Women and children are fleeing the Taliban takeover, begging for help to survive

This comment is part of an opinion section on human rights and human freedom occasionally published by The Dallas Morning News. You can find the complete series here.

The shrill, emotional screams of a woman standing in a crowded, grassless park on the outskirts of Kabul can be heard behind the blue burqa. Small children play in the dust next to her feet as she rushes forward in a louder voice.

“The foreigners,” she yells, pointing to the few unfamiliar faces. “You can’t be here! You are the reason why we are here at all! “

Her voice cracks in agony as other veiled faces try to calm her down. After she had to flee from her home in northern Afghanistan just a few hours earlier, she is traumatized and angry.

You can hardly blame her for it. Afghanistan has long been torn by war and geography, by outsiders and insecurity.

And now, after nearly 20 years of protracted conflict, the dwindling US troop presence is in the twilight, paving the way for the Taliban to conquer vast areas and wreak havoc on a civilian population that is only trying to survive and feed their families.

Since the American drawdown began in late fall, the nation has seen a huge surge in the number of internally displaced or internally displaced people. This arid park full of crying mothers and scared toddlers is just a snapshot of what is likely to come when the brutal uprising that already controls more than 60% of Afghan territory is no longer fended off by a US and NATO footprint.

Thousands are already wedged in the park of Police District 15, which does not yet need to be designated as an official camp with state and basic humanitarian support. Instead, it’s a splash of tents and torn sheets that provide shade, and most sleep without shelter on the hard earth under the scorching summer sun.

The vast majority are women who arrived with their children just hours earlier and had to leave their wounded husbands, fathers and sons on the battlefield in the fast-fading hope of being reunited one day.

“My name is Lena and I’m Afghanistan,” a soft voice tells me in crisp English behind the burqa. “A rocket hit my house and I only escaped wearing these clothes. There was no time to bring anything else. “

Lena is only 20 and holds her three-year-old son tight while he stares at the patchwork of broken bodies and severed dreams. The “camp” houses the poorest villagers, those who have no other extended family home to escape to, those who have spent the rest of their change running for their lives. In the case of Lena, she and 17 others squeezed into a single small truck on the grim, hour-long journey south to the country’s capital.

The hardest part is explaining to her little boy why her world was suddenly shaken by bombs and bullets, grief and homelessness.

“He was home when the rocket hit, but he was so brave,” Lena whispered. “But he’s very angry.”

The dying daylight shines on her son’s grave face, and I wonder how you can ever tell a child why they are no longer welcome in their own home. Why do they have to run away, leaving behind the things they love most in the world, including their father?

“I just have to tell him that it’s like a dream, only briefly, not forever,” explains Lena. “But when we got here, we found that there was nothing.”

Even the procurement of leftover food or a basic meal of buttered rice and bread brought by generous locals is a Sisyphean task.

“We are ladies and we cannot leap forward to have the food. So the men come first and we just stay back, ”says Lena.

The challenges for people like Lena only get bigger as families arrive every day as more townships come under Taliban control. According to official statistics from the Afghan government, around 400,000 people were displaced by the increase in violence this year alone.

In addition, the United Nations International Office for Migration estimates that by the end of the year around 50% of the 18.5 million Afghan population will need humanitarian aid as the conflict exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis continues. However, the grim scenario on the ground means that less humanitarian groups are willing to risk the lives of workers in order to support those who have nowhere else to go.

“The Taliban came into my village, they came in and threw a rocket and burned everything,” says Khalida, 25, who has just arrived from Kunduz and takes my hand to speak in a private place. “My husband was injured in the hospital, his legs and hands and feet and his back were hit by bullets. So we had to leave him behind. “

Khalida’s husband is a cop, and they had a simple, peaceful existence before the fighters broke through. There was life before those traumatic moments, and then there is life now: a single bag of clothes, stomachs that have not been filled for days, and three children aged 4, 3 and 18 months who are still with crushed cups as toys in the hardened tracks .

“The Taliban are terrible for the people. You don’t just kill people who worked for the government; they also only kill children, ”she says. “The children always ask me, ‘Why are we going?’ I tell them the Taliban are killing everyone. even she [tried] to kill your father. “

In other crises I have reported on over the years, parents mostly try to protect their youngsters from the harsh reality of why the sky is blazing with explosions and there is no choice but to flee.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case in Afghanistan.

“I explained to my children that the Taliban would kill and burn us if we don’t leave here,” says Haji, who fled the Balk province with his five children aged 13, 12, 10, 6 and eight months. “We will never go back while the Taliban are still there. You don’t respect anything. “

Many of the newly uprooted say that these so-called modern Taliban are not all that modern.

“Even my sister, who is very, very small,” says Lena. “The Taliban forced her to wear the full burqa. Even little girls can’t show their faces. “

Their tactics have also changed. For years the uprising targeted high-ranking politicians and security personnel. But since the signing of the U.S. peace accord in early 2020, civilians in the big cities and in the rugged mountains have been increasingly – and deliberately – maimed and killed.

For Mariam Sayedzada, a local women’s rights activist and camp representative, there is little delay when the deeply shaken people arrive in the dilapidated park, which is almost full in a few days.

“There are no facilities like toilets, there are only a few volunteers, so it’s very difficult and more people come every hour,” she tells me, her eyes filling with tears. “There is no such thing as security and we have to provide a safe place, especially for the ladies.”

As Sayedzada speaks, gunfire echoes nearby and droves of displaced people rush to see what happened. Sayedzada wipes away the harrowing noises with a dismissive hand, clearly showing that she has had enough and can no longer be silenced by the soundtrack of the war. Then, barely missed, she explains that she has asked the various tribal elders in Kabul for help for women, and laments the unspeakable crimes that women are already experiencing.

“We’re used to fighting; it has been fought for a long time. But now they just increased it, ”says Sayedzada. “Every peace that we have experienced has not been easy for us. It’s a big fight, but we will fight against this black Taliban regime. “

But the vulnerability of the already vulnerable is clear, even for minors.

Samuollah Danish is a 16-year-old who says he just escaped when the Taliban went door to door in his village of Takhar looking for people who were working for the government’s execution.

“This camp is for poor people. We need facilities, ”he pleads. “And there is no security that protects us from a suicide attack – and from the people who come here and pretend to be internally displaced in order to penetrate the women. Maybe Kabul falls tomorrow, where will people go then? “

Women and children swarm with me, armed with documents on the living, missing and dead. A foreigner’s face can hurt, but it can also help many. Almost all of them speak in a staccato of the wild attacks that have stolen their husbands, their sons, their limbs and their livelihoods.

“We are losing our lives and are fleeing,” complains a woman who weighs a pillow. “And the Taliban laugh.”

The aftermath of childhood trauma undoubtedly has haunting, potentially lifelong effects.

“Children react specifically and differently to traumatic events such as a terrorist seizure of power. Boys, more than girls, often identify with the male aggressors they see and can become aggressive themselves. This is especially true if their fathers have been killed or proven powerless to protect them, ”Anne Speckhard, director of the study on violent extremism and professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University, said in an email. “Girls can do all of that, but they also often become dissociative – that is, they are faded out and appear unemotional or absent when their traumatic memories are triggered.”

She wrote that children also often re-enact their trauma in endless post-traumatic games, trying to understand the events they experienced and experienced.

“All of these persistent traumatic reactions can make the children irritable, unable to concentrate and disrupt their learning for years after the events if their trauma is left untreated,” adds Speckhard.

Despite the dire prospects and all the unknowns, there remains a feeling of resilience in the Afghan people, a determination to wrest back what is rightfully theirs.

“When a rocket hit our house two days ago, we had to flee and leave half the family behind. If I stay under the Taliban in my village, I won’t be able to go to school, ”says Maheen, a 14-year-old girl with a gentle demeanor. “But we don’t want such a life.”

Maheen pauses and stares me straight in the eye when I ask her what she wants for her future.

She will not succumb to exist in a place where women are seen as mere property alongside gold and land.

“We want the Taliban to join the peace process. We want to educate ourselves, ”says Maheen. “And I’m going to be a doctor.”

Hollie McKay is an international freelance writer. She wrote this column for the Dallas Morning News.

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