How a Bay Area family fled from Afghanistan
A child lost and found, an adult beaten — but the Sultanis got on a plane with a congressman’s help
“There were lots of people and they were trying to push everybody and my daughter fell on the ground from my cousin’s shoulder.” Mr. Sultani, a resident of Milpitas, describing the rush toward Kabul’s airport
On their third attempt to leave Afghanistan and return to their home in Milpitas, just days after the Taliban seized power, the Sultani family found themselves submerged inside a huge crowd surging toward the Kabul airport gates. The only safe place for the children, aged 3 and 7, was on the shoulders of a cousin and uncle, their tiny fingers gripping their relatives’ heads.
Suddenly, though, the children’s father lost sight of his 7-year-old daughter.
“There were lots of people and they were trying to push everybody and my daughter fell on the ground from my cousin’s shoulder,” said the man, whom The Chronicle is identifying only by his last name to protect family members still in Afghanistan. “My wife was crying. I was crying. It was very tough.”
For an hour, Sultani and his wife pressed through the heaving masses until they found their child, safe with a cousin. By this point, the U.S. military was no longer allowing anyone to enter the airport. The family returned to the home of Sultani’s parents feeling defeated. It was Aug. 19, just 12 days before the U.S. would completely withdraw from its 20-year campaign in Afghanistan. News of Taliban reprisals in the provinces were coming in. The Sultani family was running out of time.
Sultani had worked as a human resources administrator for the U.S. government. When his life was threatened by the Taliban in 2014, he obtained a Special Immigrant Visa, available to Afghans who had worked with the U.S., and was able to take his family to safety. Sultani, his wife and daughter arrived in California in 2017; his youngest child was born soon thereafter. The family had returned to Kabul this summer to visit family when the Taliban seized power and their desperate attempts to return home began.
That very night, the family decided to try to depart again. As they approached the airport gates, passports at the ready, Sultani’s father was beaten, he believes by Taliban soldiers. But they made it past the airport gates, thanks in no small part to a direct line Sultani managed to get to Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Fremont, whose office was working around the clock to help families leave the country. As members of Congress were working overtime to help with evacuations, a friend of Sultani’s got in touch with one of Khanna’s colleagues from Pennsylvania, who passed the case along.
While thousands attempted to flee Afghanistan last week, the Sultanis’ harrowing journey offers a glimpse not only of the chaos on the ground, but also of how important connecting with officials in the U.S. was in finally getting his family onto a flight out.
In a speech Tuesday, one week after the Sultanis finally arrived at San Francisco International Airport, President Biden called the U.S.-led evacuation effort an “extraordinary success,” citing the 120,000 people who were airlifted out over 17 days. He also said those who remained had chosen to stay. As Sultani watched the president speak on the large television in his Milpitas living room, finally home after a grueling five-day journey, he scoffed, muted the TV and looked out the window.
Khanna said in an interview that the State Department worked in concert with every member of Congress during the 17-day evacuation period, and that the agency official assigned to work with him would respond within the hour whenever Khanna’s office contacted them about a constituent’s case. Khanna said this was essential during the repeated attempts it took for Sultani to get his family into the airport.
“I was on the phone with (Sultani’s friend) personally, (hearing) about how they were getting beaten getting to the airport,” Khanna said.
But as responsive as Khanna felt the State Department was, he is now concerned about the estimated 200 to 300 Americans and thousands of U.S.-affiliated Afghans left behind. His office alone believes it knows of nine citizens and one green card holder still stranded.
“Are we going to tell families you need to get to the Pakistan border? Are we going to tell them, here is a place you can go?” Khanna wondered. “What we need is specifics, and who the contacts are.’”
The scramble over the past two weeks to get people out of Afghanistan has also required the involvement of the Afghan community worldwide, said Mejgan Massoumi, historian of modern Afghanistan and a fellow at Stanford University. She has been part of that effort.
Massoumi has cousins and colleagues who are desperate to leave the country because they fear for their lives. But they are not American citizens, and likely wouldn’t qualify for special visas because they didn’t work directly with the U.S.
“For the past two weeks, I’ve been sleepless, helping members of my own family and friends figure out a way out of Afghanistan,” she said. “We’ve been engaged in this evacuation process and we’ve sort of assumed the role of a learn-as-you-go immigration lawyer for our loved ones back home.”
The need for many people to get out is real, she said. “Family members inside of Afghanistan are telling us they either had verbal or written threats from the Taliban,” Massoumi said. Some are taking photos of degrees from the American University of Afghanistan or other documentation that shows connections to the United States, then destroying it.
“They’re burning these documents because they’re scared that if the Taliban show up at their home ... they will be persecuted on the spot,” Massoumi said.
Like many in the Bay Area’s Afghan diaspora, watching the current situation brings back difficult memories for Massoumi, who fled Afghanistan in 1980. “This is a moment of trauma for me,” she said. “I’m seeing the same thing, the plight of the refugee — that’s what my family went through, (but) we left by camels and via coyotes” — people who smuggle migrants — “before we got asylum.”
That trauma is widespread, said Holly Taines White, communications director at Jewish Family & Community Services East Bay. Her organization has been resettling Afghans since 2008. “A lot of them have been living under this intense level of fear and trauma for years, as they’ve been wading through the bureaucracy of applying for their visas,” she said.
In August, the organization resettled 69 Afghans, and it has accepted 60 more who are currently at the Fort Lee military base in Virginia. Some have a family member or friend they can stay with when they arrive in California, but many need everything, from a furnished apartment to help enrolling kids in school. The East Bay agency is placing most families in the Concord area because of the significant Afghan population already residing there.
“We really try to find them housing near community so they aren’t isolated,” Taines White said.
The Sultani family had a home to return to, and Sultani has part-time work. But as they settle back into the Bay Area, Sultani longs for a good job, for an employer who would make use of the six languages he speaks. He is currently a legal permanent resident, and in a few years will be eligible to apply for citizenship.
“As soon as I get my citizenship, I will apply for the police department,” he said.
In the meantime, he dreams of working as a journalist, hosting a multilingual radio show that would connect families like his here in the Bay Area with interviews, music and news from Afghanistan.
“Inshallah,” Sultani said.