Bay Area: Afghan Americans worry for family from afar
It should have been an exciting morning for Freshta Kohgadai, whose daughter started second grade, in person, on Monday in Alameda. But as she dressed her child for school, listening to her animated chatter, Kohgadai’s focus was elsewhere, checking WhatsApp and Viber on her phone for updates from her family in Afghanistan.
“I was trying to share her excitement but I was in fear of what might have happened to our family,” Kohgadai said. “I was so scared that they have been kidnapped or shot by the Taliban.”
She watched in horror over the weekend as the Afghan leader, Ashraf Ghani, fled the country and Taliban leaders seized Kabul, completing their rapid advance through the
provinces as American troops were drawn down. Chaotic scenes of people trying to flee Kabul, reports of the Taliban conducting revenge attacks and large images of women being painted over flowed out of the country, heightening the fears for those with loved ones in Afghanistan.
“We’ve not been able to sleep for the past two months,” Kohgadai said. “We’re constantly waking up in the middle of night and checking our phones. ‘What province got taken over? Are my family members OK?’ ”
With the 11½-hour time difference between California and Kabul, Kohgadai wakes each morning to a flood of messages awaiting her, as night falls in Afghanistan. It’s the anxious reality that thousands of Afghan Americans across the Bay Area have been living these past two months.
In Fremont’s Little Kabul, Najib Kohistani sat down to eat a traditional rice and beef meal after doing some shopping at the Afghan Khorasan Market. It was a taste of the country he left 10 years ago — the country where his family remains, now in fear of what could happen after the Taliban seized Kabul amid the departure of American troops.
“The U.S. was there and we were feeling safe,” Kohistani, 35, said Monday. “But now we have nothing.”
His family was one of the many who went to the airport in Kabul on Sunday hoping to catch a plane out of Afghanistan, fearing for their lives. But they couldn’t make it onto a flight. He said he has slept only three or four hours in the past three days. At a volleyball game yesterday with other local Afghans, the group stopped playing early because they were so upset.
“They were crying,” Kohistani said.
As fears rise worldwide for the safety and well-being of Afghanistan’s women, girls, LGBTQ and other minority groups, President Biden’s speech Monday infuriated the Afghan diaspora and those who have followed the decadeslong war.
Robert Crews, Afghanistan expert and professor of history at Stanford University called the president’s speech “shockingly callous.” He said Biden painted a disingenuous picture where the U.S. presence in Afghanistan was akin to that of the lifeguard at the pool simply trying to keep the raucous kids from drowning.
“We emboldened the Taliban, we legitimized them, we inadvertently armed them, (and) we looked away as they were allowed to be reconstructed on Pakistani territory,” Crews said.
Biden repeated that the United States was not in Afghanistan for “nation building.” He said, “It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not.”
Kohgadai, 33, was livid as she listened to the president.
“This is 100% not a civil war,” she said. “The Taliban do not belong to Afghanistan, they are being brought in by Pakistan.”
When Kohgadai talks to her family members there she hears the fear, the resignation that life as they knew it is gone.
“They look at me and say ‘You have a voice, you have the freedom to amplify our voices.’ ”
Another Afghan American resident of Hayward, photographer and activist Mojghan Latify, felt increasingly frustrated as she talked to relatives in Afghanistan.
“My cousin in the Balkh Province said that he has no future anymore, and I told him, ‘Don’t say that, have hope.’ All we can tell them is have hope,” Latify said.
Yet as the weeks have passed and her relatives have become more afraid, she is running out of positive affirmations.
“It gets awkward day after day talking to them.”
So Latify decided to organize a protest which uses a hashtag: #STOPKILLINGAFGHANS and includes the positive message she said she wants to send: “Afghans want peace.”
As word of the protest spread in the local Bay Area Afghan community, she heard from many people who felt the same way she did. “They say thank you for putting this together.” She quickly got word out to gather on Wednesday afternoon outside Hayward City Hall. She hopes others will join in, too.
“The Afghan community has been there for Black Lives Matter, for Palestinians and in return we would like to have everyone’s support,” she said.
Rona Popal, executive director of the Afghan Coalition in Fremont, which provides social services and support to Bay Area Afghans, said families have been coming to the coalition seeking help, desperate for information or to find ways to bring loved ones to the U.S.
“We are physically here, but mentally, we are in Afghanistan,” Popal said.
There are fears that women and girls especially will be targeted, that they will be taken out of work or school, harassed, jailed, raped or killed, some said.
“They’re worried about their families, what’s going to happen to them,” said Popal, who lived in Afghanistan until 1977. “They have a future, they want to live and they don’t want that to be undermined.”
At the Castro Valley offices of Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Dublin, people were lining up, socially distanced, to request help with visas to get family members out of Afghanistan. Swalwell said his district had a unique connection to Afghanistan, with what he said was the largest Afghan American population in the country.
“People are heartbroken, they are sad, they’re anxious, they’re scared.”
He said his office is working to get three main groups of people eligible to come to the U.S. out of Afghanistan: Those who have filed for a special immigrant visa, those eligible and who have yet to file, and potentially American citizens who may be non-embassy personnel.
He said his staff was working to get those people connected to the U.S Department of State and to hopefully get them to the airport in Kabul, part of which is currently guarded by U.S. troops.
“The ground truth is that the situation is changing every second,” he said.
Many fear a new refugee crisis will spill out of Afghanistan. Halima Kazem, a lecturer at San Jose State University, came to the Bay Area as a refugee baby from Kabul in 1980. She was one of the first waves of Afghans to come to the United States, and in the decades since, due to civil war in the late 1980s, and then the first Taliban takeover, more waves of immigrants arrived. Kazem says the world should brace for a new exodus from the country.
“I go back and forth between anger and sadness,” she said. “Seeing Kabul had fallen was devastating.”
Kazem spent almost a decade living and working in Afghanistan, training women to be journalists and even writing journalism curricula for colleges there. She worries that the Taliban will target journalists and scholars, people she knows well and has worked with for years. “We don’t know how the Taliban will react to them and we don’t want to wait to find out.”
Kazem has begun to gather her colleagues at colleges around the Bay Area.
“I suggested to them that we start a network for scholars at risk, professors and academics who can’t get out of Afghanistan who are going to be targeted because that’s what the Taliban wants — they want to drain the intellect and knowledge,” Kazem said.
Freshta Kohgadai can’t stop thinking about her sister-inlaw in Kabul who is single.
“She is trying to pretend she is married to someone, she is single and very scared,” Kohgadai said.
Reports are emerging that girls over 12 and single women are being taken by the Taliban to serve as wives for its fighters.
Yet as she waited for her second-grader to come home from her first day of school, Kohgadai felt relieved for the time difference between Alameda and Kabul. Her relatives would hopefully have been asleep when President Biden spoke, one less chance to feel “betrayed.” Kohgadai says her family are not angry at the U.S. military being removed, “but more for the manner it was done. It gave them no real chance to prepare for what was to come.”