I work as journalist for BBC World TV, covering news of wars around the world, as well as stories of migration, typhoons, floods and health crises such as Covid. Sometimes I cover happy topics too. As a native Afghan, if there is news from my country I get assigned the story first.
I recently returned to my daily job after a rewarding extended maternity leave for my second child. But as a journalist I never stopped following the news, particularly events from Afghanistan. I remember in October 2019 leaving the BBC headquarters in London, heavily pregnant. One of the last items I produced for our TV show was on Afghanistan’s security situation; I invited a prominent Afghan female politician, Fawzia Koofi, onto our show. She was the only woman present at a peace talk meeting with the Taliban. The rest of the delegates, from both sides, were all men. Deals were done about the US troops’ withdrawal in Qatar, and some Afghans seemed hopeful—even full of joy—at the prospect of finally having peace in the country. Koofi also seemed positive, but she did warn that Afghans would not accept a deal that could lead to a loss of the freedoms they had gained.
Though women in general remained sceptical, because they didn’t want to pay the price of losing all their basic rights to a Taliban-ruled government. I, as an Afghan woman, also left my job with some hope for my people and my country. I felt that some stability was on its way; that something was being done to ensure security and basic rights for people. I was also full of joy for getting closer to meeting my baby girl and hoped that when I returned I would be covering some happy stories from my country.
Peace, hope—and painful news from afar
My daughter was born in November 2019. I named her Sola, which means “peace” in Pashto, because she gives me inner peace. I remember when my mother saw her after the birth, she looked her in the eyes and said: “Sola, my child, like you have brought peace to our family, may your steps into the world bring peace to Afghanistan too.” I still hope that my daughter’s name will be lucky for my country, that people will see peace and calm soon. But it is hard to keep hopes alive with what has been happening in Afghanistan of late.
During my maternity break, every day’s events made the prospect of peace seem more remote or even impossible to me. One morning, as I woke up to feed my baby girl, I saw the news about how mothers and newborn babies were brutally attacked at a Kabul maternity hospital. Twenty-four mothers and babies were killed. They were mothers like me, they had just given birth to babies like my Sola, babies who had opened their eyes for the first time to the outside world. I, as a new mum, didn’t know how to digest this news, how to imagine the pain or how to make sense of this brutality.
Many times I asked myself: how much more brutal can the violence get in my country? But the security situation got worse by day; students at university got attacked and then a girls’ school in Kabul was targeted, with many young girls killed. Attacks on women, activists and journalists increased. Mothers lost their beloved children. I returned to work in July as the situation was developing fast.
It almost felt as if I had never gone on that extended maternity leave. On my first week of returning to work, I covered violence as the Taliban fought hard to gain control of Afghanistan. In the first few days I covered the Taliban taking over district after district, as people started to flee. I began to cover the fall of major cities. Then the major provinces started falling, including Helmand and Kandahar in the south, Herat in the west, Mazar-i-Sharif in the north and Nangarhar in the east. I watched footage of the Afghan army fighting on the streets of Herat, and I spoke to fearful women and their families leaving their homes to get to safety.
My aunt who lived in Kholm in the north became displaced to Mazar-i-Sharif, barely ahead of the rapidly advancing Taliban force. As I spoke to people escaping for safety, I tried to find out where she and her family were. It was heartbreaking. In her forties with 13 children, she is a typical Afghan mother, who was married as a teenager and is now a grandmother. She is also an example of what Afghan mothers have been through over the past three decades.
As a young child she was displaced from the east of the country to Kabul, when the Russian-backed government was in power, and during the civil war of the US-backed mujahideen. As a teenager she was displaced again to the north, where she got married. During the original Taliban years, she was moved back to Kabul with her young children, and as she lost hope for a better future she became a refugee in Pakistan. After the collapse of the Taliban in 2001, she returned to her old home in the north, where her children grew up. It was there her family grew and she became a grandmother. Her husband had been working as a government clerk and most of her children went to school and university. In July this year, that happy life changed once again. Now, she is an internally displaced person in another province, leaving her home and belongings in search of safety. This is the fifth time she has lost everything she had, in order to be safe and to keep hold of her children.
Home falls under a shadow
On Sunday 15th August, my heart sank. My friends’ dreams were crushed; people I knew who had visions and plans for the country and its future had to hide in their homes or at the homes of their friends. The Taliban entered my beautiful, beloved city of Kabul. In the blink of an eye, I was no longer able to talk to the progressive and educated Afghans for the BBC. Life seemed darker. My family, my cousins and uncles were worried for their lives and future. They are still trying to figure out where it will be safe for them to go.
None of us expected life to change so quickly. None of us thought we would be seeing Taliban fighters with sticks and guns on the streets of our beloved city. What happened during the evacuation was devastating, as we watched all progress go to nothing in just a matter of hours.
The fear and anxiety is high among my people. I am slowly losing contact with those I was able to speak to only a few days ago, either because they had to delete their social media accounts—or because they are hiding or trying desperately to leave.
On 17th August, I was asked to translate the Taliban spokesman’s statement from Pashto to English. It was a phenomenal moment: there I was, seeing the Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, for the first time. During my career I have spoken to him many times, usually about suicide attacks in Kabul or other cities. As a BBC journalist for the Afghan Service I would reach out to him to get confirmation of the attacks that had happened, and he would confirm or deny an attack that had killed dozens of Afghan civilians.
But he never showed his face to the media. I had different numbers for him as he would regularly change them, so for me he was a familiar but faceless voice. I knew him as someone who defended the attacks of the Taliban, a group responsible for the deaths of many, many Afghans, some of whom were my friends.
Me and my family, like other Afghans around the world, are heartbroken by the direction in which our country is moving. It has brought back the memories of our own displacement and running for our lives when I was a kid. I thank my parents regularly for bringing me and my siblings to the UK in 2001. I appreciate their sacrifices and feel lucky to be here. I now know that this is what my people will have to live with. The Taliban have control: they are leading the country. The spokesman promised a lot in general terms for women and girls under Sharia law. But his message was vague, and with no specific promise of change that could make us even begin to feel safe to live in the country.
I speak to women and men and they all seem to be in a panic. Afghans are asking: why did the US military escape in the middle of the night? Is that how they work? When they came in, they didn’t sneak in. To me, it feels like Afghanistan is abandoned and forgotten.
I am still in contact with many family and friends there. For those who don’t have any hope of leaving the country, life continues. Mostly men of the families go out—women are keeping a low profile, and schools are shut in Kabul and elsewhere. Life is at a standstill, but in most places no attacks or bombings are happening. Young people are in a Taliban-induced lockdown. No one is sure what the next day will bring. A matter of days ago, just before the fall of Kabul, my cousins sent me some videos of the family getting together to celebrate the birth of my cousin’s baby boy. The videos give me hope. I wanted to be able to go and celebrate the birth and the upcoming wedding of another cousin. I enjoyed watching them sing and party, and I showed the videos to my husband and children. I so want to take them to Afghanistan and introduce them to all of my people.
But with the daily events in Afghanistan, the loss of life, of people who had dreams, in my mind it is hard to keep up hope. It is breaking my heart constantly to see my country face such an uncertain future, and I wonder if it will ever be possible for me to take my children to a prosperous Afghanistan where they could see my country for the first time and meet their extended family—and feel all the Afghan love.
I am an Afghan woman. As Afghans we fall, we fall hard and we lose, but we learn to get up and build again. That is what we have done all these years, so I want to be hopeful. I think Sola is still my lucky charm—and I want to dream of a free and prosperous Afghanistan every time I mention her name.
