The Shameful August

When I learned that my name was on the evacuation list of the French embassy, I hurried there and reported to a member of the embassy staff. He asked me for my first and last name and told me to wait outside the locked gate of the embassy building. A woman was waiting there with her back to the street and her face to the gate, and it looked as if she felt deeply uncomfortable being seen there by other people. To her left were two young girls and to her right a tall, clean-shaven man who was on the phone. “Please do something, we have been waiting a long time,” he said and ended the call.

In the bright sun you could see every detail and every hidden worry in this woman’s pensive appearance. What made her appearance even more striking was that the more she tried to conceal her presence, the more conspicuous she appeared on the outside. Yet it seemed as if she was weaving her way through every hole to disappear somewhere inside the embassy building. I stood next to her and began to reflect on the futility of my life.

About 30 minutes later, they opened the gate, but not for everyone, only for the lady and her family. It was Rangginna Hamidi, the former Minister of Education. Later, a minibus full of Afghans, including the minister’s family, and few Europeans got out and drove to Kabul airport.

For the most part, we were at the mercy of circumstances. In truth, I felt small and weak in the face of what had happened, and it scared me to think of life under the Taliban. Like a cowardly soldier who first retreats and then tries to flee, I wanted to flee. But the fact that I had little power over my fate tormented me most that day, and I could do nothing but wait and see what would come next.

As night fell, Kabul sank into deep despair. The night lamp of the French embassy was burning, and each of us, each with his body and his mind, with his strength and his weakness, was experiencing a silent fear, when suddenly a voice broke the silence and penetrated the crowd like a ghost entering a house.

“Talib is coming,” said the voice. “Be still, be still,” said another voice. A woman standing next to me with a child in her arms said a prayer. There was a dead silence in the air. A shiver of fear ran down my spine. “What if they open fire on us?” I thought, and then I closed my eyes and began to think about my own life and that of my seven-year-old son. After a while, which lasted as long as a long, bad night, I opened my eyes and began to stare at the child, who was lying peacefully in his mother’s arms in a captivatingly calm and mysterious way. Had there been a happy coincidence or had things gone a little differently from what were by the consequence of war and peace with the Taliban, one would have done nothing but take refuge in such innocent childlike peace at such a terrible time. The sight of peace on that child’s face changed my fearful logic. I gathered my courage and stood firm, ready to face the mercy of fate.

In the dim light, I could make out their faces. One of them, a short, stocky young man with a turban on his head, was carrying a Kalashnikov. The second, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a keffiyeh on his head, was carrying a walkie-talkie.

Whatever rhetoric the Taliban used to rouse their soldiers and whatever geopolitical games or ideological justifications prompted the Taliban leadership to wage war, the extent of their criminality and the proof of their heinousness, if any proof is needed, is best seen in their indiscriminate murderous actions against the innocent population. If we now allow ourselves to examine the nature of the evil that occurred in the name of jihad in Afghanistan over the last almost 20 years, and then put the Taliban on trial, their first and last word would be nothing other than the claim that everything happened according to the “will of God”.

It is perhaps better to turn to Dostoyevsky, who is aware of possible human wickedness and who can perhaps tell us something concrete about the necessity of God on earth. In Dostoyevsky, all radical evil comes from the depths of nihilism and despair, and it is an answer to this question when Ivan K. in The Brothers Karamazov raises the question: “If there is no God, is everything permitted?”

If we now deconstruct the original meaning of the words used by the Taliban to justify their murderous actions against the children, schoolgirls and newborns who died in suicide bombings and who were neither involved in war crimes nor responsible for the presence of American military camps in the country where they were born, what could be God’s response to those who died in bombings in the name of jihad?

When the man with the walkie-talkie learned that we were waiting there to get into the embassy, he made his way through the crowd and approached the gate, then knocked hard on the gate. A man came and opened the hatch. “Let them in, you will be held accountable if they are killed here,” he said in an authoritarian tone and in the Persian dialect of Kabul. “Who are you?” the guard asked. “We are [the] mujahideen,” he replied and immediately left the place.

A few minutes later they opened the gate. A harsh day, a day full of shock and unpredictability, ended the moment I set foot in the large building of the French embassy. The French soldiers led us into a large gymnasium and served us fresh fruit and tuna dishes. I was eating canned salty fish when a French journalist of Algerian origin came up to me. She asked me if I was “happy”. “Yes,” I replied ironically. Later that night, a French soldier announced that they would take us to Kabul airport the next day. I found a cardboard box, put it in a corner of the gym and fell asleep on it.

A voice, a soft, mournful cry of a baby coming from somewhere, pierces my air drums, just as the voice of a sad oriental flute comes in the dream of a gypsy sleeping on his seasonal journey in the hot desert of India. In the dim light of the stuffy gym, everyone seemed to be asleep except me and the crying baby. A man had fallen asleep next to me. His chest rose and fell with every breath he took. A pang of sadness began to press on my heart, and I suddenly decided to go outside and get some fresh air.

As I began to move through hordes of sleeping people a wide hole of homelessness opened up beneath my feet and an eerie feeling of expulsion filled my body. I went into the courtyard, where I found a French soldier of African origin sitting on an iron bench with his rifle propped up on his thigh. We exchanged a glance. He had piercing eyes.

It was a dark night. In the sad, heavy night and in the agonizing silence of that time, Kabul looked like a young, broken lover who locks himself in a dark cellar after his failure. That night I was unable to restrain my thoughts and imagination; one moment I was staring at the sky, the next I was looking at the ground, searching for my star in the sky and counting my sorrows on earth.

According to a new provisional definition, we were the “Afghan evacuees”. The term Afghan evacuees in this particular context could stand for a certain group of locals who had been friends with the Western community during their presence in Afghanistan, but now that the latter had decided to leave the country for whatever reason, these old local friends were to be evacuated to Europe and the US.

But if I dig a little into the layers of the term and get into the psyche of the evacuee and put him in the very human state he was in, be it a genuine fear of life under Taliban rule or the terrible fear of having no future, and then give my own definition, just to arrive at an understanding, I would rather say that the evacuee was a defeated, boastful, superfluous, opportunist creature, boasting of his false importance, proud of his empty heroism and dwelling in a kind of evasion. However, beyond all formalisms and regardless of the categories into which they could be categorized, the evacuees were united in a single motive: the stubborn desire to flee the country.

We spent the next three days locked in the embassy building. The French embassy building, an occidental estate with tall old cypress trees, a swimming pool, a gymnasium and a volleyball court, looked like a lifeboat surrounded by numerous sinking boats in the middle of a stormy sea. The kitchen was empty. The toilets, thick with a sharp smell of excrement and urine, ran out of water. Nearly 200 evacuees, desperately waiting to be evacuated, had spent eighty-two restless hours in the building.

Around 11 a.m. on the morning of August 19, I was standing on the volleyball court when a local employee of the embassy came up to me. He handed me his Nokia 105 and asked me to talk to the French soldier on the call. “You must leave immediately, it’s for your safety,” the soldier told me when I took his call. On the evening of August 17, three French soldiers accompanied by a small local team evacuated a group of people belonging to a family. However, they promised to evacuate the rest the next day, but when the situation in front of the embassy building got out of hand, they changed their plan.

There was an unrest outside the building. A rumor had spread that the French embassy was evacuating those in danger, and a large number of people had gathered in an agitated atmosphere outside the building, desperately trying to get inside. However, the reaction of the evacuees to the departure plan recommended by the French embassy was confusing. The dichotomy between what the French soldiers had promised us the night before and the reality that forced itself upon us the next day deepened the already existing confusion. Some insisted on not leaving the embassy building, others wanted to protest against the decision. After a long, pointless argument, we had no choice but to resign ourselves to our fate.

Like a community forced to leave its city, we moved en masse and then stopped behind the gate. Something struck the gate as if it were a stone. “Open the gate,” said a voice from outside. A man from among us wiped the sweat from his brow and quickly made his way to the gate. He asked the crowd outside to let us go. “It’s either today or never, we have to go together,” said another voice from outside. “We are going to our houses, let us go,” the man replied. “Don’t lie,” said another voice from outside. “By God, who is above us all, we are not going to the airport,” he said loudly and in a bitter tone, as if he had gotten himself into big trouble.

The evacuees came out like potatoes from a big sack when the embassy staff opened the gate. The first thing I noticed as I looked back and forth was the crowd of people in the street. And as I moved, a young woman approached me. With a sad expression on her face and dry lips, holding a certificate and an identity card in her right hand, she shyly asked me if I could help her leave the country. I could not look her in the eye, I did not have a word for her. Kabul stuck in my throat. I bent my head down, moving timidly, as timidly as someone fleeing their past without watching their back.

Like a stray flock running after a sheep moving ahead of the herd, we followed the people moving towards the airport. On the way to Kabul airport, I saw the true face of reality. The closer you got to the airport, the purer the actions and reactions of the people became, and the closer you got to the entrance of the airport, the sultrier the tone of human nature became. When we arrived near the main entrance of Kabul airport, I found myself in the wolf’s mouth of fear and desire.

A flood of people from all parts of the city had flocked to the vicinity of Kabul airport, and the airport runways seemed to be the only outlet for this flood. You could hear different voices, gunshots and screams, laughter and prayers. You could see different faces, innocent and mischievous, and you could catch different looks, questioning and sad. No matter what event had brought people there that day, different motives drove them to descend deeper and deeper into a dark hole where the line between choice and submission was blurred by the fear of being left behind. From above, however, this dark hole looked like a noisy volcanic island of human behavior in the middle of a sea surrounded by obscenity and atrocity. A large majority were desperately struggling to get into the airport, thugs had come to pick pockets and grab women’s butts, and child vendors had rushed in to sell water, energy drinks, cigarettes and chewing gum.

I made my way to the place where a group of armed Taliban had gathered. A small gunman in his twenties, with long, unwashed hair, his chin and upper lip covered with black hair, rushed towards me with the gesture of a riot policeman. “Go back,” he said in Pashto. There was a pride in his tone that was reminiscent of the tone of a devoted, victorious soldier. I ignored him because I wanted to talk to him. With an AKMC in his right hand, he shot into the air and with his left foot he hit my right leg. I heard a scream. A young woman standing next to me fell to the ground. That day, in the midst of a stampede, everything (the truth and the lie, the fact and the fiction, the gunshot and the pickpocketing, the hope and the despair) was a clear sign of neither the end nor the beginning, but a perfect embodiment of the continuation of what the country had inherited from its past.

We returned exhausted. I spent the night with some evacuees in the western neighborhood of the capital.

At dawn the next day, we went to the northern edge of Kabul airport. Back then, what was colloquially referred to as the American Gate on the northern edge of Kabul airport was nothing more than a dirt road leading into a corner of a few acres of dry land, fenced in with barbed wire and guarded by staunch US troops. The sight in the American Gate fitted a perfect scene where history emerges with something in its belly, but it does not treat its objects the same. Nothing, neither on the surface nor in the depths, was ordinary. Everyone was boiling inside themselves, everyone was shouting out the weight of their existence.

That day, trapped in a hot, stuffy minibus parked on the side of a dirt road, I saw something I would never have seen if I had not been there. My wandering eyes were glancing here and there as my gaze fell on a woman of about twenty-five standing on the dirt road next to our minibus. We exchanged a glance. I lowered my eyes and began to think about what history had given us, the woman and me, at that moment. As for me, I recoiled at that moment, and as for her, she looked deeply sad and calm. Was she the widow of a dead soldier? Was she so sad and calm from birth, or was she not sad because she had been left alone, or was she not calm because she knew that in a troubled world one is calm either by a calm mind or a mind calmed by knowledge? I do not know if I had everything right under my nose, and I do not know why I had come across this woman on such a turbulent day, but I knew that she had caught my attention. For the second time, I took a closer look at her face. She looked at me calmly, as calm as a quiet waterfall crashing down on a desert of impatience. It looked as if time was anchored in a complete standstill, caressing her in the midst of all this worry and indignation. This time, in that moment, I saw something in her eyes that touched my soul. I do not know what she thought about me and about those who had privilege to escape all the misfortunes that the country had brought upon its inhabitants, but in her eyes, I saw the kind of suffering that questions everything in the world, and the kind of strength that endures its agony without blaming anyone. Face to face, there was I inside the minibus, and there was she on the dusty road of history, with the same flesh and blood as me. That day I saw in her weather-beaten face the saddest eye I have ever seen in my life. I wanted to hide, but there was no place to hide.

The bus drivers, who had verbally committed to transporting us to the airport, tricked us. Now that they were on their own, the evacuees, as is always the case with defeated people, blamed each other to find a scapegoat. Some decided to stay there and try their chance, others went to the so-called British Gate east of the airport to take their chances, and a few returned to their homes. Under the hidden law created by circumstance, money, the greatest virtue of the day, would quickly make its way to break through the Afghan security chain guarding the gate. Some people, the rich of course, bribed the Afghan 01 Forces.

When the sun went down, I took a cab and returned to my apartment. A hard day came to an end when I arrived at my apartment. I was hungry and thirsty, but there was nothing to eat. I called my friend Shafaq Rahimi. He came with fresh fruit and food. We ate together and, as always, a heart-to-heart conversation began. We talked about everything.

The next day, a curiosity led me to look out the window and see what Kabul was doing on the morning of August 21, 2021. The light of the August morning fell through the yellow curtain of the window and the buzzing of flies was loud enough to break the morning silence in my apartment. No one seemed to be working and no child was going to school. I took a shower and went out. The storm-swept streets of Kabul were calm on the surface, but beneath the surface there seemed to be deep unrest. First, I went to Barchi to borrow 1000 dollars from an old friend, then I went to Pul-e-Surkh and visited my colleagues at the Etilaat-e-Roz office. People with anxious expressions and fearful faces were walking around here and there. Most of the stores were closed. A few shopkeepers were back in business. Everything was topsy-turvy At the Etilaat-e-Roz office. I saw Asif Ashna there. “Why haven’t you left this country?” he asked me in a bitter tone, as if something bitter had stuck in his throat. “I will leave,” I replied absent-mindedly.

In the afternoon of the same day, I drove to Shahrak and spent the night with my friend Khalil Pajwhak. As always astute in comment and slow to act, Khalil made me laugh at the absurdity of Afghan politics and served us an overcooked omelet at midnight. The next day, Khalil, I and three other friends left Shahrak for the airport, but we parted ways in Shahr-e-Naw. I went to the British Gate with one of my friends.

On a dirt way, enclosed on the left by a high wall and on the right by a sewer, people had huddled together like a community of ants set off en masse in search of a new house. The thick black water at the bottom of the canal separating the dirt way from Kabul airport looked like a slow-moving giant black stinking snake under the hot rays of the blazing sun. Surely it was the desire to escape that had driven me onto this filthy, excrement-smelling place, and to be honest, I was torn between a wounded dignity and a survival instinct.

I knew that life in Afghanistan was completely uncertain, but despite the uncertainty and the threat, an impulse had led me to live and work in Kabul. Despite all its craziness and delusion, life in Kabul gave me something that I can now call “life as a product of life”. But after the return of the Taliban to the capital, I felt like a prisoner in a cage, surrounded by armed men who impulsively delight in intimidating the group of people who differ from them in any way, be it by their shape or their way of thinking.

On the afternoon of August 22, I left Kabul with the prudent silence of a someone leaving a funeral. As the French military plane took off to leave Kabul, I was overcome with a strange feeling and cried like an orphan mourning the death of his mother. A French soldier comforted me and I fell asleep on the floor of the plane, which was full of evacuees.

What I have learned from life tells me that it is not necessary to be someone other than yourself when you are thrown out of history. No matter how unfairly history may punish you, no matter how you understand history, the truth is that history shows itself as it is. On August 15, 2021, I was the toy of history, but that same toy became an émigré in October of the same year. In search of the truth, I can only say that you can only understand the true story of a refugee if you have lived through it yourself.

Header image: US Marines with SP-MAGTF-CR-CC at an evacuation checkpoint at Kabul Airport on Aug. 21. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. Victor Mancilla, via Wikimedia Commons]

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.