The Times Magazine 47It was a painful task, choosing who got to
go and who didn’t. Finally they whittled down
their Excel spreadsheet to 450, those from the
Marefat community who they believed to be
in most danger if they stayed, and divided it,
for the sake of logistics, into two groups. After
narrowly escaping the bomb attack at Hamid
Karzai International Airport in late August
that killed more than 180 people – Hefter and
Abuzar had managed to get the first group on
to a US evacuation flight bound either for
Qatar or Albania – the troop, more than
200 strong, formed a loose caravan and made
the journey north from Kabul to Mazar-i-
Sharif, where we hoped to fly them out to a
neighbouring “lily pad” (which one, we didn’t
yet know) as soon as the Taliban opened the
airport there.
When it became clear the Taliban weren’t
going to let the Kam Air flight we had raised
money to charter to leave the tarmac, we
decided the only way out was overland to
neighbouring Pakistan. With the help of a
human rights organisation in Toronto and
the Prince’s Trust in London, the Canadian
government agreed to resettle the group. With
temporary visas issued through Pakistan’s
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they reached the
Torkham Pass on the Afghanistan/Pakistan
border in early October. Less than four weeks
later, they arrived in Canada, with Selendy
and Hefter (along with a staff sergeant of the
Saskatoon Police Service, who had served in
Afghanistan) at the airport to welcome them.
The second half of the group have not
been so lucky. Delayed in transit, their visa
applications were submitted later, and eight
long months after making it to the border,
they are stuck in seemingly endless limbo
in Islamabad while they wait to see if they
too will be accepted by Canada (last year,
President Trudeau committed to accepting
40,000 Afghan refugees under its immigration
and humanitarian resettlement programmes).
Unlike the first batch, who were given
government assistance, this second group,
we were told by the Immigration, Refugees
and Citizenship Canada department, had
to be privately sponsored.
In order to do this, we needed to raise
C$3.6 million, more than £2 million (the
cost of supporting the group for a year).Miraculously, we raised the amount in just five
weeks. But clearly we still need to raise more.
While the long and arduous process of vetting
their visa applications takes place, the group
need to be fed and sheltered. Medical bills
have to be paid – the last time I was here,
one of the group had to be rushed to hospital
to give birth. There is no guarantee that
visas will be granted, nor how long it will
take. We’ve been assured by Canada that
those fleeing the war in Ukraine (1.4 million
Canadians identify as being of Ukrainian
heritage) fall into a different visa bracket. But
Afghans are used to being at the bottom of
the pile and patience is what every refugee
has to learn.
Numbering 150 and predominantly female,
this second group includes footballers, martial
artists, performers, human rights activists, even
skateboarders, all of whose lives would be at
risk under Taliban rule. Forty-nine of them
between the ages of 18 and 23 have had to travel
alone, forced to leave their families behind.
Among them is Dyana, 23 – a pretty,
bespectacled medical student who acts
as an unofficial “mother hen” to the girls.
When Kabul fell she had been interning in
the emergency department of the city’s main
hospital while she continued her degree in
anaesthesiology. She tells how her father
had insisted, when the news broke, that
she stay, despite her desire to get out in
order to continue studying.
“He said it was my duty with my medical
knowledge to serve my people,” she says.
“But then something changed his mind.”
One night, while she was working late,
four Taliban soldiers strode in unannounced
and made their way to an operating theatre
where a team of foreign national doctors were
about to perform a procedure. “It happened
so quickly the first thing I thought was,
why aren’t these people wearing surgical
masks and protective uniforms? The second
thing I thought was to remove any trace of
lipstick I was wearing.”
Hiding behind a cabinet of medical supplies
she watched as they beat up the foreign
doctors on duty, enraged by the sight of men
and women working side by side. “After that,
my father told me, ‘OK, you have to go. It is
not safe for you to be here any more.’ ”
As the morning wears on, more women
and girls shyly throng the room to relate their
stories to me and Selendy, until they are‘A SOLDIER STOPPED OUR
BUS: WHY WERE WE ALL
LEAVING? I TOLD HIM
THAT WE WERE SICK’
Najma, 28, and her sister, Marzia, 14