’s 370 districts have fallen since the beginning of May. Most districts that have been taken surround provincial capitals, suggesting that the Taliban are positioning themselves to try and take these capitals once foreign forces are fully withdrawn.

On July 2, U.S. troops suddenly and quietly pulled out of Bagram Air Base, the sprawling outpost about an hour’s drive from Kabul that had been their main military hub since the war began 20 years earlier.

At the time, I was finishing a master’s degree in public policy at the University of Oxford, where I’d been studying since 2020 as Afghanistan’s first-ever Rhodes scholar.

Sitting in my room in Oxford, reading about territory falling to the Taliban and the deaths of Afghan security forces and civilians, it suddenly hit me that my family had to get out. We are ethnic Uzbeks, one of the minorities that has historically been persecuted in Afghanistan. The Taliban are primarily Pashtun, the country’s largest ethnic group. But it wasn’t just about ethnicity. My family would have been on their radar already, because of me.

I’d worked on a menstrual hygiene project for teenage girls in Afghanistan — the country’s former first lady, Rula Ghani, had encouraged it — and when I won the Rhodes scholarship, it made international news.

Mary Louise Kelly (NPR): When Summia Tora heads to Oxford University in England this fall, she’ll be making history — the first Rhodes scholar from Afghanistan.

Summia Tora: I was pretty sure the Taliban would eventually come after my family. Would my father be persecuted? At that time, we didn’t know for sure.

For my family and many other Afghans, this was an old story. Every time the government collapsed, or there was a war, you had to figure out all over again where you fit into the power structure and whether you could survive.

CBC News “The National” (Dec. 27, 1979): Good evening. Soviet troops fought pitched battles in the streets of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan today. It was part of a successful effort to replace a pro-Moscow president of Afghanistan with a new leader who’s even more pro-Moscow.

Summia Tora: In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and installed a communist government. Many Afghans wanted the foreigners out. Some joined the mujahedeen: so-called freedom fighters, funded and trained by the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and many other countries aligned against the Soviet Union. And there began a decadelong war to force the occupiers to leave.

Greg Dobbs (ABC): Around the country, insurgents have captured their first provincial capital, a city in the northeast — a tremendous psychological blow to the government. And elsewhere, also according to Western diplomatic sources, guerrillas are mining highways and inflicting real harm on the Russians.

Summia Tora: After 10 years, the militants finally succeeded in forcing the Soviets out, but not before the fighting killed 1 million civilians, in addition to tens of thousands of mujahedeen fighters, Afghan troops, and Soviet soldiers.

CBS: The American-made Stinger anti-aircraft missile is credited with turning the tide of battle. Armed with the Stinger, the mujahedeen neutralized Soviet airpower.

Summia Tora: When the mujahedeen factions took Kabul in 1992, they couldn’t agree on how to share power. The factions were controlled by different ethnic groups — Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks — and they started fighting each other.

CNN: Kabul, Afghanistan. Once a city of roses and minarets, now a scene from hell [sounds of gunfire]. This is Kabul after the Soviet withdrawal.

Summia Tora: That’s when most of my family, and many others, fled. My parents went to Pakistan, where my siblings and I grew up as refugees. In the 1990s, when I was a kid, a group of fundamentalist religious students and clerics emerged from Kandahar province, which borders Pakistan. They became known as the Taliban.

BBC: There was a tremendous stir in Kandahar. We followed the crowds to a mosque in the city center. The Taliban had been holding an assembly of mullahs from all over Afghanistan. Now the results were about to be made public. A holy war was announced against the government of President Rabbani in Kabul. The head of Taliban, Mullah Omar, was declared to be the amir, or leader of all Muslims everywhere.

Summia Tora: After coming to power, they imposed harsh laws that brought some measures of security to Afghans, who were being robbed, raped, and killed by criminals and members of the warring factions. But the Taliban went on to impose their violent version of Shariah law on the rest of the country.

C4N: A year after they seized control of Kabul has raised further concerns about the plight of women. They remain strictly segregated and banned from schools and offices. Aid agencies are struggling to cope in a country which is also in the midst of civil war.

Summia Tora: My dad says he was one of a dozen ethnic Uzbeks to attend Kabul University during the Soviet-backed regime. He was not able to complete his engineering degree because of the unrest in the Afghan capital.

Sayed Tora: [words muffled]

Summia Tora: I can’t hear you. You’re blocking the mic. You should —

Sayed Tora: OK.

Summia Tora: Now I can hear you.

Sayed Tora: Do you listen?

Summia Tora: That’s my dad, Sayed Tora.

Summia Tora: What were you doing during the Soviet regime?

Sayed Tora: I was doing my internship, telecommunication ministry, in that time when the Russians invaded Afghanistan.

Summia Tora: My dad was doing a telecommunications internship when the Soviets were fighting in Afghanistan. My mother grew up in a more remote part of the country and couldn’t complete her education because her family couldn’t afford it. But in Pakistan, my parents worked hard and made sure that their four children got the education they had only dreamed of.

After the U.S. invasion in 2001, my family lived between Pakistan and Afghanistan, traveling back and forth frequently. I left the region in 2014 to attend high school and college in the United States, returning for visits when I could.

Last year, as the Taliban was gaining ground, my older brother and sister were attending medical school in Pakistan. And my parents were back in Afghanistan, along with my younger brother. In late July, I began looking for ways to get my family to the United States.

My father — a longtime trader of fruits, nuts, and other goods between Afghanistan and the Middle East — had worked with a subcontractor to the U.S. Agency for International Development. I spent two desperate weeks trying to figure out which visas or programs might help him and gathered the required documents. Then, one of my classmates told me that he’d heard the Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul were busy burning documents.

CNN: There were documents that were burned — classified documents. They were also getting rid of anything that could be used as anti-American propaganda, such as American flags or anything that had a seal of the U.S. Embassy on it.

Summia Tora: My father was still in Kabul on August 15, when I woke up to the news that the capital had fallen to the Taliban.

Al Jazeera: We’re just going to bring you these live and exclusive pictures here from inside the presidential palace. What you are looking at right now is Taliban fighters inside the presidential palace.

Summia Tora: I scrolled through the news on my phone. The Afghan president had boarded a helicopter and flown out of the country with his family. The Taliban were all over Kabul, including my neighborhood of Kart-e-Say. My mother and brother had made it out to Pakistan, but my father, my uncle, and many friends were stuck.

Some of my friends came over, and we started writing emails to everyone we could think of: the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, Congress, the Justice Department, members of the British Parliament, the Pakistani Embassy in Kabul.

Unlike thousands of other Afghans trying to leave the country and watching helplessly from outside, I had access to the Rhodes network, where everyone knew someone who knew someone. I was painfully aware of how lucky I was.

All this time, people were sending me messages saying things like, “I hope you’re OK.” I didn’t open any of them. I was scared. I thought, if I get emotional — if I cry — I’ll get distracted from what I need to do.

Recently, I asked my dad what he was thinking before Kabul fell.

Summia Tora: I remember we had a conversation, and you thought that there would be a peace deal happening between the government and the Taliban. That didn’t happen.

Sayed Tora: Yes, yes.

Summia Tora: How did you feel? Because — were you surprised when the Taliban just took over completely?

Sayed Tora: Yeah, we are surprised it has happened in a short time. We expected for six months, one year, the government and their military forces and other groups will resist Taliban. But unfortunately in a short time they gave up all things. And I have experience about Taliban. I understand them because I have experienced them in Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul and other places.

Summia Tora: What do you mean by experienced?

Summia Tora: That’s when my father started telling me something he’d never told me before. It happened in 1998, the last time the Taliban was in power.

He was heading to the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif. He happened to be traveling with the Red Cross. The Red Cross was heading there because the Taliban had killed an estimated 2,000 people, possibly more, according to a Human Rights Watch investigation.

There were also reports from the city’s neighborhoods like Ali Chopan, where women and girls were abducted and raped. Most of the people they killed there were Hazaras, an ethnic minority that has faced centuries of discrimination and violence in Afghanistan. The Red Cross workers warned my dad that he too could be detained and killed in Mazar.

Sayed Tora: I have been in Mazar-e-Sharif with Red Cross. In Mazar-e-Sharif, they killed people in Ali Chopan village in the city of Mazar-e-Sharif. And I listened in my ear, they declared from National Radio of Afghanistan, Mazar-e-Sharif, they will kill all the people of Hazara ethnic. They say “tashayyu” up to their babies.

Summia Tora: They would kill Hazara babies too, he said. I knew I had to get my father out — not just for his safety, but also to protect my ability to speak freely about what was going on in my country.

We worked for days. One of my friends, an American Rhodes scholar, spoke to someone high up at the State Department. They told her my dad wasn’t a priority because he hadn’t worked with the U.S. military. I realized my father was not going to be evacuated. That’s when I sat down and cried for the first time.

Soon after that, I got a call from Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic group I’d been working with on Rise, an educational scholarship for young teenagers. They told me they were organizing a charter plane, and they might be able to add my father to the manifest.

Summia Tora: I know it was very difficult for you to leave. There were times you didn’t want to leave, and I had to convince you to leave. Why did you end up deciding to leave?

Sayed Tora: Oh, because of the fate of my daughters and my sons. And I convinced to leave, but I have decided to be there, near to Afghanistan, and we should do something to convince the Taliban, to make resist [laughs]. We should not give up for them. Don’t leave our people. OK. But, I don’t know, I’m lucky I have a daughter like you. And they convinced me, and I decided for their fate — my daughters’ fate and my sons — I have to leave Afghanistan.

Summia Tora: On August 21, my dad got a call. He was told to go to the Serena, an upscale hotel in Kabul. People from the U.S. Embassy greeted him there. It was very organized.

They took him on a bus and through a gate inside the airport at night. A private charter plane flew them to Qatar and then on to Albania. My father had made it out.

The next day, a Taliban fighter showed up at his house, looking for him.

Summia Tora: Would you have stayed if I hadn’t convinced you to leave? Because you did face risks of being persecuted.

Sayed Tora: Yeah, yeah. I will go to maybe some areas there was no Taliban. And then I will take refuge to neighboring countries. Maybe I go to Tajikistan or Pakistan, somewhere like this.

Summia Tora: People heard of our success in getting my father out and started sending us names of others who needed help. The list grew longer and longer.

And that’s how I met Hamid.

No Exit

Summia Tora: Last summer, Hamid was living in Dasht-e-Barchi, a neighborhood of western Kabul. Like many who live there, he and his family are Hazaras: the ethnic group my father had mentioned who had been massacred by the Taliban the last time they ran the country. Hazaras have faced widespread discrimination and some of the most severe violence from the Taliban and other armed groups, like the Islamic State.

Hamid isn’t his real name. He worked for a French nonprofit organization, called Geres, that focused on climate and environmental issues. I can’t name him because he and his colleagues may still be in danger.

Sometime in August, I got a text message from an American I’ll call Michael. He works with families still in danger of being targeted by the Taliban, so we’re not using his real name either. Michael had lived in Afghanistan for a while and worked with Hamid. Now he was back in New York, and he wanted to help his former colleagues get out.

Michael: When I first went there, he was one of the first people to welcome me. And actually, he was one of the people that always kept an eye on your safety and making sure that you’re fed, you’re sleeping well, everything else is going well.

Summia Tora: At Geres, Hamid was a project coordinator, working with the government and NGOs.

Michael: The one thing that was almost seamless while we were there was the fact that we always felt safe. And we always had a destination; the destination was always ready for us. All because people like Hamid were laying the groundwork weeks before, days before. And I never understood how they kept up with all the work that we were doing, but it was really incredible.

Summia Tora: Michael wanted our advice about how to get Hamid and the other Geres workers out. We were able to get Illinois Democratic congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi to write a letter for Hamid. By this time, I knew a few people in the U.S. military and people working as security contractors who were trying to help Afghans.

Like my father, Hamid had lived through decades of war. Like my father, he believed that with education and hard work, and by trying to rebuild Afghanistan, he would be able to give his daughter a different life.

In mid-2018, after a decade working with national and international agencies in Afghanistan, Hamid and his wife left to study abroad.

Hamid: After completing our master’s degrees in late 2020, we returned back to country with full hope and plan to serve our community. But our optimism unfortunately didn’t last long, and the Taliban suddenly reached the gates of Kabul capital. That is why we planned to leave Afghanistan soon, as I had the experience of the Taliban regime in 1995. And also we were very worried that we will be the second target of Taliban as we collaborated with foreign agencies.

I sent a number of emails to all agencies that I worked with and asked them for help and assistance.

Summia Tora: He checked his email every minute, waiting and hoping for a response. On August 15, the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, Hamid was at home.

Hamid: Around 8 o’clock in the morning, a friend of mine called me and said, “The Taliban have entered Kabul. And the president and other government officials have fled the country.” I was very surprised. And upon hearing this news, my fear and anxiety multiplied. Actually, no one knew what to do and what would happen next. The situation was very insane, and we felt an experience — really helpless.

Summia Tora: After that call, Hamid went outside to look around, and all the shops were closed. Hamid anxiously scrolled through his emails, hoping that someone would reach out to help. Help had to be coming, right? Because Hamid has spent most of his life trying to rebuild Afghanistan.

Late that evening, his phone pulsed.

Hamid: A friend of mine called me at night and said, “Let’s go to the airport. All the people are leaving.” I said, “I do not have a visa, I cannot go anywhere with this.” He said, “People leave the country with electricity bills and vaccination cards, but you have at least a passport.” Sure, I have a passport. But I cannot go anywhere with this. I didn’t believe him, but later I noticed that he was right: People boarded the plane without a document and left the country, and many fell from the wings of the planes, disappeared, and died.

Summia Tora: Hamid wasn’t sure how to get out, so he decided, for the moment to go into hiding.

Hamid: One of my friends said, “It is good for you to relocate and change your place of residence at least.” So I moved to another part of the city, where I, my wife, and my little daughter to be safer. And then we chose a nickname for all us, not be easily identified by Taliban spies and militants as a person who worked with foreign agencies in Afghanistan.

Summia Tora: Hamid chose fake names for himself, his wife, and his daughter. He finally heard from Geres that he and his colleagues would be shortlisted for evacuation.

Hamid: They ask me to send my details and those of my family list quickly. Then they sent me a letter mentioning that I should print it out and take my family to airport and show them to French soldiers, and they will help us to get out of the country. So I printed out the letter and hide it in the bottom of my socks.

Summia Tora: In the middle of the night, they headed to the airport. Along the way, Taliban fighters beat and harassed him at various checkpoints.

Hamid: When we arrived at the first checkpoint, one of the Taliban soldiers pointed his gun at the taxi to stop and then asked me, “Where are you going?” I said, “We are going to hospital.” He motioned for the gun to go.

Passing through dozens of checkpoints, we arrived to a huge crowd called Camp-e-Baran in Persian, “Rain Camp,” and one of the entrances to the airport at the time, as if all the people had come there. The men and women were trying to get into the airport with their children quickly. It was crowded everywhere, with women and children standing in long lines with frightened and worried faces, and some sitting on the side of the road.

Summia Tora: Taliban soldiers were fighting and whipping people.

Hamid: They beat everyone. They shot in front of the people and called people, “You are infidels, mercenaries, and foreign spies.”

My daughter cried when she heard gunshots and loud noises. The only option that I had, I comforted her and lied to her that they are shooting films and making movies like the ones you have seen on TV before, it is not real.

Summia Tora: Hamid’s wife was three months pregnant, something none of us knew at the time.

Hamid: It seemed really impossible to walk through the crowd with a pregnant woman and a little girl, I was afraid my daughter would be crushed by people.

Summia Tora: Hamid had a letter of support from the French organization he worked for, the letter from Rep. Krishnamoorthi, and other documentation.

Hamid: And we were unable to enter the airport through the French forces because they didn’t pay attention to our letter and did not allow us to enter the airport.

So I tried to reach the American forces from the crowd, I got into the river full of garbage, and I showed the letter to an American female soldier. She took the letter and read it and then simply said, “This is fake. And you got it from Facebook.” She refused and also she didn’t let me to explain that this is not fake one. It is real.

One Final Attempt

Summia Tora: At 2 a.m. on August 26, I was in Oxford, glued to my phone. I had barely slept all night, sitting in the living room waiting to hear whether Hamid was going to try again to get into the airport. I kept scrolling through my WhatsApp, sending messages to figure out where he was.

He and his family had spent two nights outside the airport. They hadn’t been able to get in, and had finally decided, the night of August 25, to go back home.

At 8 a.m. Kabul time, my contacts at the U.S. military messaged me to say that Hamid might have a chance to get into the airport. So I scrambled to figure out if he and his family could make it there.

Summia Tora (voice memo in Dari): Can you please tell us via voice note what your plans are for today? Are you planning to go to the airport? Please let us know.

Summia Tora: I said, Can you please let me know via voice note what your plans are for today? Are you planning to go to the airport? Please let us know so that we can plan accordingly.

About 30 minutes later, I heard from Hamid. He said they were heading to the airport, going through checkpoints and hoping they’ll make it in time.

Hamid (voice memo in Dari): I am currently in the car going toward the location that you mentioned. But I am not sure if we will be able to make it or not, but we will try our best.

Summia Tora: My contact on the ground asked for photos of Hamid and his family; the soldiers at the airport gates needed to know what they were wearing. I asked Hamid to send details I could pass along to help them get through the gates.

Summia Tora (voice memo in Dari): Salam, it is good that both of you are going there together. Could you try to reach the airport by 9 a.m. as our guy/contact person is waiting for you? Please make sure to take a photo showing what you and your family are wearing and send it to us.

Summia Tora: I looked at the photos Hamid had sent. This was the first time I’d seen their faces. He and his wife and their daughter were standing under the scorching sun outside the airport, holding colorful umbrellas. It was 86 degrees. They wore traditional Afghan clothes, and their eyes were bloodshot and tired. It was all too real. I had taken responsibility for their lives.

I waited to hear back from Hamid. I would later learn that he had been stopped again at the Taliban checkpoints. They reached the airport. Thousands of people were standing outside. I looked again at the photo they’d sent: His daughter was smiling — but there was fear in her eyes.

I tried to imagine what it must be like for this little girl seeing her parents totally helpless. I thought of my own childhood trips with my family across the Torkham border from Pakistan into Afghanistan.

Being at Torkham as a kid was scary. The border was chaotic, and if you got separated from your family, you were lost. American soldiers patrolled that border, too — somehow, they were always the ones who decided who could go into and out of my country.

Survivors

Summia Tora: We tracked Hamid’s location minute by minute, relaying to him instructions on how to reach the gate by speaking to U.S. military people and trying to ensure that when they got there, someone would be able to help them get inside.

My friend Jhamat Mahbubani was at school with me. He took the lead in guiding Hamid and his family — and several of his colleagues, also traveling with their wives and children — toward the gate and the U.S. Marines. Hamid sent Jhamat a voice note, asking for some assurances.

Jhamat Mahbubani: Something along the lines of like, “You need to promise us that if we get to the gate, your contacts will come out and get us. Because if you go any further, there’s a real chance our kids will die.” Their kids are like 5, 9 years old, things like that. And he needed that assurance. And this is a man who had been, you know, unsuccessfully tried to do this for three previous nights, right? And we really believed this was the chance to get out. It was the best chance we had seen over the past week.

So we spoke to our U.S. Army contacts about it, about kind of giving this assurance. And they said something which I thought was quite a good assessment at time. I mean, they were not gonna give any blanket assurance or something, but I think the response from one of them was, “You need to ask the family whether the risk of staying in Afghanistan is greater than the risk of trying to escape here.”

Summia Tora: Hamid and his family pushed through the crowds in a sewage canal until they were 100 meters from Abbey Gate. Hamid had the congressional letter we’d helped him get. He was trying to show it to the soldiers outside the airport.

It seemed like they had a chance. They were only 30 meters away from the gate now, and closer to reaching an American soldier who, according to our military contacts, could get them inside the airport.

That’s when we lost them.

On WhatsApp, when a message is sent, a checkmark appears beneath it; a second checkmark shows up when the message is received. All of a sudden, late on the afternoon of August 26, Hamid stopped reading our messages.

There was no second checkmark.

Jhamat Mahbubani: But I don’t remember thinking that they had made it at any point. So I just remember being in this twilight zone, like waiting for an update, they’re so close. Signal was terrible.

Summia Tora: Thirty-three minutes later, our contacts messaged to say that a bomb had exploded near where Hamid and his family had been standing.

Jhamat Mahbubani: They text and they say, “We’ve heard a bomb and possibly shooting has happened on the site.” So immediately, your heart is sunk, to absolute zero. The thought that they could have come to harm is completely devastating.

Summia Tora: We asked for the exact location. Our U.S. military contacts sent us a 50-meter radius of the blast, based on the information they had at the time. We thought Hamid and his family had to be hurt, if not dead.

His phone wasn’t working. They asked us to keep trying.

Jhamat Mahbubani: And I remember looking through Twitter — there were photos taken at the site of the bombing — to look through the photos of the dead, to see if any of them looked like Hamid or his family or the kids. And there were like videos of people being like helped out and so on. And I was checking the face of everyone, and we were desperately trying to reach them.

I honestly thought we led them to their deaths. And it was the worst. I felt like [we had] completely failed them.

Hamid: Suddenly a loud explosion of smoke and dust rose, and the resulting wave hit me in the face and threw me into the crowd. I held my breath for a moment, for a second; my eyes were burning. I could not see anyone. My ears could only hear the crowds, but I still did not know what happened. I tried to open my eyes to know about my wife and daughter. I could not open my eyes. I shouted their names with my eyes closed.

Summia Tora: At 7:24 p.m., our U.S. military contacts wrote to say that Hamid and his family were safe. They were leaving the airport.

Hamid’s wife and daughter had been so close to the explosion that they’d been covered with blood and gore from those killed and wounded all around them.

Jamila (translated voiceover): I felt like I was in a bad dream. I can’t really remember what happened. It was my husband Hamid who got me out of there.

Summia Tora: They made their way home.

Hamid: After the crowd subsided, we left the scene in clothes full of dirt and blood and bare feet, but we were still afraid that the second or third explosions would take place. We still do not tell the truth to our daughter, but she still asks questions about murder and human blood that she has seen there, for which we do not have a satisfactory answer to her.

We were unable to leave the country, and we still live far from the public eye and in fear.

Summia Tora: Next time on No Way Home.

Leila (translated voiceover): I couldn’t sit down to take off my shoes, but I could feel that my toenails were coming off. I had to take care of my children. I had fallen in several places, and my eyes were closed. All I could hear was my daughter and son crying. 

Mir Abdullah Miri: When the Taliban seized Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, Leila’s husband, Aziz, quickly started planning the family’s exit from the country. Their attempt to leave would irreversibly change their lives — and mine. 

Leila (translated voiceover): Aziz said, “Had I known you are like this, I wouldn’t have married you.” He even told me, “Even if I get killed, I won’t return home. Bury me in Iran next to my father’s grave if I die. I won’t return to Afghanistan.”

Summia Tora: No Way Home is a production of The Intercept and New America’s Afghanistan Observatory Scholars program.

This episode was written and reported by me, Summia Tora.

Our executive producer and editor is Vanessa Gezari.

Supervising producer and editor is Laura Flynn.

Candace Rondeaux is the director of Future Frontlines Program-New America and project editor.

Ali Yawar Adili is the Afghanistan Observatory Project Coordinator.

Jose Olivares also helped with production.

Rick Kwan mixed this episode. Zach Young composed our theme music. Legal review by David Bralow. Fact checking by Emily Schneider.

Awista Ayub is the director and project manager of New America’s Fellows Program.

Voiceover in this episode by Humaira Rahbin.

To learn more, visit theintercept.com where you can find transcripts and show art. Philipp Hubert is our visual designer and Nara Shin our copy editor.

Roger Hodge is the editor-in-chief of The Intercept.

If you want to give us feedback or have any questions, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thanks, so much, for listening.

The post No Way Home, Episode One: Life and Death appeared first on The Intercept.

We became adults in a country struggling to cope with current and past conflicts, but also one that was full of hope and promise. We went to school, pursued careers, and grew fully invested in rebuilding Afghanistan.

Then, last summer, we became refugees once again.

In the days after the Taliban’s swift toppling of the U.S.-backed Afghan government, fearing our accomplishments would make us targets, we scrambled to get ourselves and our loved ones to safety. We are among tens of thousands of Afghans who were either outside the country already or who managed to escape, while countless more tried and failed.

Becoming a refugee doesn’t get easier every time you are displaced. Like our parents before us, we’ve had to start from scratch. The past year has been filled with the logistics of survival: Where would we live? How would we provide for ourselves and our families? How would we get our stranded relatives to safety, reunite our families, and create new lives in languages we didn’t speak?

Knowing that millions of our fellow Afghans — both those who left and those who stayed — were living their own unique versions of this drama felt overwhelming. That’s why we chose to tell some of their stories in this podcast, No Way Home.

Created in partnership with The Intercept and the Future Frontlines Program at New America, No Way Home tells the story of last summer’s perilous exodus brought on by two decades of broken promises in the U.S. war on terror. Over four episodes, we tell both our own stories and those of other Afghans who tried to leave when the U.S. military pulled out of Afghanistan a year ago: a businessman with an activist daughter; a valued employee of a French environmental NGO; a cellphone programmer determined to build a better life for his kids; and a finance officer for Jesuit Refugee Services who became a refugee himself. These stories seek to give a voice to just a few of the millions whose lives were upended last year.

All of the stories start on August 15, 2021 — a day some Afghans carry seared on their souls like their own 9/11. That day, the Taliban marched into Kabul and Afghanistan’s former president, Ashraf Ghani, fled the country in a helicopter. The podcast talks about those first frantic days and the weeks and months that followed, as some got out — or died trying — and others were left behind.

In the first episode, Summia Tora, an Afghan human rights advocate, talks about her parallel efforts to evacuate her father and a longtime NGO worker named Hamid, his pregnant wife, and their young daughter, as a suicide bomber stalks the Kabul airport. In the second episode, Mir Abdullah Miri, an educational researcher now living in the U.K., sets out to investigate a family tragedy set against the backdrop of last summer’s exodus, when his cousin Aziz, a cellphone programmer, decided to cross into Iran on foot with his wife and two young children, hoping to reach relatives in Germany. In episode three, Maryam Barak, an Afghan journalist who was evacuated to Italy, tells the story of Qader Kazimizada, another newly arrived Afghan who has healed by helping other refugees find community in an alien place. In the fourth and final episode, Tora tells the story of Hamid and his family’s year of hiding in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and a surprise, last-minute opportunity to escape.

Working on this podcast, in which our own stories are intertwined with those of our fellow Afghans, gave us a sense of community at a time when we felt adrift. Interviewing Sayed Tora, Qader Kazimizada, Hamid, and many others allowed us to reflect on our own journeys. Becoming reporters gave us an identity beyond “refugee” to define ourselves and our purpose. As we scattered around the world, far from family and friends, working on this project with other Afghans helped us find a bit of home through Zoom meetings and Slack chats.

It is important that we, Afghans, be the ones to tell these stories. There are certain nuances that only we can capture when reporting on Afghanistan. We wanted to represent the diversity of our country, its ethnicities and languages, and the various ways in which our fellow Afghans have experienced the events of the last year.

At the same time, we strove to tell stories that would resonate with an international audience. Sayed, Hamid, Qader, and Aziz wanted to live in safety with their families and give their children opportunities they didn’t have. They all hoped to do that at home, in Afghanistan.

The post Telling Afghanistan’s Stories — in Their Own Words appeared first on The Intercept.