This week, Operation North Star ran out of donor funding to provide safe houses, security, and goods to some of the 2,000 allies and at-risk Afghans who have entrusted the operation with their lives, resulting in more than 100 families being turned out into the desolation of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Though funds speedily procured by nonprofit organization Flanders Fields will allow both groups to meet their most urgent needs for the next 30 days, many Afghans who fought for democracy face a precarious future.
Jess Owen, the director of case management for Flanders Fields, recently received a message from a 22-year-old policewoman who “said she was cold and hungry,” having run away from her family home to ensure her loved ones’ safety when the Taliban came to find her. The women are Hazaras, an ethnic minority in Afghanistan actively being targeted by the Taliban. She and two sisters were moving between abandoned houses, sharing a single jacket to keep warm. Owen sent the young women enough money for food and jackets. Later that week, she was able to send two blankets.
The woman “writes me often, ‘I’m 22, I don’t want to die,’” Owen says. She now has “to tell this poor woman that I [can’t] do anything right now,” Owen laments. “Even if I did [get her to a safe house], there is no life for her. She can’t work.”
Recently, Operation North Star received a video of a Taliban commander raping and beating a former Afghan policewoman in the back of a car. Sadly, the situation is not unusual. Many of the women who answered the call to “make a difference in the world” under the former government “are now left with nothing but the constant threat of death and rape,” Owen says.
Operation North Star is also struggling to help women like Feroza, whose name has been changed to protect her identity. Feroza was left with an immense burden this week after her husband, a former combat interpreter and intelligence officer for the Afghan National Police, was brutally murdered by Taliban fighters. While trying to protect her husband, Feroza was stabbed and hospitalized. She is now staying in a safe house with her two children. “We are not entirely sure how to keep [this family] living indoors and eating throughout the winter right now,” Ben Owen, president of Flanders Fields, tells me.
Feroza is one of many women now relegated to a life of widowhood, unable to procure employment or education in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. There is “no provision … for the rest of the family” to enter the United States now that the father is deceased, Owen says. “Had the Department of State not impeded every effort to evacuate him and his family, he’d still be alive.”
Other individuals, like Rambo, an Afghan commando whose name has also been changed to protect his identity, have pressing needs beyond Flanders Fields’s financial capabilities. Two months ago, the Taliban kidnapped Rambo and seven other commandos, many of whom were slaughtered. About three weeks ago, Rambo evaded captivity and returned to his family. His extended family is now receiving death threats from the Taliban, who insist Rambo turn himself in. Owen says Rambo requires a “secured housing option” but that Flanders Fields “can barely afford [his current] lease.” Assisting Rambo has “been very difficult, but we are committed … to righting the wrongs done by our government,” Owen says.
The Afghans whom evacuation organizations are struggling to assist “are in this situation because America taught them how to live in … a free society, then stripped them of that freedom through our abandonment of our commitment to their liberty,” Owen says. “We liberated a nation only to hand it right back to tyrants.”
For the Owens, “life as we knew it stopped on August 16.” They have shifted $10,000 from their personal savings to Flanders Fields to cover expenses, but their savings will eventually dry up. Without support and funding from the U.S. government and donors, Flanders Fields and Operation North Star will be unable to provide further assistance to Afghan allies and democracy advocates who cannot work or live freely as they face the devastating threats of starvation, freezing temperatures, and Taliban reprisals.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance writer from the Detroit area.
