Taliban troops are gaining ground in Afghanistan, even threatening to take over three major cities. Their progress has accelerated since the withdrawal of US troops and has highlighted a problem: the danger faced by people who have worked for foreign troops, such as translators.
Zia Ghafoori, His pregnant wife and three young children landed in the United States from Kabul in September 2014.
He had five visas as a reward for his 14 years of service as an interpreter in the US Special Forces in Afghanistan.
But the benefits ended there.
Upon arrival, Zia found himself homeless , sent to a shelter by a well-meaning volunteer who told him it would be a place for him and his family to start a new life.
Seven years afterwards, the memory still infuriates him.
In a conversation with the BBC from e North Carolina, where she lives now, recalled how difficult it was to look her children in the eye, and how she apologized for bringing them to the United States.
“I couldn’t control my tears,” she says . “After what I had done for both countries, I wondered ‘is this what I deserve?’”
But among his companions, Zia, now from 37 years, he considers himself lucky to have arrived in the US
Tens of thousands of Afghans have served as interpreters, mediators and local guides for US and allied soldiers since the beginning of the Afghanistan war in 2001, when Western forces invaded the country to seize control from the Taliban regime.
Two decades after the start of what would become the longest-running conflict in the US, President Joe Biden promised to withdraw US troops before the 11 September, even if the Taliban re come to power.
A prolonged exodus
Biden has promised that a mass evacuation of interpreters would begin before August .
For him 30 of July, 200 Afghans from an initial group of 2 . 500 reached E E. to complete your visa applications and start a new life.
Until 50. 000 interpreters have worked with the US Army
From 2008, some 70. Afghans, interpreters and their families, have moved to the US with a special immigrant visa granted for their service.
P ero about 20. 000 interpreters and their families continue looking for a way out.
They face a complex and obstructed visa process, with the threat of rapid advancement by the Taliban as the US ends its war of 20 years.
The danger for interpreters, marked by his work with the states idenses, it is serious.
It is estimated that 300 have died since 2009 while they were looking for a US visa, a process that can take years.
Delays have affected Zia.
“These people stood up and fought shoulder to shoulder to support both countries … and now we close our eyes and leave them there, leaving them to die,” he says.
Comrades in arms
Zia signed up to join the US Army as an interpreter at 2002.
F was your first full-time job. Had 18 years.
It was also the fulfillment of a promise made to his mother six years earlier, when the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan.
As a primary school student then, Zia saw the end of a carefree childhood, an easy exchange between school, soccer and games with her seven siblings.
Zia recalled her lively neighborhood transformed under a strict Islamic regime: indiscriminate beatings of men and women, a strange tranquility while the families hid inside their houses.
Their sisters could not go to school.
His older brother, who then had 20 years, was beaten and imprisoned after being heard speaking the Panjshir Valley dialect, then the center of resistance against the s Taliban.
The beating left her feet and legs so swollen she couldn’t put her boots on, Zia said. The injuries were so severe that he could not walk.
Within a few days, his parents decided that they could not stay. The family fled their home in Kabul and moved to P e shawar, in Pakistan.
“I told my mother: ‘When I grow up, I will fight against these people’ ”He said, referring to the Taliban.
He learned English at school in Peshawar.
His family stayed in Pakistan until 2001, when USA began their invasion.
“When I returned, I saw that a stable government was beginning,” said Zia. “I said it was fine, now we have hope.”
She went back to living in Afghanistan, got married and started teaching English at a local school.
A few months after his return, a friend told him that Americans needed interpreters.
They went the next day, he said. They showed up at the Kabul base asking for a job.
“They were just hiring people who spoke English. He did not know military words. They told me ‘no problem.’
He omitted the pleas of his wife and family for him to retire, saying that he was devoted to his “brothers” in the armed forces Americans, who had given him the nickname “Booyah.”
“We were the eye and the tongue of the military,” said Zia.
For Zia, working With the Green Berets (the US Army’s special operations unit), this meant almost constant proximity to death and violence.
In April of 2008, accompanied the American forces in the battle of Shok Valley . The fire lasted six hours. Minutes later, his best friend, another interpreter, died.
The battle generated the most Silver Stars, the second highest decoration for valor, of any battle since Vietnam.
Zia received a Heart Purple from his injuries. When he arrived in the United States, shrapnel from the day of the battle was still on his body.
He applied for US visas that year under a new visa program created by Congress at 2008: the Special Immigrant Visa , designed specifically for Afghans and Iraqis who worked alongside US troops in both conflicts.
Zia’s visa took six years to be approved.
Zia, who is an affable and soft-spoken man , described the process as “disgusting.”
The delays were inexplicable, he alleges.
“I don’t know why it took so long, we were already in the US database,” he said. “I don’t know who could explain to the State Department what these guys have done for both countries.”
“I couldn’t bring anything”
Zia received visa approval via email in the summer of 2014, while on duty in Jalalabad, Nangarhar province.
He felt “strange,” he says, intimidated by the prospect of leaving Afghanistan behind. “I couldn’t bring anything I had built.”
The Taliban forced him. His family had begun to receive “night letters”, handwritten threats by extremists with the aim of discouraging cooperation with US forces.
Three months after its approval, Zia and her family boarded a commercial airliner bound for Nashville, Tennessee, overwhelmed by multiple bags of clothing and a bill for 6. 500 dollars per the flight.
When they landed, they found no support or safety net. Zia was surprised by the unfamiliarity of the situation.
“I couldn’t find any Afghans there,” she says.
Zia took her family into a hired taxi and drove to Manassas, Virginia, where he had heard that many Afghans lived.
They stayed in a hotel while he tried to get his bearings, reaching out to organizations aimed at helping special immigrant visa holders.
After a few weeks, a volunteer called again and said they had found his family a place to live and begin their lives.
“He took me to a homeless shelter,” Zia said. “I looked around and said ‘this is not a place for my children to grow up.’”
They had nowhere go, and Zia felt again abandoned by the country that had promised to take care of him.
His children, too young to fully understand, were scared and confused.
All the days they would ask their father about the family and friends they had left behind and when they were going to return home.
“This is your house”
Desperate, Zia called his former captain and told him where I was.
“I was so upset,” Zia said. Days later, his captain arrived in Virginia and took him and his family back to their home in North Carolina.
“He told me, ‘This is your house,’” Zia said. . “As long as you want to live here, you can do it.”
“I’ll never ever forget that.”
Zia was finally able to move into her family to an apartment of their own in Charlotte, where he worked in construction and later in u A convenience store.
North Carolina was not like the places she had heard from her fellow Americans, like New York, Washington, or Las Vegas.
But she enjoyed the simple safety of her new lives: her children’s safe travel to and from school and his wife’s freedom to go out and work.
His Four children quickly became fluent in English and now the former interpreter is mocked for his language mistakes.
Last year, Zia, his wife, and their three oldest children were sworn in as U.S. citizens.
Their youngest six-year-old son was born in the United States and speaks with a slight southern accent.
About two years ago the family moved into a modest wooden house in a quiet cul-de-sac. A large American flag hangs from a pole outside.
“Nothing has changed”
But Zia’s view from Charlotte is clouded by the people left behind.
In 2019, launched the Interpreting Freedom Foundation , a charity aimed at helping interpreters with the visa process and resettlement in the US
Now he receives late-night calls from former interpreters and their families, desperate for a way out.
Most are trapped in a complex bureaucratic process, bankrupt by years of backwardness.
Complicating matters further: US evacuations are taking place only outside of Kabul, meaning Afghans who living outside the capital will have to face a potentially fatal journey through Taliban-controlled territory , in rapid e xpansion.
Since the US announced its withdrawal in April, the number of districts controlled by the Taliban has tripled from 72 to 221 , according to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, a non-profit organization Washington-based profit organization.
The US government has said that the Afghan government may collapse next year.
Some of the Provinces most at risk of falling into the hands of the Taliban, such as Kandahar and Helmand, were home to thousands of American soldiers and their local interpreters, who now face threats of capture or execution.
Interpreters are in “Deadly danger,” said retired Colonel Mik e Jason. “This is not a mystery. They have been murdering our interpreters for more than a decade. ”
Evidence of prior employment with the US military or documents required for a visa application amount to a“ confession ”in the eyes of the Taliban .
“We are at a point where I don’t know how they can get out,” he said.
The State Department has promised to expedite the process, whenever possible. But the light-hearted response has infuriated veterans and performers alike.
“It’s no surprise we’re leaving… this isn’t something that was suddenly imposed on us,” said Joe Kassabian, author and US Army veteran in Afghanistan.
“We should have planned ahead, and now we’re acting like we have to do an emergency evacuation. ”
For Zia, the US withdrawal reads as abandonment. It has been hard for him to see how Afghanistan is once again the country that was when it fled for the first time when I was a child.
“The Taliban continue to kill innocent people,” he says. “Nothing has changed.”
And even more, it has been difficult for him to understand how the Americans have sent their soldiers home , leaving his allies behind.
He loves his adopted country, he says, but believes his politicians have betrayed him and others who served.
“They’re trying to wash their hands of us,” he said.
Chelsea Bailey contributed research .
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