Sacramento children are trapped in Afghanistan, hiding from Taliban
SACRAMENTO — Three students from the Sacramento City Unified School District went to Afghanistan to be with a family member who was having heart problems. The children — ages 6, 8 and 9 — and their mother flew there in February and attended school in distance learning through the spring. They spent seven days crammed outside an airport, trying to come home, before bombs ripped through a crowd last week.
Now they’re hiding in Kabul.
Two San Juan Unified students, ages 9 and 15, traveled with their mother in July to Afghanistan. Their father was dying of cancer. They went there on summer break to spend their father’s final days in his homeland. Their sister in Sacramento has been trying to get them home since.
As of Wednesday, the family was still in hiding.
Two Washington Unified students are believed to have caught a final flight from the Kabul airport. With the mad dash of planes that departed the now-infamous airport, scattering people around the world, officials with the West Sacramento district said they believe the students are traveling back to the U.S.
To understand how slapdash and uncertain the past two weeks have been, just look to any of the Sacramento-area school districts with students whose family members hail from Afghanistan. Unknown numbers of kids and loved ones traveled to the country to be with family during summer vacation — a routine trip for many.
Preliminary guesses from school district officials now suggest at least 24 Sacramento-area kids remain trapped in the middle of an international incident. Most of the students are from San Juan Unified.
In the three weeks since Taliban fighters entered Kabul, families and local officials in California have waited anxiously for any word of the Sacramentoarea kids’ whereabouts. Some have made it back to the state.
Dozens, it appears, have made no progress at all.
Meanwhile, school districts have emerged as the primary purveyor of information about the missing kids. The problem?
They too are caught in a lurch, scrambling for piecemeal details — about family trees and travel itineraries and international diplomacy.
That scramble entered a new phase this week. With U.S. troops fully withdrawn from Afghanistan, elected officials and school district employees are coming to terms with the new reality on the ground in Kabul: that students and their families face an anything-but-clear path back to Sacramento.
Taliban control of the airport throws into disarray plans of catching a flight stateside. Distrust of the new regime — whose history of oppressing women and girls — has those who remain afraid to leave the house for a potential exodus to nearby Pakistan.
They’re trapped in limbo.
The numbers of those known to be trapped are likely to grow, said David Miyashiro, the superintendent of Cajon Valley Union School District in San Diego County. He, along with a local congressman and a tactical team on the ground in Kabul, helped coordinate the extraction of nearly two-dozen students last month.
It was among the first high-profile cases of students stranded in Afghanistan.
“There are thousands of students and children there in the same predicament that will start to unfold, I think, in the coming days and weeks,” Miyashiro told The Sacramento Bee in an interview Wednesday night. “Our story was first because we knew them. We knew they were there and raised attention to it.
“But now that there’s no travel out of Afghanistan, I think that Afghanistan families will start to show up as missing in school districts in California, in Virginia ... and in other pockets across the southern United States where there are large Afghanistan families located.”