Life under the Taliban, may God help us all
My family’s dreams of having a normal life, a decent life, a dignified life, are shattered. Will they even live to see the next day?
Editor’s note: This column was told to USA TODAY by an Afghan American defense analyst living in Virginia. USA TODAY granted the author’s request for anonymity to protect his family still living in Afghanistan. USA TODAY has verified his identity.
I came to the United States when I was 25 years old and had just completed my undergraduate degree overseas. Now, I live in Northern Virginia with my wife and children.
From 1996 to 2011, the Taliban banned girls from going to school, but they also imposed extreme restrictions on male students in schools and colleges. I had to leave my home, Afghanistan, to pursue higher education because I was deprived of the basic right to an education under the Taliban’s totalitarian regime for the five years leading up to Sept. 11, 2001.
My brothers and I not only witnessed their violence and oppression, but experienced it firsthand. We attended high school in Kabul under the Taliban and were beaten and punished on three occasions for not leaving the classroom to pray when the call to prayer was playing in a nearby mosque.
On a late afternoon in 1998, when I was just 15 years old, I walked back home from the gym – unfortunately during the prayer time – and was nearly caught by the religious police that was known for their brutality, viciousness and acts of barbarism. Their vehicle turned down the local road I walked along, and as soon as they saw me they started chasing me. I ran for my life. I remember kicking and entering a random house’s door to take shelter. The Taliban religious police circled and raided the house in an attempt to find me.
Fortunately, I was an athletic teenager and my time at the gym paid off as I was able to jump over the wall onto the roof, then jump onto the neighboring house’s roof. From there I jumped to another house’s roof until I made it to a safe place where a good family sheltered me for several hours until it was dark. There were no cellphones back then. I could not contact my family and tell them I was safe or tell them where I was.
My mother was worried sick about me and cried for hours. My father was looking for his son who never came home. Later, I was told that the Taliban had shot one of the family members in the first house I entered to take shelter. This was a sadly typical day in the lives of many who lived under the Taliban. But the effect of those traumas continue to haunt us to this day.
Still in Afghanistan are my parents and three brothers. I have been in contact with them for the past few days.
They are scared for their lives, emotionally devastated and outraged over how they were left at the mercy of international terrorists like ISIS, al-qaida and the Taliban who have no attachment to Afghanistan or its people.
My family’s dreams of having a normal life, a decent life, a dignified life, are shattered; their souls and hope are crushed, and their chances of a peaceful and prosperous life now totally diminished. They are unsure if they will make it to see the light of even the next day. On Monday, they told me that there are reports that the Taliban are going door to door in Kabul and making targeted executions and extrajudicial killings of those who had spoken ill against them. The Taliban are also seizing peoples’ properties by force such as homes, vehicles and other valuables.
My family is as miserable and helpless as 39 million other Afghans who have nowhere to go. They have to endure the pain and suffering of living under the Taliban regime again. They must accept to be whipped, lashed, beaten, imprisoned and targeted for trying to exercise their God given basic human rights and civil liberties.
The saddest part is that they have to relive and endure the same pain, fear and suffering that we went through 25 years ago; perhaps it will be much more horrifying this time given that the terrorist group is vicious, violent and vengeful of the millions of Afghan people who rejected the terror group and instead desired to live under the democratic constitutional republic that was built with the massive blood and treasure of Afghans and Americans in the past 20 years.
Now that democratic constitutional republic has been wiped out of the face of the world political map. It is perhaps an irreparable damage that we all have to live with for the rest of our lives. May God help us all.