Let's get this family to their new home
Three years after the fall of Kabul, here's an update from the family whose lives you saved.
For those of you who know this story, forgive me for telling it again. I’ve acquired new readers since the fall of Kabul, and I’d like to share this story with them, too.
When Kabul fell, I was glued to the news, which I was following on Twitter. I was refreshing the list of Afghans I followed, mostly journalists, over and over to see if they had been evacuated and if not, if they were safe.
I don’t remember how I found myself exchanging messages with a family I’ll call “the S. family.” They knew I was in France, and they knew, from following me, how worried I was for our Afghan allies and how horrified I was to see Kabul revert, almost overnight, to the Dark Ages. I was filled with dread for Afghan women and girls.
I was sick—more than sick—at the thought that our troops, too, were watching these scenes. I was exchanging Tweets with friends and acquaintances who had served in Afghanistan, and I was excoriating the host of politicians responsible for the disaster. My tone may have been why the S. family believed that I was someone more important and powerful than I am. They thought I was French, because I lived here, and they mistook me for someone with the power to make the French government do my bidding.
Mr. and Mrs. S. were in mortal danger, as were their five daughters and their son. Mr. S. had worked for French NGO for many years. Mrs. S was a lawyer who had been trained by the US State Department and a prominent women’s rights activist. She defended abused women and children, and she had put their abusers behind bars. The Taliban had released them, and now they wanted revenge.
They weren’t the only ones who wanted to kill her. The Taliban raided the office of the Afghan Bar Association, seizing a database with the names and identifying details of its members and their families, including Mrs. S. They set to work killing them.
The family was, therefore, in triple danger. Their father had worked for France. Their mother was a woman’s rights activist. And they were Tajiks. (Tajiks dominated the Northern Alliance, and make up the majority of Afghanistan’s educated, urban elite. The Taliban has ruthlessly suppressed and persecuted them.)
The French government understood that this family, in particular, was at grave risk, and put their names on the flight list for evacuation. Then came the bombing at Abbey Gate, and the flights stopped. The S. Family was one of countless many left behind.
This is why they contacted me. They mistakenly believed that I had the power to reach the relevant ministers in France and tell them that they needed to send another flight. They sincerely believed, at this point, that a failure of communication was involved—that if only France understood that they were still there, and in terrible and immediate danger, they would send another plane.
Below, their son recounts these events:
I was a student at the computer science faculty. Our lives were normal. On the day Kabul fell, like all normal days, I woke up and went to work after breakfast. On the way, people sitting in the city vehicle were worried about the security situation. When I arrived at the office, the situation was still normal, like every day. It was 11 o’clock, when many people were out and about, when my father called me and told me to leave the office right away and go home, because the security situation wasn’t good.
I immediately left the office. On my way home, everyone looked disturbed, they were moving in every direction, terror was everywhere. It was as if Kabul had fallen, I thought, but I had never experienced such a situation and I thought that maybe tomorrow things would be better. I wasn’t aware that yes, Kabul had really fallen, that Kabul had been sold out by its corrupt Afghan leaders.
It was exactly two o’clock in the afternoon when I got home. Everyone was worried that our lives would change a lot. Warplanes flew over Kabul.
It was nighttime when I saw on Facebook that the Taliban had taken over the presidential palace in Afghanistan. From that moment, Kabul was dead. Our hopes were dashed. Everything we had worked for was lost in a single day. Afghanistan turned back the clock twenty years because of the United States’ policy mistakes and the corruption of Afghanistan’s leaders.
I woke up the next day with no hope of going to work because the whole city was closed. Fear was everywhere. I felt we had lost our freedom. Our achievements. Our hopes. Our reason to live. We lost it all.
All I could think about was surviving and getting out of Afghanistan. My mother worked for many years as a lawyer and advocate for women’s rights. My father also worked for years with the French government and other international organizations. It is clear that the Taliban is opposed to people like us. Kabul was no longer a safe place for us.
My father brought me the documents that proved he had worked on French projects for seven years. He said we had to contact the French embassy and ask them to save our lives. I was shocked, because my father loves Afghanistan very much. He could have left our homeland many times to emigrate to the United States or Europe. But before, he didn’t want to leave Afghanistan.
I took his documents and went to the French embassy, in the Green Zone. When I got there, about 5,000 people had already gathered near the embassy to ask for visas. Most of them had never worked for France. They were ordinary people. The Taliban were near the French embassy. They didn’t allow people to approach the embassy and they beat people away.
I went home and found the French embassy’s phone number on Google. I called them but they didn’t answer. I tried the French embassy on Twitter, but that didn’t work either. I could not make contact with them. By nightfall, I was sharing our problem on Twitter but could find no one to help.
A few days after the fall of Kabul, I was still unable to make contact with the French Embassy in Kabul. But Ms. Claire Berlinski replied to me on Twitter, as if she had been sent by God to help us. I told her about our situation and sent her our documents. She promised to try to help. She gave me the email of the French crisis center. I emailed the crisis center and sent them my documents. I told them about my family. But I did not receive an answer.
One day after the fall of Kabul, I saw two Taliban men with violent faces near our house, looking at our home. The Taliban are wild people. We have never been in such a situation before. Fear ran through us, wondering if they had come to kill us, but after thirty minutes, they left. We left the house immediately and went to my aunt’s house. Claire Berlinski tried contacting people in France to help us. But still, the French Embassy did not reply. They left us behind. I emailed them over and over but received no response.
We are currently hiding in my aunt’s house and we are not going outdoors. The Taliban are going house to house, searching for people who have worked with foreign institutions, and they’re also looking for women who defend women’s rights. We all fear for our survival. Our future is unknown. We see anxiety and misery in our parents’ faces. They are not worried about themselves, they are worried about their children’s future.
We are facing a lot of problems right now. We may not have food to eat in the next few days. During the many years that my parents were on duty, they spent all their money on our education and did not make enough money to save.
When I see my sisters, I can’t control my tears. These days are really hard. I cannot do anything for my sisters. We need urgently to leave Kabul. I don’t know why the French Embassy didn’t place any value on our lives. Our lives are in danger. The Taliban are not human, they will kill all of us. Our only hope right now is for the French government to intervene to save our family.
They have five daughters and a son. All were in school. On the day Kabul fell, their education came to an end. This is a tragedy for every girl in Afghanistan, but a particular tragedy for these girls. They believed the United States when we said we’d come to secure democracy, human rights, and a brighter future for Afghanistan’s women and girls. They bet everything on it.
These words now evoke cynicism and eye-rolling in the US. They didn’t in Afghanistan. Americans now tell themselves that Afghans never wanted these things in the first place. It isn’t true. They did.
Those five girls faced a ghastly future. The littlest girl had been the best student in her class. But in the Taliban’s view, girls don’t need an education. The eldest had been on the verge of getting her master’s degree, hoping to join her mother as an advocate for Afghan women and children. The second daughter wanted to be a journalist.
But instead they all became, in their father’s words, “teenage prisoners.” Now, at best, they faced spending the rest of their lives as terrified shut-ins whose faces would never again feel sunlight. At worst, their parents would be killed before their eyes, and they would be forcibly married to Taliban fighters. Or they would be killed, too.
I too, naively, believed that if I could just reach the right officials, I could ensure that when flights started again (as I assumed they would) I could confirm that this family was on the manifest for the next one and reassure them that they would be evacuated. But I was wrong. The scale of the crisis had overwhelmed the French government, as it had every other government. Try as I might, I couldn’t even get anyone to answer the phone, no less give me the assurance I sought.
I had tried to reassure this terrified family that something rational would happen—help would come, surely France wouldn’t just abandon them there. But I came to realize that yes, it would. Just as we would abandon our allies. I’d told them that they would be okay. (What else would you say to people so frightened?) But it didn’t look as if it would be okay at all. And somehow they were counting on me, even though they shouldn’t have been, because I had no power at all over this situation. I nonetheless feared they’d be killed because I couldn’t get them out of there. Meanwhile, US troops were losing their minds because they couldn’t help the Afghan allies who had fought with them, either. The moral injury we inflicted upon our troops with our shameful abandonment of Afghanistan—and our refusal, to this day, to help our Afghan allies—is as grave as any physical injury.
Many of our troops had given up on our government and were trying to exfiltrate their allies themselves. I believe that some succeeded. I didn’t have the skills that would allow me to do that. But I was speaking to the troops who were involved in these efforts. They told me the best advice I could give to them was to travel overland to the border to Pakistan and then try to cross it, if it was open. From there, they could apply for asylum.
The problem was that one of their daughters didn’t have a passport. They weren’t willing to split up the family. Nor did they have any money. So they would have to stay in Afghanistan until the passport office reopened, and who knew when that would be. But they could no longer go outside to earn a living. They were moving from house to house at night, terrified.
So I started a GoFundMe campaign to help them. It was the only thing I could think to do. This is where the Cosmopolitan Globalist comes in. My readers of came through for them. You—my readers—saved their lives. They would have starved during that terrible period without you.
By the time they were finally able to secure passports for everyone in the family, I had become deeply involved in their story. I found their plight unbearable. Five intelligent, innocent, optimistic girls, suddenly facing life under the Taliban? It was a nightmare. They were not, by this point, an abstraction to me. I was by now quite determined to do anything in my power to help them get to a place where those girls could go back to school. But this is not easy.
You can read the whole story here:
Under every relevant international convention, a family like this should be eligible for asylum and refugee status. But in practice, the world makes this nearly impossible. If you’ve ever tried to help a family of asylum-seekers reach a safe country, you’ll understand exactly why so many cross the US border illegally: There is no legal way to do it. Most countries claim to observe international refugee law, but in practice erect such massive physical and bureaucratic barriers between refugees and any place they might be safe that the laws are all but meaningless. The asylum system is broken, the Geneva Conventions are no longer fit for purpose, and many are dying because of it.
I asked everyone I knew for advice. I cast the net as widely as I could. I wrote at the time:
This is all they ask: The chance to live, the chance to see their children educate their minds and contribute their talents to serve their new community. You would be proud to have them as neighbors. They would be no burden on your country or its welfare system; to the contrary, they have many years of productive work ahead of them and would surely contribute more to your country than they would take. They are not criminals or terrorists. They’re just girls who want to go to school, and their terribly worried, loving parents. They have much to offer. They just need someone who can cut through the red tape on their behalf—someone with far more power than me.
One of our readers told me that Canada had a refugee-sponsorship program for which the family is eligible. To apply, the family has to demonstrate that there’s a community waiting to welcome and emotionally support them, and they need funds to support them for a year. I began calling every Canadian I knew.
That’s how Lawrence Krauss became involved. Lawrence is probably better known to you as a theoretical physicist, cosmologist and bestselling writer. For a decade, he was the Chair of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He reads and writes for the Cosmopolitan Globalist, and when I told him about the S. family, he responded as we all have: He was deeply moved and wanted to help. He figured that he could put together a community of five sponsors in Canada.
You can’t apply for this program from Afghanistan, however. You have to be recognized as refugees by the United Nations Refugee Agency, which means you have to apply from a third country. We concluded that the plan that made the most sense was, indeed, for the whole family to go to Islamabad and stay there while they wait for their application to be processed. So they set out for Islamabad—and they crossed the border one day before it closed.
They have been in Islamabad since. Your donations made this possible and kept this family alive. You got them out of Afghanistan, the first and most important step toward a decent life.
So here’s the update. It’s all good news. It wasn’t easy, at all. We had several heartbreaking false starts. But we have found a wonderful group of volunteers in Toronto and a group that’s willing and able to act as sponsors for the whole family, and not in some abstract future, either, but next year. The Jewish Immigrant Aid Services can do it. We’re so grateful to them.
We now need to come up with the rest of the funding. We need to show that we can support them for a year (or until they can support themselves, whichever comes first). The good news is that we’ve already raised most of it.
But we haven’t raised all of it. There’s a shortfall. A manageable one, but a shortfall all the same, and we need to make it up.
So again, I’m asking for your help. The GoFundMe link is the same, but if you’re in Canada and you’d like to make a tax-deductible contribution, you can send it directly to the Jewish Immigrant Aid Services. (Send me an email and I’ll send you the bank details.)
I’d also be grateful if you shared this fundraiser as widely as you can. Share it with your office, your church, your synagogue, your book club; share it on social media; share it with your local newspaper.
We’ve got this whole way through small donations. Some people made very large contributions, for which we’re inexpressibly grateful, but the bulk of the money we’ve raised so far has been from people who gave a little bit. And it really added up. So there’s no such thing as a donation too small. If all you can give is a dollar, it will be the most gratefully received dollar you’ve ever spent.
The eldest son also helped me to make the video I posted above. Please share it and use it, if it helps you better to explain the story. Some of the photos we used are theirs; others came from the Internet, but they chose them as best depicting what they’ve lived through and seen. I wish I could show you their faces, but we still think it would be for the best if they aren’t easily identified.
(Here’s the video again, if you skipped it.)
And finally, here’s a word from the family. (The girls didn’t speak any English when I first met them. Their brother translated for us. But you can see they’ve put this time to good use.)
Thank you. From the bottom of my heart. Nothing I’ve ever done has struck me as more obviously the right thing to do than helping this family. I couldn’t have done it unless my readers had helped. I hope everyone who contributed, and will contribute, grasps that your contribution has given a family a chance to live. Not to better their life—although that, too—but to live.
They’ve asked me on occasion how they’ll ever repay you. I’ve taken the liberty on your behalf of telling them that their obligation is to pay it forward. I’m sure, given their drive and talent, that these girls will thrive and become successful powerhouses. Their son, too, is destined to be a great man: His determination to save and protect his family is a force of nature. They will absolutely, one day, be in a position to help another family. And when that happens, I have every confidence that they will—and that your generosity will spread through the world, and keep spreading, forever.
I was going to write something more political, and more analytical, about Afghanistan to accompany this. But I think for today I’ll keep politics out of it. Here are stories we published at the time about the fall of Afghanistan. They’ve held up well. I’ll write that essay another time.
I contributed last time and will make another contribution today. This family’s bravery has been rewarded with your friendship, Claire. They will have long, productive and happy lives thanks to you. As the proverb says, “he who saves a life saves the world.” You and your loyal readers have done precisely that.
I've been trying to contribute using Venmo but get "Declined transaction from GoFundMe" (both on desktop and phone). One of the explanations said Venmo may be intercepting it thinking the transaction is fraudulent. The advice is to try again tomorrow. Stay tuned. Help is on the way!