Student shows beauty of her homeland
Images often unseen outside of Afghanistan
Photographs help Sabira to remember her life’s journey and share the country she loves – but that she doesn’t know when she will see again.
Images she made of women skiing down snowy slopes in Afghanistan and girls walking to school up a winding hillside path allow her to show an often unseen side of her home country to a new community in Arizona.
Memories of her peaceful home province and advancements made by women there also keep her hope for its future alive.
Sabira is now at Arizona State University, having fled Afghanistan with a group of nearly 150 other female students last summer during the second violent Taliban takeover of her lifetime.
As she escaped, she could only grab a few items to take with her. One of those was a portable hard drive with her photos.
While she doesn’t have pictures from the time, she remembers clearly 20 years ago, when she was a little girl in a small house in a rural part of Bamyan, Afghanistan. She played with ashes of burned books, looking for unscorched images, and toyed with used bullets from a Taliban attack on the region.
The U.S. military had just helped topple the Taliban, her family had moved and rebuilt their home after it was looted and the family properties burned amid the violence. A young Sabira was about to start school for the first time.
“We started everything from zero,” she said about that period. She hoped and prayed the Taliban would never return to power.
In the two decades after 2001, Sabira saw her hometown make monumental strides in girls’ education and women’s participation in politics, business and sports. She and her four sisters all graduated from university. Sabira was proud of her Hazara ethnic group and loved her city, capturing its daily life in photo
The series
Today: Sabira’s story.
Wednesday: Laila’s story.
Friday: Fahima’s story.
Saturday: Going forward.
“When I’m learning about their situation, my hometown’s situation, my people’s situation. But at the same time in a way it gives me the courage to do more, to stay strong.” Sabira,
ASU student
graphs.
The fall of Afghanistan last year hit hard, especially when Bamyan was captured. Sabira left her job and fled to Kabul, about 100 miles to the east. She helped lead a group of her classmates from the Asian University for Women during one of several attempts to access the airport.
They eventually escaped and were taken to the United States. Months later they flew to Arizona and started classes at ASU.
Now on the Tempe campus, Sabira is adjusting to her new life while worrying for her family back home. She completed English immersion classes and is preparing to start a degree program in the fall. She finds healing in sharing her background and through her photos, the parts of Afghanistan she loves.
“There are ups and downs every day. One day I am doing really good, I have a lot of dreams and all, but it depends definitely, the situation back home impacts me a lot,” Sabira said during her second month at ASU.
“When I’m learning about their situation, my hometown’s situation, my people’s situation, mentally it defeats me. But at the same time in a way it gives me the courage to do more, to stay strong.”
The Arizona Republic spent time with Sabira over the course of her first months at ASU, learning about her life in Afghanistan, journey to Arizona and aspirations for the future. She requested that the news organization use just her first name.
Photos capture beauty of Afghanistan
Outside of Phoenix City Hall in midMarch, Sabira worked with her older sister, who was part of the student group that left Afghanistan and is also now at ASU, to hang up eight poster-size photographs to form an outdoor display.
It was Phoenix’s first celebration of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, and Sabira’s photo exhibit showed images from the hard drive she took as she left, of Afghanistan and its women thriving before the Taliban takeover.
She spent the next few hours of the warm spring evening talking to people walking by about the images and her home country.
“What media portrayed, mostly it was all about war, conflict, unfortunately killing, explosions and all, but Afghanistan has another side as well,” she said. “Even though there were a lot of challenges — there was poverty, discrimination, there was explosions, security issues and all — but still women were strong to fight for their rights, they were taking part in society.”
The photographs included a girl holding her baby sibling, a women’s cycling team from Bamyan, a female entrepreneur selling fabric and male and female students sitting for final exams at Bamyan University.
Sabira likes to display the beauty in people and the diversity of Afghanistan that outsiders haven’t experienced. Women from her Hazara ethnic group aren’t often viewed as “beautiful” in the typical Afghan sense, she said, lacking some of the characteristic facial features. And Hazaras have long faced discrimination and persecution in Afghanistan. But photographing them lets her share their humanity and raise awareness about the breadth of her country.
Sabira’s photographs show her strong connection to Bamyan and her dismay over how it’s changed. Bamyan is a city of some 100,000 people in central Afghanistan and the capital of a province with the same name.
“The falling of Afghanistan didn’t hurt as much as when my city fell because I grew up there and I know how it feels when the Taliban came. I haven’t been to Kabul much, I don’t know how the life looks over there, but I know how life looks in Bamyan before the Taliban and how it’s changing and shifting to a city of fear, city of poverty. … It’s completely changed.”
As she evacuated last August, Sabira wore her clothes and shoes and carried only her passport, phone and the hard drive with all her photographs. The storage disk looked like a portable phone charger. She hoped it would ensure she could bring it. She couldn’t bring a bag.
Sabira has taken some photos around the Tempe campus, finding courtyards and high overlooks, and she is working as a photographer for ASU this summer. Being behind the lens calms her down and helps her focus on sharing the beauty of the world.
Taliban attacks community
Sabira’s last normal day in Afghanistan was Aug. 14, 2021, although by then fears already were simmering. It was a Saturday, and the day before the Taliban took over.
Sabira went into the office, where she was working on education programs in Bamyan. She had graduated in 2019 with a degree in environmental sciences from the Asian University for Women. She soon got a call from her mother to come back home. The Taliban was attacking the area. She went home and they stayed up all night checking for updates online and news from friends and relatives.
Early the next morning, Sabira, her mom and two of her sisters drove to a remote area where they could hide from the Taliban, afraid because of their gender, ethnicity and family’s work experience.
Leaving Bamyan was the last time Sabira and her family saw their hometown.
“It hurts a lot, not only because of education but also because Bamyan was a totally different city, different province. It was known for its peaceful community, welcoming community for everyone,” she said.
Bamyam was also targeted two decades earlier. The valley garnered international attention in 2001 after the Taliban destroyed two monumental sixthcentury statues of Buddha that were carved into a cliffside. Some of Sabira’s photos show the gaping holes in the cliffs where the sculptures once stood.
By the time they got to the other city, Sabira learned Bamyan had collapsed, and the Taliban were looting homes and offices, including her organization’s office where she was the day before. If she had been there, they might have killed her.
Sabira couldn’t help but think of her memories from two decades earlier.
“Last time they attacked our city they burned completely our houses, our properties, killed hundreds of people and also so many other people were refugees and displaced or migrated to another country or displaced inside Afghanistan,” she said.
“I was hoping and I was praying that would not happen. We shouldn’t go back again and be under the control of the Taliban.”
Sabira’s mother urged her and her sister to join the effort organized by AUW to try to leave the country. But Sabira was torn.
“I was sad, whether I will make it or not. If I go, what will happen to my family? What will happen to my little nephews? So many thoughts the whole way when I left the district, the district where I was born and grew up, both the feeling of leaving and the feeling of Taliban coming and taking the city were mixed up. And I was emotional.”
A major decision at Kabul airport
Sabira, her mother and her sister went to Kabul. Leaving her home district and thinking of the future, she couldn’t cry. She felt numb.
Her mother urged them to leave the country: “It’s the future,” Sabira recalled her saying. Her parents had long prioritized their girls’ education, even as other families were slower to enroll their daughters in school. Her mother didn’t go to school, but she had learned to read and taught Sabira the basics as a little kid.
The tough journey was just beginning. Sabira was appointed as a bus leader for one of seven groups during one of the multiday trips to attempt to enter the Kabul airport, putting her in charge of 23 other students.
“Getting inside the airport was the most difficult part, because there were huge crowds around, thousands of people came from different cities just to escape Afghanistan … and the Taliban was controlling the gates, so it was very risky to get inside.”
Given the level of uncertainty, plus the potential of explosions and attacks, Sabira was scared. How would the Taliban possibly let 150 women leave the country, she remembers thinking.
On the first day they were to try to get into the airport, the students were ready, but plans changed and they didn’t go. Another day in late August, they sat anxiously on the buses as they circled the airport. Something exploded outside, Sabira recalled. The bus still headed to the airport. At a Taliban checkpoint, someone shot at the vehicle and a Taliban member angrily yelled at the women, she said. That attempt to enter the airport also was unsuccessful.
Outside the airport on their final at
tempt, Sabira as bus leader was warned about a potential suicide bombing and told to watch out the window for suspicious people, one of whom would be a woman.
The crowd was packed; it was impossible to tell who might be dangerous.
She saw two women take a picture of their buses and had a choice: Tell the other students about the threat or don’t.
“It was the hardest decision I’ve made in my life,” she said. “If I tell them, they will go back home and they will have very a different future; there will be no education opportunity anymore for them.”
But if they kept going, the outcome could be deadly.
“There was something that might happen — the very worst — but there was something that if I wasn’t telling them, there was a good future, which is education.”
She took that chance. They made it into the airport.
Sabira got in touch with her mother once she and her sister were there. After not sleeping for days as her daughters went back and forth, she finally felt relief.
“Before when we were leaving (for university), she was sad, she was upset, but this time she was so happy because she knew what would happen if we stayed in Afghanistan. She encouraged me a lot, she was giving me hope, she was giving me courage to stay strong,” Sabira said.
All the AUW students boarded a U.S. military plane with 300 to 400 other people, Sabira recalled. They sat on the floor, squeezed in tight, and held a rope tied in front of them during takeoff and landing. They still thought they were heading back to campus in Bangladesh. Instead, they made stops in two other countries and eventually landed at a U.S. Army base in Wisconsin, where they’d spend 31⁄2 months before finally arriving in Arizona and at ASU.
“Traveling to the U.S. is the dream for everyone, but the way that we traveled is very different,” Sabira said.
Life at ASU, dreams for Afghanistan
Sabira has tried to get as much as she can out her first few months at ASU.
She took advanced immersive English language courses at Global Launch and has met new people and explored campus. She recently started her summer job working as a photographer for ASU.
She’d like to do another photo exhibit on campus. She visited the Grand Canyon, Sedona and New York City this spring.
She plans to start courses for a degree program in the fall and to graduate from ASU in the coming years. She expects to stay in the U.S. after she graduates.
But she dreams of finding ways to help the women back in Afghanistan, especially girls in Bamyan who live in poverty, so they can continue their education and learn English. For now, she’s helping young Afghan women apply to the Asian University for Women by connecting with them online and recommending students to the university.
Sabira is grateful to have her sister on campus for a small hug, or even a small fight, to make the hard days easier. She found a store that sells some Afghan food and tasted an apple from there that looked just like a kind they have in Bamyan – she felt at home.
She stays in close touch with her mother and another sister, who are still living in hiding in Afghanistan as the situation worsens for women. She keeps in contact with some high school students she worked with. But she finds it hard to talk to other relatives when they ask how things are going in Arizona.
“I cannot really share the feeling of being happy here and they don’t have anything, so because of that I try to skip talking to them,” she said.
“It’s good that I am safe here, I can work, I can study. But I’m worried definitely about my family, my friends, my hometown.”
Sabira finds strength in sharing her experience with people she meets at ASU. As with showing photos of home, talking about her life with people from different backgrounds helps with understanding.
“I’m talkative, I do talk a lot. … I share my story a lot with the people and I don’t really feel hesitant or feel bad when I’m sharing. It gives me healing and it helps me to heal from all of the issues,” she said.
She said people have mostly been supportive and she thinks her story has an effect on them. She talks about Bamyan and how it was different before and after the Taliban took power. People tell her they’re praying for her and her family.
“I feel so good. It doesn’t really matter for me what religion they are following, but when they show their support, because they believe in that religion and it’s so valuable for them, so it’s valuable for me as well.”