From defying the Taliban to pursuing education
WHEN THE Taliban took over Kabul, they forbade girls from going to school. There would be serious consequences for disobedience, but that didn’t stop Robina Aryubwal and her family.
At home in their Soviet-era apartment, she continued her studies in secret and helped her parents teach other girls and women. The Aryubwals asked students to show up at different times to avoid arousing suspicion. Her mom, a former teacher, taught reading and writing, while her dad taught mathematics. Robina gave lessons in English.
Ruby, as she’s known, was 14 and sometimes taught women twice her age. Her students were so eager, she says, that when it came time for her to cook, they followed her to the kitchen to wash potatoes and onions while reciting English words.
“Even the children of the Taliban, they were coming to learn,” Aryubwal recalls. “It inspired me, seeing the excitement in their eyes.”
The teenager who once risked her life to study in secret can now spend hours in the quiet study area of Robarts Library, surrounded by hundreds of other students sweating over papers and cramming for exams. These days, one of her biggest worries is submitting an essay comparing Locke and Rousseau on time.
Her family’s past and their eight-year struggle to come to Canada are documented in CBC journalist Carol Off’s new book, All We Leave Behind, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award.
Off and the Aryubwals met in Kabul in 2002, not long after the Taliban had been driven out and schools reopened. “Ruby was so spirited and full of life that I could not imagine how the Taliban could have kept her suppressed for so long, or if she could have continued with that kind of oppression,” Off says by email.
Robina, who had taught herself English, acted as a translator for the other family members. Off interviewed Robina’s father, Asad, about life under the Uzbek warlord — and later vice-president — Abdul Rashid Dostum. Asad guided Off and her crew on a tour of Dostum’s fiefdom in northern Afghanistan. During the civil war in the 1990s, the Aryubwals had lived in northern Afghanistan, Dostum’s territory, which was safer than other parts of the country.
Asad had run a wholesale business but said he was conscripted into Dostum’s army. Although he had held the rank of general, Asad was nothing more than a “glorified gofer,” Off says.
THE RIGHT THING
“Dostum has a reputation of brutality that few warlords in Afghanistan can rival,” says Aisha Ahmad, an assistant professor at U of T Scarborough and author of Jihad and Co The US put Dostum and other strongmen on the payroll and used them as weapons against the Taliban, she added.
“In an expedient battlefield calculation, the international community empowered the most brutal warlords on Earth,” Ahmad says.
After surviving the Taliban, Asad and his wife, Mobina, hoped to raise their family in peace but believed that Western countries’ support for warlords could only lead to more violence, Off says. He spoke out against Dostum and helped the Canadian journalists — a fateful decision that put his family at risk.
For Robina, meeting Off and her then-CBC colleague Heather Abbott (now at CBS) was a revelation. Even before meeting the Canadians, “I wanted to be a strong woman and do something
big for other women,” she recalls. “I realised whatever was in my mind about women was the right thing. They weren’t crazy ideas.”
When Off returned to Afghanistan four years later to see how things had changed, Asad spoke his mind again. As a result, Off writes that a senior officer in Dostum’s command warned Asad after the second CBC documentary aired: “If you want to live, then you must go.” Not for the first time, Asad fled to Pakistan, and his family followed.
Off didn’t learn the full extent of the family’s predicament until she travelled to Pakistan in 2008 to report on the election after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. In a hotel in Islamabad, Asad filled her in. Although he understood
An Afghan refugee shares her story