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By Humaira
The Woman who escaped from the Taliban
I met the woman who became the director of our schools, let’s call her Zan, in 2006. She escaped from the Taliban just four days ago. I can’t share her identity because her husband and 6 children are still in Afghanistan. We need your help to get Zan’s family out of Afghanistan, too.
My family left Afghanistan in 1979, after the Russian invasion, but Zan’s family couldn’t.
Instead, Zan finished high school and attended Kabul University during the Russian occupation. While at college, she married a wonderful man, an accomplished doctor, and started a family. After college, Zan became a sought-after teacher.
Sadly war was ever-present. The Russians were driven from Afghanistan but the country descended into five years of civil war. While her mother-in-law helped with her growing family, Zan, despite bouts of anxiety and depression, joined a teacher’s collective and began advocating for girls' education.
In 1996, a year after the Taliban overran Kabul for the first time, Zan’s family retreated to a remote province, let’s call it Khakistan, to escape the brutality that the Taliban unleashed on city folk. While her husband was expected to tend to the sick and wounded of the Taliban, Zan was not allowed to teach, read, write or leave her home without her husband.
Or so the Taliban thought. Instead, Zan rallied some other educated mothers and started an underground school for their daughters. Within a few months, they had several hundred students attending secret classes in their homes.
Unexpectedly, the US ousted the Taliban after 9/11 and promised a better, more empowered life to Afghan women. Zan went back to work first as a teacher, then as the principal of her school and finally as head of education for the entire province. An outspoken advocate for women’s rights, Zan was chosen to represent her city at the Loya Jirga that brought people from across Afghanistan together to create a new constitutional framework.
In 2006 we met and connected deeply. As mothers, as advocates. We made a pact to help the girls, boys, and women of Khakistan. With the help of a non-profit I co-founded, Afghan Friends Network, Zan established schools in her province. Over the last fourteen years, we educated 4300 girls, 350 mothers became literate and 1000 boys learned English.
Ever since I’ve known Zan she has received “night letters”, intimidating calls and threats from the Taliban. On numerous occasions I’ve encouraged her to leave Afghanistan but she always said, “I can’t leave our students, they need me.”
I was terrified when the Taliban took over one Afghan province after the other, and then the whole country. I have cousins in Afghanistan, but I was more concerned for Zan because she visibly put herself out there to lift up girls and women -- promoting everything the American government and troops had promised the Afghan women since 2001: democracy, women’s rights and a better future. She was a believer and a doer and now, she is in the line of fire.
Zan never worked directly for the US military or US government funded projects. She didn’t benefit financially from the US occupation. She is not on an evacuation list, if such a thing exists. But, she encouraged girls to go to school, assured women that they would be safe if they voted and participated openly in their society. How do we protect people like her? Are they collateral damage, the incalculable cost of war that no one measures or cites in a report?
Last week the Taliban raided Zan’s house in Khakistan, (thankfully she and her family were in Kabul) and found a gun and gun license issued by the US army to her after the first “night letters'' arrived from the Taliban. The license had her name and picture. With the Taliban possessing this newfound evidence, Zan and her husband made the bold and very difficult decision to get Zan out of Afghanistan.
With a temporary visa to Turkey in hand, under the cover of a burka, Zan travelled from Kabul to Jalalabad (with two distant relatives) where they obtained a visa for Pakistan. Then traveled overland, passing by thousands of Afghan refugees in cars and on foot, to Islamabad, Pakistan. They bought airplane tickets and flew to Istanbul.
This may seem like a happy ending but Zan left her six children (four girls & two boys) and her husband behind. Her fourteen-year-old son cried, wondering when he would see his mother again. Zan is safe, however, she doesn’t know how she will reunite with her family.
It cost $8,000 to get Zan out of Afghanistan and to Turkey. How will her husband find the money to get the rest of the family out of Afghanistan? In Afghan terms, Zan’s family is middle class but their home and land are worth almost nothing now. Their savings converted to dollars doesn’t go a long way.
Afghan Friends Network is looking to raise $56,000 to financially assist Zan’s children and husband escape from Afghanistan. Would you please consider making a donation to help us reunite Zan and her family?
Please make a tax deducible donation at Afghan Friends Network to support Zan and her family.