Escaping the Taliban

Why not?

“Because you’re scared of Allah,” Shajjan, a 43-year-old lawyer, responded. “Allah would punish you for this if you shoot me.”

He was met with silence.

Shajjan and his family turned back and parked the vehicles elsewhere. Shajjan, alone this time, returned to his Taliban interlocutors. Making use of his courtroom acumen, Shajjan explained that he wasn’t joining “the infidels,” as the Taliban men called the fleeing Americans. He was, instead, going with the Qataris.

It worked.

Shajjan’s departure had been facilitated by friends in high places, and he and his family had been cleared to fly out of Kabul. After speaking with the Qataris at the airport, he made his way back to his eagerly waiting family, who he said were frightened because the Taliban had been firing their weapons into the air.

“They were so terrified by the time I was coming back to pick them [up] and get them through the crowd and then inside the airport,” he told the Washington Examiner. But they made it.

The confidence Shajjan put on display for the Taliban at the airport “was difficult,” he recalled. “My kids were really scared when they saw that the gun was pointed at me. It’s obviously not easy for them to see their father like that.”

Shajjan, who was born and raised in Afghanistan, is a Kabul-based lawyer with degrees from both Harvard University and India’s University of Pune. He graduated about a decade ago from Harvard and decided to return to Afghanistan, where he worked for the government for a bit before starting his own law firm, Shajjan & Associates.

Nearly two dozen people, including lawyers and tax consultants, worked at the practice before the Taliban took over this summer. It was one of the best, and most well-known, practices in Afghanistan.

“Now, I have to abandon everything,” Shajjan said.

Shajjan said he was blown away by the speed and efficiency of the Taliban takeover. On the morning of Aug. 15, the day that Kabul fell, he called a meeting in his office and advised his colleagues to go home before things started to deteriorate further. Soon, all the government buildings were abandoned and the Taliban were roaming the streets of Kabul, weapons in hand.

“I was so scared for myself because of the education that I had, because of the work that I was doing,” he said, noting that he had worked with several diplomatic missions and provided legal services to American companies.

He didn’t leave his home for two days, bristling at every knock at the door or car driving down the street. The next day, Shajjan made the 15-minute drive to the airport. He thinks there were probably fewer checkpoints at the time than there are now, and Shajjan says that as harrowing as facing down the Taliban was, he had it easy compared to others.

Some of those hoping to leave Afghanistan have faced brutal beatings, crushing crowds, and sheer exhaustion outside the airport, which has become the only tenable rallying spot for escape from the country.

One such person is Mohammed. Mohammed worked with U.S. forces in Afghanistan as a translator, and now, he and his four children are desperately trying to flee the country out of fear they will face reprisal at the hands of the Taliban.

Mohammed, communicating through an encrypted messaging app, said that when he tried to push through the crowd of people at the airport with his wife and four small children, they faced an overwhelming mob of terrified Afghans and tear gas.

With the deadline looming, he has been unable to make it through the gauntlet.

One of his young sons dislocated his leg in the scrum outside the gate. Taliban fighters near the airport are exacerbating the humanitarian crisis by harassing people and beating refugees with sticks as they pray.

Mohammed shared a video with the Washington Examiner showing people sprawled out on the ground outside the airport. Some were dead or unconscious. A child sat in the foreground with a look of abject hopelessness on his face as a seated man embraced a woman from behind and frantically pumped her chest in a futile attempt to revive her.

Mohammed’s friend’s wife was crushed to death by that same mob, demonstrating the catastrophic and tragic situation faced by those merely trying to get to the airport.

Mohammed is still in Afghanistan as President Joe Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline approaches. While the pace of the airlifts has quickened and tens of thousands of people are being extricated each day, there is still fear among many, especially Afghans who worked with coalition forces, that they will become targets of Taliban reprisal if they end up being left behind.

Two bombings on Aug. 26, carried out most likely by the local Islamic State group, punctuated the terror at the airport. At least 13 are dead and dozens more injured. Mohammed and his family were still planning to make at least one more run at the airport.

People like Mohammed have been able to communicate with family and friends across the country and globe using applications such as Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram. They have also used the internet to broadcast photos and videos of Taliban brutality, an effective means of putting pressure on U.S. political leaders and broadcasting to the world the consequences of the shoddy American withdrawal.

Nasser Von Waziri is an Afghan national who is now safely out of the country but is still in contact with people in Kabul. Waziri told the Washington Examiner that the internet in Afghanistan is very slow and that he now believes it is the goal of the Taliban to cut desperate Afghans off from the outside world. The internet cards are sold out at local shops, and the banks are closed.

While a lot of the international media have been focused on Kabul, many of those congregated outside of Hamid Karzai International Airport are not originally from the capital but rather risked life and limb to journey from their home provinces to reach Kabul after the Taliban came to power.

Sayyid, a 42-year-old who once worked as a translator for U.S. special forces, described his journey out of the country as “terrible.” He and his large family hail from the southern province of Kandahar, which features the province’s namesake and Afghanistan’s second-largest city. Sayyid said that when parts of the Kandahar province started to collapse, he left his family and fled to the western city of Herat to live with friends, whom he stayed with for weeks.

After the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, province after province began collapsing like dominoes. Herat and Kandahar soon fell, leaving Sayyid fearful for the future. He said that he was sleeping in Herat the morning after the Taliban wrested control of the two cities and was awakened by a phone call.

Sayyid answered the phone, the first of two calls from the same number. The man on the other end of the line taunted Sayyid. “I am Biden, your father,” he said, threatening that the Taliban were trying to find him. It was a Kandahar number, according to Sayyid, highlighting the fact that the Taliban were in control of much of Afghanistan.

“Where is your Biden? Where is his plane to drop bombs?” the militant mocked.

Sayyid hung up the first call, but soon, his phone was ringing again. This time, there was a third person on the line as well.

“You are working with infidels. I am working with Muslims,” the new speaker, who sounded much younger, said.

Sayyid hung up and blocked the number. The next day, he prepared to head to Kabul. Because the regional airports were shut down, he had to take a bus to Kabul, where he thought he would be safer given his past work with the military.

Sayyid had been in Herat for a while and had about a month’s worth of facial hair. He donned a hat and glasses and made the 18-hour excursion to Kabul by bus.

Sayyid said that the journey from Herat to Kabul was fraught with Taliban checkpoints, but, luckily, he had gotten sick while in Herat and was prescribed medicine. He said that when he was questioned about why he was from Kandahar yet leaving Herat, he showed his prescriptions and told the Taliban that he had traveled to Herat not to escape but rather because he couldn’t find a decent doctor in his home province.

“Those prescriptions saved my life,” he said.

Once he was safely in Kabul, and in hiding, Sayyid’s eldest son, who is in his early 20s, contacted him and revealed that the Taliban were searching for him in Kandahar. His son told him that Taliban militants visited the family’s home and asked where Sayyid was.

The family told the Taliban that Sayyid was not home, and so they commanded Sayyid’s family to bring them food and provide them shelter. Sayyid said that while the militants were in his house, he was frightened for his family and pointed out that the Taliban stayed the entire day eating and drinking before they left.

Days later, the final domino, Kabul, had fallen, and Taliban commanders holding American-made rifles were seen sitting in the presidential palace. Sayyid’s family joined him in Kabul shortly after he arrived, and, thankfully, he was able to connect with some of the U.S. special forces that he used to work with.

They were able to help secure his and his family’s safety out of Afghanistan. He said his name was put on a list that included how many children he had, and Marines were able to locate them at the airport.

He said that on the day his family was finally rescued from the mob, there were thousands of Afghans congregated by the gate pleading for entry. Marines fired some warning shots and cleared the area enough to locate Sayyid and his family and usher them to safety.

“That was really happy days for me in my life,” he said, comparing the area outside the airport, where throngs of people were suffering from desperation and exhaustion, to hell. Sayyid said that once his family got into the airport, it felt as though they had entered “paradise.” Sayyid was later airlifted out of Kabul and into a third country, where he is staying at a holding facility.

While thousands of Afghans have been able to escape from Kabul, some have not even ventured to the capital yet, as the window closes.

Abdullah, who is in his mid-30s, lives in a province in the western part of the country and had been planning to take his wife and three children on the perilous journey to Kabul. He works as an English teacher at an Afghan university and has a master’s degree from a U.S. university through the Fulbright Program.

He described the heartbreak of his current plight during an interview.

“We were so proud when we returned [to Afghanistan from the U.S.] in 2014, and now, we are thinking that we could have had a better life without going,” Abdullah said.

Abdullah said that because he is an English teacher who has taken advantage of embassy and State Department programs like the Fulbright scholarship, he fears the Taliban could harm him and his family if he doesn’t flee the country. He said that many of the militants patrolling his city are now holding the guns that U.S. forces once held.

“After 5 p.m., I never dare to go out of the home. And before 8:30 or 9 a.m., I can’t dare going out,” he said in a hushed voice during a 4 a.m. call with the Washington Examiner. “It’s chaos, nobody knows what is going on.”

The first night the Taliban arrived, the sound of gunfire was nonstop. His son was terrified, so Abdullah comforted him by saying it was just a wedding and that people were celebrating.

“Just yesterday, I was telling my wife that I guess my future might be very few years left, but I guess this kid’s future has to be something better,” Abdullah said. “We both are worried.”

In a sign of the quickly evolving situation in Afghanistan, when the Washington Examiner first spoke to Abdullah, he had plans to travel to Kabul, but the following morning when contacted by encrypted app, he said that those plans were no longer feasible.

All he said that his family can do is wait and hope that eventually, commercial flights return and they can find a way to get to a third country with the ultimate goal of immigrating to the U.S. He said his U.S. visa application is being processed, but he has not yet gotten approved.

In his first call, when he was still discussing travel to Kabul, Abdullah highlighted the perils of making the trip to the capital. The issue is that to get out of Afghanistan, Abdullah and his family would need identifying documents, but when traveling, if the Taliban catch them with those papers, it could doom them.

He said his family would have had to take a bus, which holds dozens of passengers, because they couldn’t risk taking a personal car for fear of being stopped at a Taliban checkpoint. They have a greater chance of avoiding Taliban detection in a bus because their luggage, which contains the documents, would be comingled with scores of other bags.

“The rate of catching your documents and finding you would be a bit lower,” Abdullah said. He said that before the complete takeover, he avoided carrying any documents on him, including anything that indicates he is educated — even a pen.

Abdullah said a trip to Kabul brought with it a “high percentage” chance that if he were to be discovered, he would be pulled out of the bus and executed.

“These people, they have not changed, but now, they are good politicians. They are now real politicians — they know what to say and what to do behind the scenes,” he said of the Taliban’s evolution since the 1990s.

Like Sayyid, Abdullah said that he has tried his best to look more like the Taliban invaders: “dirty and unorganized.” A well-kept appearance could mean death now in the new Afghanistan.

Many Afghans who helped and sacrificed for the U.S. feel as though they have been left behind.

“I think I should use the word ‘betrayal,’ and I don’t know if there is any other stronger word for that to replace it with,” Abdullah said. He said there should have been a plan to accompany the withdrawal of U.S. troops and international forces.

“You could have given the people a chance to choose whether they would like to go or not,” he continued. “It’s not only the betrayal from the international forces or America, our own government also betrayed [us].”

Likewise, Shajjan said he thinks Biden’s “rash” decision to pull out troops was unwise and thought the president should have left more troops behind, perhaps 2,500, for another couple of years to ensure the peace dialogue could continue.

He said that former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country soon after the Taliban offensive began, also let the country down. Shajjan said the Afghan government was inefficient and wasteful and pointed out that some Cabinet positions were filled with people of little experience or were only filled in acting capacities.

The past days and weeks have been painful ones not only for U.S. veterans who are watching the country that they helped support collapse, but also for Afghans like Shajjan, Sayyid, Mohammed, and Abdullah.

Shajjan’s law firm that he spent years growing, his home that cost so much time and money to build, his relationships — gone.

“It’s not easy to think of what I’ve lost or how soon I’ve lost [it].”

Zachary Halaschak is a reporter for the Washington Examiner.