In Minnesota, Afghan woman struggles to help stranded relatives

The sun was already setting in Kabul when Amina Baha picked up the phone in Blaine.

"Hello?" she said. "Salam Alaikum!"

Sitting at her dining room table, Baha heard the worry in her cousin's voice as he spoke in their native Pashto. He had been a judge in Afghanistan and feared the new Taliban regime that had swiftly taken control of his country would not look kindly upon his service.

Why, he asked, hadn't he and other relatives gotten the OK to fly out of Afghanistan?

"I wish I knew," Baha said. "I'm not the U.S. government."

Her relatives had driven past the airport earlier that day, as they often did, contemplating whether it looked safe enough to try to fight through the crush of people and talk their way onto a flight.

It didn't, so they stayed in the car.

Now it was Monday night in Afghanistan's capital, hours from the Aug. 31 deadline set by President Joe Biden to withdraw U.S. troops, and the Baha family's chances for escape were fading.

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She was a baby when her family fled Kabul on horseback. The Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and Russian forces killed her mother's father and brothers. The family feared her father would be next.

Baha, her parents and older sister sought refuge in Pakistan, then settled in Minnesota in the mid-1980s. She quickly learned English and became a cultural bridge of sorts for her elders, translating the particulars of their new life. Baha would see her mother cry sometimes when people died in movies as she thought back to her relatives' deaths — losses all the more painful because they had left their homeland too hastily to take any family photographs.

Now a 40 year-old IT manager, Baha's interest in her roots deepened after her children — Ibrahim, 6, and Imaan Fayyaz, 10 — began asking her about Afghanistan. She began organizing cultural events to show that the country was more than its wars. And she traveled to Kabul.

On her last visit in 2016, with U.S. troops still providing support to the Afghan government, it seemed like a normally functioning city although Baha covered her head out of caution.

Earlier this summer, her mother, Sabera Baha, returned for a series of family weddings only to find herself stranded after the Taliban took control. When a suicide bombing last week at the airport killed 13 U.S. service members and 169 Afghans, she called Amina Baha right away.

"I don't want you to worry," she told her daughter, adding that she still planned to go to a wedding soon. "I'm fine."

Amina Baha was struck at how even-keeled her mother was and reasoned that it was because Afghans have endured constant turmoil throughout recent history. "They've been through so much. … She's so strong and just brushes all this stuff off."

Equipped with an American passport, her mother was confident that she would find her way out. Five family members had escaped on an earlier flight to Germany and arrived in Washington, D.C., last week. A stream of other relatives in Kabul hoped to accompany Sabera Baha out of the country if she left on an American military flight. One had worked as a doctor for the Afghan military. As the Taliban closed in, he found a letter on his door warning him to help "our country" instead of foreigners and non-believers.

Another cousin even jumped the wall of the Kabul airport to argue that he needed to flee because his life was in danger, but he was sent back.

As the deadline for the U.S. withdrawal neared, Amina Baha kept up with developments by logging onto Clubhouse, the audio-based app that features chatrooms in different languages. It's there, as Agence France-Presse recently reported, that Afghans have been known to confront the Taliban.

In a pro-Taliban chatroom on Monday, Baha was the lone female voice, questioning how the new regime would handle the military equipment left by the Americans: "What if [they] misuse it and kill a lot of people that don't deserve to die?" One man reasoned that the Taliban knew what to do because it had ruled the country before.

"They are in safe hands," he said, as Baha's eyes widened. Another told her he didn't speak to women and, therefore, asked to have a man ask the question for her.

"How are you going to run the country without women?" she replied.

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As night fell in Kabul, sun shone through Baha's balcony door. She fixed chai and began chatting with her mother.

Sabera Baha said in Pashto that rumors were circulating that Biden's deadline for withdrawal was not firm. The U.S. government had not sent her notice to leave yet and fearing another airport attack, she and the family stayed at home.

The Baha men hurriedly tried to grow the beards demanded by the Taliban. They sent the youngsters in the house to fetch groceries because it was safer; potential attackers considered them too young to have the wrong allegiances.

Sabera Baha said a friend had visited a bank only to be told she was prohibited from withdrawing more than 4,000 afghanis, a pittance.

As the Taliban came into power in the 1990s, Sabera Baha recalled visiting a zoo in Kabul when extremists began hitting some of her female relatives with sticks because they wore open-toed sandals without socks.

As Sabera Baha told the story, she suddenly stopped and ended the call, deciding it was not safe to discuss such matters because the Taliban could be monitoring communications.

Baha heard her children rustling upstairs.

"I feel like my kids are suffering going through this because I can't give them my full attention," she admitted.

"Hurry up, it's breakfast!" she called, setting out doughnuts and milk.

Scrolling through e-mails, Baha spotted yet another query from a Minnesotan asking how she could welcome Afghans. A large influx of people from Afghanistan is not expected here, given that the government likely would place them in spots — such as California — where a lot Afghan immigrants previously had settled so they could form communities of support. She fielded such messages daily and wished she had an answer, but so much remained so unknown.

At her kitchen table, Baha joined a conference call with state and community leaders to talk about their plan to resettle those refugees who came. As participants on the call talked about the need for hijabs, halal foods, housing, translators, and computers for the newcomers to correspond with family back home, a 608 area code flashed across Baha's phone. She had been waiting to hear back from the military base in central Wisconsin, where thousands of Afghans were being temporarily housed.

"This is Fort McCoy, I've got to get it!" she said, jumping up excitedly.

But it was only Xfinity, asking about her wireless router.

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Baha already had prepared two bedrooms in anticipation that her relatives soon would be here, and her sister Yasmine Baha in Coon Rapids had readied her own basement. Between them and a few other family members, the Bahas figured they could host up to 14 refugees.

Monday afternoon, Amina got a voice mail from relatives who had escaped, saying they had been taken from D.C. to Fort Pickett in Virginia. Baha imagined how hard it would be for them to start over, having been upper class in Kabul.

"You either have freedom and security but not money," she told her sister's family, "or you have money but not freedom and security."

By then, the last U.S. military plane was soaring out of Kabul, officially ending America's longest war a day early.

Baha's family later would tell her that they were unaware of the development; they couldn't follow English news and didn't trust local media to be independent of the Taliban. So the morning of the 31st, the day they thought was the deadline to escape, her mother and relatives piled into two cars and drove to the airport, only to find it empty.

As they pondered their fate, celebratory gunfire from Taliban soldiers echoed through the streets.

Maya Rao • 612-673-4210