On the flight from Kabul

“It’s a very hard decision when you leave a country, and you know you probably won’t be able to return,” Khyber says. “It’s no longer a country where you believe in the values. All those freedoms, they’re all taken away. Everything was multiplied by zero. Everything.”

On Sunday, August 15, 2021, the first day of a new working week in Kabul, Khyber left for work as usual around 8 a.m. He felt conspicuous in his suit and turned back before he reached the end of his road. He let himself back into the house he shared with his extended family: father and mother, five brothers and one sister, wives and children, including his own pregnant wife Zarghona and daughters Sara, who was two, and Sana, four. He changed into jeans and a casual shirt, less obviously the kind of man who works for the government or a foreign agency.

He had no intention of making any big life changes that day. He had a good job helping deliver a new payroll system to the Afghan Police Force and had recently taken on a part-time role at the United Nations Migration Service. He lived in the heart of the family he loved. He’d meet friends at Table Talk, one of the cafes that had recently taken root in the neighborhood, to talk family, politics or business or play chess until late. But he knew change was coming and had scheduled an appointment at the U.S. Embassy for September 12 to discuss a Special Immigrant visa.

By that evening Khyber was in hiding, and nine days later, he, Zarghona, Sara and Sana sat on the floor of a cargo plane with 550 fellow Afghans as it taxied down the runway of Kabul Airport. The only bag Khyber brought onboard was a small backpack that held identity documents, and spare clothes for the girls. Five months later, in the back of an ambulance in the parking lot of a Residence Inn in Maryland in the middle of a snowstorm, Khyber and Zarghona’s third daughter was born.

The speed of the Taliban’s comeback took everyone by surprise. Provinces to the east had fallen overnight and that Sunday morning Kabul was surrounded. For several weeks, target killings had been seeding fear in the city and it was hard to know who to trust. American agencies had started removing pictures of Afghan civilians from their websites, fearing reprisals.

Khyber passed back out through the courtyard at the front of the house where flowers peppered brightly-painted red, yellow, blue, and green planters. A single Persian ivy reached up high, tall enough to be seen over the front gate and the barbed wire that crowned it. He shut the gun-metal gray gate and walked to the end of the dusty street in Qala-e-Khayat, the suburb in the north-east of the city where he had grown up. Head right and you’d eventually arrive at the U.S. Embassy, head left and after three miles you’d hit Hamid Karzai International Airport. Khyber turned right and hailed a shared taxi, heading for the U.N. offices downtown.

Around 10:30 a.m., Khyber learned that the Taliban were in Kabul. U.N. staff were donning body armor and getting into vehicles headed for the airport. Other offices were already empty. The streets outside were paralyzed with cars and a huge crowd. Most were young men, huddled together in groups, many wearing backpacks, speaking urgently on mobile phones or standing on the backs of stationary jeeps, straining to see what was happening up ahead.

It took Khyber two hours to walk home. His family was having lunch. He collected his laptop, kissed his wife and children, and called a friend he knew he could trust.

“You know my identity is known,” he said. “I need your help. Please let me hide for two or three days until I find a way.”

“Come over, you don’t have to ask,” the friend replied.

While his work — a collaboration between U.S. command, NATO forces and the Afghan government — put him at risk, it also meant he knew people in a position to help. He started getting texts and calls. Everyone wanted to help, but no one could arrange safe passage to the airport. A colleague called from Qatar. “Khyber, I can’t write this in an email to you, but everyone is being allowed out to make their way to the airport,” he said. “Just go and try your luck.”

On August 18, his brothers escorted him back to the family home, hidden under a shawl. He said his goodbyes and headed for the airport with his wife and daughters.

Their way out would be through three checkpoints. The first was manned by the Taliban. Four-feet high concrete T-walls bracketed a gate wide enough for one car to pass. Thousands pressed around the closed gate, waiting to get through. The crowd felt agitated, the Taliban soldiers unpredictable. Khyber and his family started towards the gate at five o’clock in the afternoon but pulled back after Sara started suffocating as the crowd closed in. They waited an hour and tried again. Their goal was only 20 yards away. Khyber and a friend passed the children to a group of women on the far side of the wall and Zarghona climbed over during the call to prayer. None of the men dared follow. A year later, their first July Fourth fireworks would remind the girls of the sound of Taliban fighters firing over the heads of the crowd. Khyber waited through the night to get past the Taliban.

Around eight the next morning, the crowd started moving. A Taliban vehicle stood in the open gate and people were climbing under and around it to get through. Young Taliban men spat insults and struck out. Khyber took a glancing blow from a rubber whip as he scrambled through. He found his family and they pressed on.

It was already 80 degrees when they arrived at the second checkpoint an hour later. British soldiers were pitching small plastic water bottles into a crowd of several thousand. Every picture of the family’s exit from Kabul, waiting in the streets or waiting at checkpoints or waiting for the plane, is littered with small plastic water bottles. The second checkpoint was slow but straightforward and on August 21 they came to the third set of barriers.

The final checkpoint was operated by American military. They handed out Military Ready-to-Eat meals, the first food the family had had in three days. A weary Zarghona sat on flattened cardboard in the shade of concrete barriers, armed soldiers and chemical toilets a few yards away. Sara, in a blue dress with white flowers, played peek-a-boo with her dad. Sana wore a red T-shirt, sandals with golden butterflies tied to the straps and jeans with sewn-in sparkles that spelled out the word “change” in English. She played or slept on her mother. Khyber carries a picture of the family having lunch in Kabul the day before the collapse. They had just been shopping for new clothes, all of which they would leave behind. In the picture, Khyber is clean shaven, his collarless perahan o tunban, Afghan traditional dress, is smartly-pressed. In pictures from the third checkpoint, he wears a week of stubble and looks careworn.

A female official came to the front of the crowd and called out for yellow pass holders. A laminated golden ticket, two inches by three, was proof of security clearance at the U.S. Embassy and NATO facilities, and Khyber had one. He waved it and they were beckoned forward. A five-minute bus ride took them to have their biometrics processed. They joined the line for a place on a plane.

On August 24, at six in the evening, the family reached the front of the line that snaked back across the tarmac and climbed the ladder to board a plane bound for Qatar. The girls still had no idea what was happening. As they taxied, Khyber looked out of the window.

“The whole 20 years was rewinded in front of my eyes.” Khyber recalls, “I was just thinking, why has this happened? How beautiful it was, living in your country. Then leaving your country this way. I wondered, what will happen? Where will we end up? I had no idea how my life would be changed. I cried a lot about my country on the day I left.”

Two days later a suicide bomber killed 169 Afghan civilians and 13 American troops at the airport.

In Doha, they roomed together with 2,000 others in a military base and spent 14 nights on black-framed beds with shrink-wrapped mattresses. Khyber held back some food each day so two-year-old Sara would have something to eat when she woke up hungry in the night. On September 8, they boarded a plane. They were airborne before a flight attendant told them they were heading for the United States.

Their first stop was a base in New Jersey, where they shared a large tent with hundreds of Afghan families. Six-foot-high curtains offered each family some privacy, but it was constantly noisy.

Homesickness and uncertainty were sending some adults into a depression. Zarghona, now in her second trimester, was growing tired. Everyone was free to go any time, but few had the contacts or financial resources to get started. The family waited to be told where they would be sent.

On November 30, they boarded a bus and stepped off in front of a hotel in Bethesda, Maryland. After more than 100 nights sleeping among crowds of fellow refugees, it was just the four of them in a room together. They stayed in hotels for two months.

Sara and Sana were born in Kabul. The house would be like a beehive for a month, visitors dropping in to congratulate and celebrate. Naming each girl took a week as family members weighed in with suggestions. This time Zarghona hadn’t been able to get a sonogram, so they were flying blind, with no due date and no gender, when she went into labor on January 3, 2022. The baby’s parents named her two days later. She is Zala, “sparkling brightness” in Pashto.

Her mother is happy in the United States. She is free to go unchaperoned to a restaurant. Their daughters are free to go to school. Their parents let them watch cartoons to improve their English. Sana has picked up the language quickly; a talented mimic, she has her summer school teacher’s accent and mannerisms down. She takes the yellow school bus with the other children. Last week she lost a tooth and woke up to find a few dollars under her pillow.

There are around 70 Afghan families in their Silver Spring apartment complex and they get together every few weeks to share a meal, memories and tips on navigating life in the United States. While Khyber was in the New Jersey camp, he met a Pentagon official who stayed in touch. She asked how she could help. He asked if she could get him a laptop. He used their time in hotels to study and get formal accreditation as a project manager, ready to work. He studied for his driving test online but had to wait two months for a permanent address before taking his test. He has been working with Upwardly Global, a non-profit that helps immigrant and refugee professionals start their careers in the U.S. The family has been supported by the U.S. Resettlement Agency with accommodation and an allowance while they get on their feet, but agency case workers have been overloaded with the sheer number of Afghan arrivals. Khyber speaks excellent English so was able to get things done once he knew what he had to do, but others have struggled.

Everything feels new. Khyber had to watch a video to learn how to take the bus and metro. He uses online banking and marvels at being able to deposit a check without going to a branch. Earlier this month he saw the sea for the first time in his life.

He mourns losing his old life and the years of progress that the international community ushered in when they toppled the Taliban in 2001.

“It’s very short, one year. I can’t compare it to the whole rest of my life. I value relationships a lot. I didn’t know the value of those relationships until I departed. The value of having a country. The value of having a government that you can be proud of. I no longer have them. It is now where we were 20 years ago.”

A year ago, with Taliban on the streets of Kabul, Khyber asked Zarghona, “Do you want to live the rest of your life under draconian, stone-age rules? Or do you want to take a risk and leave the country?” She was firm. “I want to take the risk.”

Khyber is eager to contribute to their adopted country. “I am a product of the twenty years of international engagement,” he says. “It made me a person useful to society.” And he is adamant he will make their new life a success. “I am hopeful because I can overcome problems. I am hopeful because I know I have a bright future.”

Note: The family’s surname and photos have been deliberately omitted from this article.