Unsettled: the Afghan refugee crisis collides with the American housing disaster

Afghanistan was no longer safe after their 14-year-old son, Abdul-Azim, was kidnapped on his way home from school. For years, the Taliban abducted children for ransom or used them as leverage in negotiating with the Afghan police. As much as it pained them to abandon their son, Fazela and Hakeem Abdil had other children — two teenage daughters — to think about. They were faced with a difficult choice: stay in an increasingly dangerous Afghanistan or leave their home forever.

Up until then, things had been peaceful for the Abdils. “We had a well-arranged life. We had work, a house. Life was pretty comfortable,” Hakeem says. But conditions in Kabul had grown worse when many assumed they’d get better. In February 2020, the Trump administration negotiated a deal with the Taliban, promising to withdraw all troops within 14 months so long as it abstained from attacking US soldiers. The violence did not end and, in fact, became more pronounced.

So the Abdils made the painful decision to flee, knowing that they would be leaving Abdul-Azim behind.

If the decision to leave is complicated, it is followed by the equally convoluted, bureaucratic process of emigrating. Hurriedly, the Abdils fled to Tajikistan where they awaited visas into Ukraine. Then they began a process to enter the US. After working alongside the Americans for nearly a decade in logistics and transport, Fazela qualified for a Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, granting her and her family permanent safety in the States. The SIV can be read two ways: as a reward for aiding American forces or an acknowledgment that helping the US can put an Afghan’s life in peril.

https://www.theverge.com/c/23170906/homeland-unsettled-afghan-refugee-crisis-housing-bay-area

 

‘I will reach Europe or die’: three stories of Afghan refugees in Turkey

Shukriya and her husband huddled together at the bottom of a deep trench on the Turkish-Iranian border. It was summer and the days were hot. Around them were other Afghan families and their children, some of whom had improvised tents out of shawls and scarves to stave off the punishing glare of the sun.

Water was scarce and the stench of excrement and bodies packed close together had made Shukriya, three months pregnant, nauseous and sick. Everyone, infant babies included, crouched in silence as they waited for the smugglers to return. They had led the scared families to the trench four days earlier, promising to come back soon and take them across a heavily fortified border wall built to deter people like them from entering Turkey.

About 300,000 people are estimated to have made the perilous journey from Afghanistan to Turkey since western forces withdrew and the Taliban regained power.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/07/i-will-reach-europe-or-die-three-stories-of-afghan-refugees-in-turkey

 

Afghanistan: NGOs call for assets to be unfrozen to end ‘near universal poverty’

One year on from the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, a group of 32 Afghan and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are urging the international community not to abandon the country’s people, but instead address the root causes of the its economic crisis, stand up for human rights and increase humanitarian aid.

Reflecting a concern that the deep ideological deadlock between the Taliban and the international community is consigning millions of Afghans to destitution, they call for a clear roadmap that will lead to the restoration of the basic functions of the Afghan central bank and the release of Afghanistan’s assets frozen abroad, mainly in the US. The NGOs call for the disbursement of badly needed Afghan banknotes that have been printed but are impounded in Poland.

Talks on the release of the central bank’s assets have been unresolved for months, partly because the west is not yet prepared to lift sanctions until the Taliban set up a more diverse government, permit girls to return to secondary school and allow independent control of the Afghan central bank. The European Union reiterated those broad demands in a statement issued on Sunday.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/15/afghanistan-ngo-assets-unfrozen-end-near-universal-poverty

 

Our Lack of Commitment in Afghanistan

A year after the chaotic scenes at Kabul airport, the outcome of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is heartbreaking and tragic for many Afghans and devastating for their country. The Afghan government that fell, leading to the return of the Taliban, was maddeningly imperfect, full of frustrating shortcomings, and, in various respects, corrupt. Yet it was also an ally in America’s effort to combat Islamist extremists in Afghanistan and the region, it celebrated many of the freedoms we cherish, and it wanted to ensure them for the long-suffering Afghan people. It was certainly preferable to what replaced it.

Recent decisions by the Taliban, particularly its treatment of women and girls, confirm the trajectory of a regime that seems intent on returning Afghanistan to an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam. It will be incapable of reviving the Afghan economy, which has collapsed since Western forces withdrew. Although the Kabul strike that killed the al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was a tremendous achievement by our intelligence and counterterrorism communities, Zawahiri’s very presence in Kabul demonstrated that the Taliban is still willing to provide sanctuary to Islamist extremists. In short, a country of nearly 40 million people—individuals whom we sought to help for two decades—has been condemned to a future of repression and privation and likely will be an incubator for Islamist extremism in the years ahead.The fact and manner of America’s departure also enabled our adversaries to claim that the United States is not a dependable partner and is instead a great power in decline. In an era in which deterrence is of growing importance, that is not trivial (though our efforts to support Ukraine following Russia’s invasion show that the U.S. can still lead effectively when it seeks to do so). Nor is it trivial that we left behind hundreds of thousands of Afghans who shared risk and hardship with our soldiers, diplomats, and development workers, and whose lives are now endangered, along with those of their family members.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/08/us-withdrawal-afghanistan-strategy-shortcomings/670980/

 

‘We Have Nothing’: Afghan Quake Survivors Despair Over Recovery

As dawn broke over his village on Friday morning, Abdul Qadir dug through the rubble of his family home desperate to find a small sack of flour buried somewhere beneath the piles of wood and dust.

Like many in this desolate stretch of eastern Afghanistan, the small bag was the only food his family had before a devastating earthquake decimated half of the village last week.

For nearly a year since the Taliban seized power and an economic crisis engulfed the country, villagers could no longer afford the firewood he once collected and sold for a few dollars a day. The price of food in the local bazaar doubled. He racked up 500,000 Afghanis — over $5,000 — in debt from shopkeepers until they refused to lend to him anymore.

Then on Wednesday, the mountains around him erupted in a violent rumble that brought the walls of his home crashing down and killed six members of his family. Looking at the remains of his home, he was at a loss.

 

Taliban divisions deepen as Afghan women defy veil edict

Arooza was furious and afraid, keeping her eyes open for Taliban on patrol as she and a friend shopped Sunday in Kabul’s Macroyan neighborhood.

The math teacher was fearful her large shawl, wrapped tight around her head, and sweeping pale brown coat would not satisfy the latest decree by the country’s religiously driven Taliban government. After all, more than just her eyes were showing. Her face was visible.

Arooza, who asked to be identified by just one name to avoid attracting attention, wasn’t wearing the all-encompassing burqa preferred by the Taliban, who on Saturday issued a new dress code for women appearing in public. The edict said only a woman’s eyes should be visible.

The decree by the Taliban’s hardline leader Hibaitullah Akhunzada even suggested women shouldn’t leave their homes unless necessary and outlines a series of punishments for male relatives of women violating the code.

https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-religion-kabul-taliban-aec1a4bb5dc2a91fc19954093a5595e0

 

The Guardian view on Afghan women: the Taliban turn the screws

Two decades ago, photographs of blue burqas became perhaps the totemic image of life under the Taliban, as Afghan women’s rights were invoked and exploited to justify the country’s invasion. On Saturday, the Taliban once more ordered women to cover their faces in public. While Afghan women have courageously protested against the injunction, the reaction internationally has this time been muted. That it follows other punitive restrictions creating what some have called “gender apartheid” – preventing teenage girls from studying and women from working outside healthcare or education, or travelling outside their home town without a male guardian – makes it all the more appalling. Ukraine is absorbing the world’s attention. But the muffled response surely also reflects the wish of the US, the UK and others to put the failure of the last 20 years behind them, and the fact that behind the rhetoric, women’s rights remain a low priority.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/10/the-guardian-view-on-afghan-women-the-taliban-turn-the-screws

 

Athens’ Parliament of Exiled Afghan Women: Making Their Voices Be Heard

The woman’s name is Shagufa Noorzai, 29, and she was one of the youngest lawmakers in the Afghan parliament at the time.

Only a short time later, Noorzai had to flee the Taliban in Kabul. She hid for 10 days with friends and then for a month in her apartment. The Taliban searched for her and nearly caught her. When her father opened the door one morning, they beat him and stole Noorzai’s armored work car that her chauffeur had used to drive her to the parliament in Kabul each day. But parliament hasn’t convened since the arrival of the Taliban.

First, Noorzai lost her office, then her job and her income – and now she has also lost her country. Noorzai now lives in Greece, in the capital of Athens, where she shares her story.

On a recent morning, a minibus drives her through the Athens suburbs for two hours together with other Kabul politicians before stopping in a narrow street near Omonia Square, in the center of the city. The women get out. Noorzai wears a colorfully embroidered coat, a headscarf and high heels.

She has arrived at her new job: The Afghan Women’s Parliamentarians Network. Her new calling is to speak out so that things aren’t forgotten.

She steps into the building’s second floor, where the Afghan parliament in exile is headquartered. The space has been provided by Melissa Network, a Greek aid organization. Two dozen Afghan women, who until recently held seats in the Afghan parliament, move up the stairs. They chat. The atmosphere is confident. They are young and old. Some of the women are from important political families, while others are representatives of minorities.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/athens-parliament-of-exiled-afghan-women-making-their-voices-be-heard-a-67c41c9d-9f76-47eb-bef8-330bc3bbef46

 

The Taliban Confront the Realities of Power

For fifteen years, Zabihullah Mujahid was the Tokyo Rose of the Taliban: a clandestine operative who called reporters to claim responsibility for his fighters’ attacks and to exult in their victories. Sometimes the victims were American soldiers or their coalition allies. Sometimes they were Afghan government troops. Often, civilians were killed. For reporters, Mujahid was a kind of phantom, a disembodied voice on the phone. No one ever saw his face, and, when one journalist claimed to have encountered him, Mujahid fiercely denied it. But he seemed to talk to everyone, all the time, and a rumor spread to explain his output: Zabihullah Mujahid was a composite identity, assumed by a rotating group of Talibs, who perhaps weren’t even living in Afghanistan. He denied this, too.

Last summer, Mujahid appeared in public for the first time. After years of steady gains in the countryside, the Taliban had swarmed into Kabul, as President Ashraf Ghani fled to Abu Dhabi. While the Taliban asserted their authority, Mujahid held a press conference to announce that he was the new government’s acting Deputy Minister of Information and Culture. With the fall of Kabul, he had been transformed from the covert spokesman of a long-running insurgency to the face of a national administration. He was, it turned out, a lean, sharp-featured man in middle age.

In September, after the U.S. military’s last humanitarian-evacuation flight left the Kabul airport, Mujahid introduced the interim government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. This was the same name that the Taliban had adopted during their previous stint in power, a brutal period that extended from 1996 to 2001. But Mujahid offered a vision of a more ecumenical Afghanistan, with an “inclusive” government that protected the rights of women and ethnic minorities. He maintained that the Taliban weren’t after revenge, and would offer amnesty to their former enemies. This was hard to believe. A few weeks earlier, Mujahid had issued a press release rejoicing in the assassination of the previous government’s spokesman, a man named Dawa Khan Menapal. He didn’t say what his predecessor’s offense was, only that he had been “punished for his misdeeds, killed in a special operation carried out by the mujahideen.”

One December evening, I met with Mujahid in an unheated corner office at the Afghan Media and Information Center, the mostly empty ministry that he now ran. Wearing a black turban with white stripes, he sat very still, his eyes watchful.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/28/the-taliban-confront-the-realities-of-power-afghanistan

 

The Guardian view on a Kabul heist: snatching money from the starving

The average Afghan was not even alive when planes were flown into the twin towers on 11 September 2001. This is only one of the reasons why handing money from the Afghan central bank to the families of 9/11 victims would be unconscionable. Parents are already selling their organs to feed their children, 98% of the population is short of food, and unless cash starts flowing again things are about to get much, much worse.

The executive order signed by the Biden administration on Friday would allow Afghanistan’s $7bn US-held assets, frozen when the Taliban swept to power, to be halved. One half would be held pending the outcome of lawsuits brought against the Taliban by the families of 9/11 victims who have persuaded a judge to attach their case to the Afghan assets. The other half, if courts agree, would be used for humanitarian aid. The administration’s argument is that this may help get assistance to Afghanistan more swiftly, without having to await the outcome of the cases. The government can step into lawsuits to say what it believes is in the national interest, but decided that it would not object to any decision to award half the money to the families.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/14/the-guardian-view-on-a-kabul-heist-snatching-money-from-the-starving