The journalist, the refugees and the warlord
An Afghan criticized Abdul Rashid Dostum in a CBC documentary in 2002. When the strongman’s people sought revenge, the CBC’s Carol Off had to decide whether to cross the line
Asad Aryubwal wanted a safe Afghanistan. When he was a boy in Kabul, his father’s family owned the biggest movie theatre in town, Aryub Cinema, and he remembers the young men and women dating in the open, blue jeans, religious freedom. After the Saur Revolution in 1978, his father was arrested and never seen again. Then the wars came in endless waves, forcing him to flee his home three times.
By the time CBC journalist Carol Off came to Kabul, he was a married father of five and he was tired of the violence. He wanted the world to know that teaming up with warlords to fight the Taliban was not a good idea.
Off was a journalist who could take his words to the world — and so in 2002, he helped her access different locations and agreed to an on-camera interview talking about life under Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum.
He did it again when Off returned to film an update in 2006. There were consequences both times, but in 2007 he was ultimately told: leave Afghanistan or die.
Off has always considered herself an old-fashioned journalist: you tell the story, you keep your distance. This is the story she couldn’t walk away from.
In their Toronto home this summer, the Aryubwal family talk about their eightyear journey to Canada, which Off has written about in her book All We Leave Behind. Robina Aryubwal, the oldest child, now 29, says it was hard for everybody involved, including the journalist.
“I didn’t suffer,” Off interjects, quietly, sitting on the floor.
“She suffered more than our family,” Robina says.
“No. No. There’s no comparing,” Off says in that forceful voice Canadians are used to hearing on the radio. “I was always secure. I was always safe. I was always OK. I lived a normal life.”
The man who brought Carol Off and the Aryubwal family together is Abdul Rashid Dostum.
The warlord turned Afghan vice-president is an ethnic Uzbek who holds great power in the north of Afghanistan and has been accused of human rights abuses.
He is known for switching allegiances to survive — “more often than some people change socks,” as Off writes in her book. In the ’90s, when Afghanistan descended into civil war, he was one of the warlords battling for control.
It was out of that chaos that the Taliban rose to power, and when it did, Dostum teamed up with some of his former enemies to form the Northern Alliance to fight the Taliban.
The CIA put them on the payroll after 9/11, even though allegations of human rights abuses and violence were known, says Aisha Ahmad, an international security professor at the University of Toronto and author of Jihad & Co.
It was “counter-insurgency on the cheap,” she explains — and the warlords “were very happy to take the sacks of cash and crates full of guns and then restart their bid for power that they lost during the civil war.”
At the time, warlords were considered by U.S. officials to be the “expedient way to check the Taliban,” she says, “even though many analysts were screaming about the fact that you are going to set in motion forces that you can’t control.”
Dostum’s forces were accused of murdering hundreds or possibly thousands of Taliban prisoners of war in 2001, as reported in investigations by the New York Times and Newsweek, and Physicians for Human Rights, who discovered a mass grave in 2002. (Dostum, through a spokesperson, has said that any deaths in the prison transfer were unintentional and the numbers were not as high as those in media reports.)
Allegations like these were why Off came to Afghanistan in 2002 — to find out just who the U.S. had partnered with in fighting the Taliban.
Asad Aryubwal and his family had lived in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif for a few years in the 1990s. Dostum’s northern stronghold was a relatively safe option during the civil war. Asad ran a wholesale business, but he says he had to join Dostum’s army to keep his family and property safe. He was named a general, but was a “glorified gofer,” as Off notes in her book. He worked in logistics, supervising construction sites and the like, but he told Off he never had a weapon, and “prayed that he would never be ordered to do more.”
His wife, Mobina, was worried it wasn’t safe to talk on camera, but she was proud of her husband. She was a teacher and they both believed in the power of education, equality and that he was doing the right thing.
Asad travelled to the north with the CBC team, helping them gain access to Dostum’s fortress and people who might be useful to their story. Thanks to Aryubwal, “we had evidence that significant offences against human rights had occurred under General Dostum’s authority,” Off writes.
When Off and her team (producer Heather Abbott and cameraman Brian Kelly) first met the Aryubwals, the family was living in Kabul, where life had improved since international forces had arrived. Schools reopened and the girls were star students. Women weren’t forced to wear the burka.
“We had a good feeling,” Robina says. “We really loved these independent, strong women who came all the way from Canada to Afghanistan.”
Off returned home, and later won a Gemini for In the Company of Warlords. Back in Afghanistan, the Aryubwals made the eight-hour drive for a summer vacation in Mazar-e-Sharif. It was here, she writes, that one of Dostum’s men found Asad, and told him he shouldn’t have spoken to the CBC.
He didn’t tell Off about this warning. She had done her job, and he was hopeful that Afghanistan would improve. When she returned in 2006 to film an update, he spoke on camera again.
Dostum’s people found out, and a commander visited the family’s home in Kabul: “Instead of execution, Asad’s punishment would be banishment,” Off writes.
“I am actually astonished that this gentleman spoke out and got out alive,” says U of T’s Ahmad. “Dostum has publicly boasted about shocking acts of violence he has perpetrated against his opponents.”
Back in Toronto, Off hadn’t heard from the Aryubwals. She knew Robina had started law school in Kabul and she imagined their lives were busy, as hers was. She had started a new job as co-host of CBC Radio’s As It Happens in the fall of 2007, when the phone call came from a stranger. The man was told to find Off when he arrived in Toronto and tell her Asad needed to speak to her.
Off imagined it was about Robina. She had been in Paris to study for a month and perhaps she wanted to continue her schooling in Canada. Off emailed her, but didn’t hear back.
In January 2008, Off was travelling to Pakistan to report on the election after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. She had been in touch with the family and knew they were living in Pakistan, but she didn’t know the details. In an Islamabad hotel room, she learned about the warnings in 2002 and the banishment. She asked Asad why he had spoken to her.
As he spoke in Pashto, the faces around her crumpled into tears. She waited on Robina’s translation.
“Because if I had not spoken up, if I had not told you the truth of what was happening, I would never be able to look into the eyes of my children again.”
So many times in her career, she had thought: “Geez, I wish I could help you but you know I can’t really do anything . . . but I feel your pain.”
There was always an invisible line separating her from her sources.
“Once I had looked over my shoulder and seen what the consequences had been of those interviews,” she says, “I knew I could never walk away from that either as a journalist or a human being.”
She would help them come to Canada. Asad told her she was the family’s only hope. It was unusual for the self-reliant man to say something so dire to someone he hardly knew.
Off thought: how hard could it be?
Problems were quick to appear. Asad’s refugee application was rejected because the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) confused him with another man, Off writes. The application was soon back on track but the process was fraught.
At the UNHCR office, Asad bristled when his name was called out, or when a security guard loudly asked about his situation in front of others. Strangers sometimes approached with schemes, money in exchange for influence with the application.
Living in Peshawar, on the Afghan-Pakistani border, the family did not feel safe. Off sent money, and Asad and Mobina used it to send their children to school.
If they were five minutes late, their father would call their mobiles. Where are you?
In 2012, their oldest son, Muhammad, went to the market to buy tomatoes. He was stopped by police and asked for ID. He had forgotten his university card at home, and they took him to jail.
“I spent three nights with people who were addicted to drugs and criminals and killers,” he says, now 26, wearing a Blue Jays hat as he sits on a stool in the kitchen.
You were so young, says Off, who experienced these crises through phone calls and texts.
The police threatened to deport Muhammad. Asad wondered if it was a plot to get him to follow his son back into the country.
In 2014, their youngest child, Hossna, came home from school crying. The Army Public School in Peshawar had been attacked by Taliban gunmen, and her teacher told her: “It’s all because of you.”
Robina felt that one of the biggest problems with the refugee process was corruption. Things moved so slowly. In Toronto, Off woke early to phone the other side of the world, to push the case along, asking for information from the UNHCR office or the Canadian High Commission in Pakistan. She saw it as part of her job. She knows other journalists might disagree. She might have, years ago.
“I saw it definitely as something that was my responsibility . . . to help get them out of the mess that I put them in.”
Robina had a hard time sleeping, and when Off’s emails came, sometimes in the middle of the night, she’d wake her parents to tell them the latest news, occasionally embellishing to see the “glow” in their faces. In the kitchen, Mobina nods, tears in her eyes. “It was the only happiness for us,” says Hossai, 27.
There were days when they felt like giving up. “Maybe one of our family members will be kidnapped, the other will get upset, get depression,” Robina says of the future she imagined. “One by one, our family would be finished.”
She says Off would tell them there would be light at the end of the tunnel.
“We had no jobs, no money, but Carol sent us money to live,” she continues. “We went to school with that.”
“It’s because of Carol we have our bachelors,” Hossai says. “It’s all because of Carol,” Robina says. “You were family,” Off says quietly. “You were my family.”
Off has not heard them talk about her like this, and in some ways, it is painful, how concerned about her they have always been amid their own troubles. Later, on the phone, she explains that she had to push Asad into including the CBC documentary as the reason he had to flee Afghanistan when he was filling out his asylum application.
“He didn’t want to get me in this trouble or cause me any grief,” she says. “Their feelings of concern for me, all the time . . . that’s who they are. There is nothing selfish in them.” In 2013, UNHCR recommended the Aryubwals as good candidates for settlement in Canada, and many people wanted to help. Two church groups had signed on to sponsor, but each had to change plans as time dragged on with no news. In 2014, the interview at the Canadian High Commission went well. Off sent the family encouraging emails, but privately worried she was giving false hope. Before Christmas, she thought about draining her bank account, sending it to the family, and walking away.
In Peshawar, Asad also thought about walking away — returning to Afghanistan, to Dostum — telling him he could do whatever he wanted if his family would be safe.
In 2015, Off brought immigration lawyer Lorne Waldman in to help. He found out the family’s security checks cleared in 2014. He filed an application in federal court to find out why the file was held up. Not long after, the family was approved as government-assisted refugees. Off sent Robina a text to check out a map.
“We were laughing and crying together,” Hossai says.
The process took eight painful years, or nine, depending on when you start your count.
Asad goes to another room and returns with a framed photo of him and his sons at the Santa Claus parade in Hamilton in 2015, a few days after arriving in Canada. The family was sent to Hamilton because they didn’t have relatives in Toronto. They talk about how hard it was in those first months to shake the old feelings of insecurity. Robina remembers going for a walk and telling her mother to slow down. No one was after them in Steeltown.
In October 2016, the family moved to Toronto.
Asad works as a dishwasher at the Carlu. Mobina started a business, making samosas and mantus (dumplings), which the family sells at the Wychwood market on Saturdays.
Youngest daughter Hossna is in Grade 11. Mujeeb and Hossai work at O&B restaurant in Bayview village. Muhammad has applied to Ryerson for engineering, which he studied in Pakistan. He makes deliveries for a pharmacy and enjoys driving around the city. Robina studies at U of T’s Mississauga campus. She hopes to one day go to law school. Both Muhammad and Mujeeb have their drivers’ licences, and everyone else in the family is in the process. They all look at Robina.
“In Afghanistan I was wearing the chador,” Robina begins, as the room erupts in laughter. “In Pakistan I was . . .”
“So why is Hossai doing so well?” Off asks.
“Oh my God, she just gets frozen when she is turning the wheel,” her younger brother Mujeeb says. “You have to drive with her sometime.” “No!” Off says. “I’m not going to.” Asad closes his eyes in laughter. He has always wanted security for Afghanistan. To find safety in Canada is bittersweet. He wants his children to go to school and change this country for the better.
“We are Canadians, with no citizenship, but we will get that,” Mujeeb says. “This is our Afghanistan.”
On a recent Friday, Mobina and her daughters Robina and Hossna were frying beef, cutting vegetables and making dough for their dumplings and samosas, at a commercial kitchen loaned to the family. Asad came in to help before a dishwashing shift downtown.
“In Afghanistan, businessperson,” he said, smiling as he scraped onion skin. “Here, kitchen worker.”
Mobina was a teacher in the years when the Taliban weren’t calling the shots. She taught high school literature.
“Oh, I miss,” she said, dreamily, stirring spices into the ground beef in the pan. Then she starts reciting some verses in Dari.
“Whatever you want to do, it’s your own personal choice,” Robina translates. “But never bother anyone else.”
The Aryubwal family closely follows the news in Afghanistan, which often involves Dostum.
In 2013, he made a public apology to all who had suffered in Afghanistan’s wars, paving his way to run for vice-president on the same ticket as President Ashraf Ghani, who had only a few years earlier called his running mate a “known killer.”
Romain Malejacq, a political scientist at the Centre for International Conflict Analysis and Management at Radboud University in the Netherlands, is writing a book about warlords.
In Afghanistan, he says, many of these people with “a proven ability to organize violence,” are involved in politics, like Dostum.
“If the state collapses or gets weaker and weaker, you will see that these men, I believe, will assert more autonomy in their previous territories, and might become what I call active warlords again,” he says.
“Warlords exert power in different ways today, but they remain warlords.”
Dostum’s tenure as vice-president has been volatile. He is currently in Turkey, in what has been described as exile, amid allegations that he was behind the abduction and sexual torture of a political rival, former Jowzjan Province Gov. Ahmad Ishchi, last November. He has denied the charges, allegations that Amnesty International has called “stomach churning.”
Off tried to interview Dostum when making the documentary, but once the family was in peril, she didn’t try, for fear it would endanger them.
“I think that exposing him and what he did to the light of day kind of inoculates them to some extent,” Off says.
When she wanted to write the book, the Aryubwals were on board. They wanted people to know what happened to them, and they wanted to highlight problems in their long journey to Canada in the hopes that life might be easier for refugees who don’t have a “Carol Off.”
Off felt that as a result of telling the family’s story, people might understand “what others are going through out there.”
The Aryubwals have mourned the death of Off’s father and celebrated the births of her granddaughters. She has celebrated their birthdays and milestones, and chided Asad for his smoking habit. They are friends. Before Off is sent out the door with a bag of leftovers, Robina says even though Off isn’t a blood relation, she is “more than a blood connection.”
“Wait till I start making demands on you, wait and see,” Off says. “I’m the oldest, OK? So you have to take care of me when I’m an old lady.”
“That would be our pleasure,” Hossai says.
“I will be a really miserable old lady,” Off says. “You will regret this. You’ll say, how do we get rid of this old lady who is so miserable?”
“Never,” Hossai says.
“Warlords exert power in different ways today, but they remain warlords.” ROMAIN MALEJACQ POLITICAL SCIENTIST
“We had no jobs, no money, but Carol sent us money to live.” ROBINA ARYUBWAL