TRAUMA and the Taliban
How their return to power has thousands of Afghans reliving horrors of the past
Ahmed Fadozai can still remember the moment the knife was plunged into the man’s neck.
Fadozai, now an entrepreneur in Houston, was in Kabul’s Ghazi soccer stadium in 1998, waiting to watch a soccer match with friends. Instead, military trucks rolled in, soldiers jumped out, hoisted up a man and then decapitated him.
“They cut this person’s head off with a knife in front of thousands of people,” Fadozai says, his voice trembling as he vividly recalls the moment.
He was 10 years old.
With the recent return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Fadozai is among thousands of Afghans now living in North America reliving the horrors of their past.
Nearly six million Afghans have been displaced from their homes during four decades of war, reports the United Nations Refugee Agency. And according to refugee settlement officers in
Canada, recent images of Taliban violence in the media are bringing back terrifying memories to the approximately 100,000 Canadians of Afghan heritage.
Erin Pease, director of the office for refugees for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Hamilton, says she has received hundreds of calls from Afghan Canadians over the past month worried about their relatives in Afghanistan and reliving the horrors they endured at the hands of the Taliban years ago.
“It just gives me goose bumps,” says Pease. Her office has two full-time staff but she also relies on a team of volunteers to help respond to Afghan Canadians in crisis. “Watching TV is causing them to go to hospital and get care and be on medication and it’s really, really devastating.”
Dr. Kazim Hizbullah of Ottawa, a global health expert, is experiencing first-hand how disturbing images trigger traumatic memories. His voice wavers as he relives one of many threats he received from the Taliban when he worked on a U.S. military base in Kunar province in 2008: “We spared you this time. We didn’t shoot you. But next time (we will).”
Hizbullah, whose quiet demeanour does not mask the terror he felt for his young wife and three-month-old baby, went on to lead a successful and happy life in Canada. But a recent Facebook video of two tiny girls crying over the dead body of their brother in Kabul triggered a mental-health crisis.
“I was unable to sleep well, would wake up four to five times in the night … it was a situation of grief,” he says. Hizbullah says he would normally reach out to his wife for support but could not this time: “Her (mental-health) situation was worse than mine.”
Dr. Craig Haen, a trauma therapist in White Plains, N.Y., and co-chair of community outreach for the American Group Psychotherapy Association, says that media footage plays a major role in our traumatic reactions.
A study in the journal Psychiatry in 2002 found that people who repeatedly saw images of “people falling or jumping from the towers of the World Trade Center” had almost three times the prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than those who did not. Haen works with victims of trauma to help them regulate their exposure to distressing media and talk about their experiences.
Noor Sabir Sabaru, an energetic Uber driver in North York, says he cries as he recalls his 41 years of living in a war zone. His earliest memory is fleeing barefoot, aged 4, from his village in Khost province in 1980. His family’s house was burned to the ground. They returned to rebuild it when the Russians left in 1990, only to suffer under the Taliban.
“The Taliban hit me because my beard was too short; they put my brother in jail,” recalls Sabaru.
When the Americans invaded in 2001, the trauma returned.
“There was a lot of bombing,” says Subaru. He fled to Canada in 2015 after the Taliban shot at his family and bombed the family car. “I was lucky I was not in that car.”
Shelley Kavenaugh, a psychotherapist in Toronto who specializes in trauma, says refugees are so busy with the necessities of life when they arrive in North America — housing, school and jobs — that their mental health is not a priority, and that unresolved trauma can be reactivated when events recur.
Newly arrived from Kabul, Farzaneh (not her real name), 26, is suffering from severe PTSD but says she has no time to seek help. She is overwhelmed by caring for her parents and younger siblings, who had to flee with her as a result of her work as a writer.
“(Getting mentalhealth care is) like a double-edged sword: On the one side you have a lack of resources and on the other you have the stigma.”
DR. KAZIM HIZBULLAH OTTAWA-BASED GLOBAL HEALTH EXPERT
In July 2016, Farzaneh was near Deh Mazang square in Kabul when twin suicide bombers killed 120 people and wounded hundreds of others. She blacked out, she says, and awoke to an apocalypse.
“I was injured, I was bleeding … there was flesh everywhere. I saw people who were divided in multiple pieces and bodies cut in half, their heads off,” Farzaneh says, her voice choking. She says she saw several close friends whose bodies were shattered. The fragments of other friends would never be found.
Farzaneh’s PTSD recurred as she escaped Kabul with her family. Soldiers were constantly shooting their guns in the air, which brought back memories of the bombing. And Taliban members were beating people with sticks as they waited for hours at the airport.
“My mom, my sister and my brother were beaten up by the Taliban” at the airport, Farzaneh recalls. “It happened right in front of the Americans and they were just looking at us.” Her mother still has bruises on her head and back more than five weeks later.
Mujeeb Anjar, a father of seven who settled in Halifax in 2013, has been trying to manage his re-traumatization in different ways.
Watching the news of Afghanistan brought back memories of Taliban threats he endured as a correspondent for Afghan Radio Liberty in 2010-13. “I was like a baby without a mother, crying 24 hours,” he says.
Anjar says he tries to keep busy with his driving instruction business and stay away from social media. He says medication and religion have not helped much: “If you are contacting Allah, then it helps — but not enough.”
Integrating Islam into treatment is important for religious refugees, according to research at the Khalil School of Islamic Psychology and Research, which has wellness centres in the U.S. and Toronto. But depression and other mentalhealth conditions are stigmatized in Afghan culture, according to Hiz
bullah, who practised medicine in Afghanistan until 2008.
Hizbullah estimates that more than 70 per cent of Afghans need some kind of mental-health intervention, having lived most of their lives in a war zone. But Afghans rarely go to see psychiatrists and mental-health services are extremely scarce.
“It’s like a double-edged sword: On the one side you have a lack of resources and on the other you have the stigma.”
Karima (not her real name), 41, who arrived in Canada from Afghanistan in early September, is not afraid to ask for help but has not yet been able see a mental-health professional.
She raised her family in a war zone and worried constantly about her six children when they were out of their house in Afghanistan.
Medication that she received a few years ago in Pakistan for depression and anxiety has now run out. Safe in Canada, Karima has recurring memories of the bloodsoaked hand of a small girl killed in an explosion and her brother-inlaw’s dead body. She has seen Canadian doctors for stomach and eye problems but has not yet seen a psychiatrist.
Afghan refugees such as Karima tend to be highly educated or have strong life skills and may be seen to need less support when they arrive, according to the executive director of a trauma support organization for refugees in Toronto who does not want to be identified to protect the identify of her organization. Statistics Canada research shows refugee permanent residents of Afghan origin are more than four times as likely to have post-secondary education than those from Southeast Asia. In an email, the refugee trauma support director said the organization does not see many people from Afghanistan: “It may be that we don’t see them as they are managing with less formal support.”
Mohammed (not his real name), 53, has never received formal support to cope with the trauma of growing up in Kandahar during the Russian occupation from 1979 to 1989.
“Gunshots, rebels, explosions and rockets my whole life,” remembers Mohammed. Walking home from school as an 11-year-old in 1979, he and his friends were caught in crossfire and one was killed. The next year, the secret service hauled Mohammed off a public bus, put a gun to his head and held him for hours at a location far from his home, he says.
Mohammed’s voice falters as he remembers the dead bodies he saw daily as a child outside a hospital near where he played. He relives the moment a medical worker asked him to help move four charred bodies and he ran away. He was 14 years old.
But Mohammed says that telling his story and the kindness of others have helped him heal.
“One woman immigration officer, she was so nice. She started crying when she heard my story.” Mohammed now has children of his own and he often tells them the traumatic stories of his childhood so that they will know how lucky they are.
It is important to offer support to the Afghans who are being re-traumatized, says trauma therapist Haen: “Isolation is like fertilizer for traumatic reactions. The more alone people feel, the more ashamed they feel about their reactions, the less they share with people that understand, the more traumatized they are going to feel.”
Ahmed Fadozai still awakes every day with the image of the man in the stadium, and is terrified. “It bothers me mentally, emotionally, physically even just hearing their name — Taliban.”