When Zahra Nazari receives word that the province of Bamyan, her home in Afghanistan, has fallen to the Taliban, the teenager thinks she’ll die.
It’s around midnight on August 14, 2021. The fundamentalist group is on the cusp of seizing the country’s capital, Kabul. A month earlier, Zahra, 18, had taken a call from a Bamyan official, whose name St. Louis Magazine is withholding due to safety concerns. Zahra says that the official asked her to join a group of 15 women in helping feed Afghan troops fighting the Taliban near Shahidan.
Get a fresh take on the day’s top news
Subscribe to the St. Louis Daily newsletter for a smart, succinct guide to local news from award-winning journalists Sarah Fenske and Ryan Krull.
Zahra feels a sense of duty. So she says goodbye to her family and sends her mother, Bilqis Rezai, and 17-year-old sister, Fatima Nazari, to the mountains to hide in a cave—it will be harder for the Taliban to find them there.
“I had a strong spirit, and I knew I [would be] stronger than 1,000 men, and I would save my mom and my sister,” she says.
Zahra goes to Shahidan, where she provides food and water to Afghan troops and sews uniforms. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Zahra says that an Afghan commander stationed a soldier with the women. If the province fell to the Taliban, Zahra recalls, that soldier’s orders were simple: Kill the women. Don’t let the Taliban sell them into slavery or kill them.
So when the province falls, Zahra feels despair. “I always had so many dreams for my future,” she says. “We work so hard in Afghanistan society for equality, for women’s rights, for girls’ rights, for children’s rights, for human rights, but the Taliban attacked and broke everything. I was sad I couldn’t see my friends again, my mother and my sister again. We are human. Why couldn’t we live like humans in other countries?… Why am I an Afghan?”
The soldier comes to Zahra—but not to hurt her. He finds her a car and a burqa. His order is simple: Go.
Zahra sends word for her mother and Fatima to meet her in Bamyan so they can begin the journey to Kabul International Airport, hoping they can board an evacuation flight.
Earlier, she’d sent another message, though she doesn’t remember this one as well, to a friend. All of the provinces were falling to the Taliban, she explained to him.
“I can help you,” came the reply. It was from Andy Bass, 7,000 miles away in St. Charles.
Zahra describes the province of Bamyan, 80 miles northwest of Kabul, as a natural wonder. It’s situated near the snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush mountains and the six cerulean lakes of Band-e-Amir National Park. The valley used to be part of the ancient Silk Road where traders carried the precious material west to Rome and gold and silver to China in return. Nearby red-hued cliffs used to house two huge—175- and 120-foot-tall—Buddha statues that were carved in the 4th and 5th centuries CE, before the Taliban destroyed them in 2001. For Zahra and her family, Bamyan was home.
Zahra had ambitions of continuing her handicraft business there, as well as her advocacy for women and children. She participated in a USAID program and studied at Bamyan University. Fatima was a competitive skier and a student at Kabul University. Zahra never thought they would leave.
Her mother did leave Afghanistan, once before. Born in Bamyan, Bilqis fled to Iran when she was 7 because of the Taliban. Her daughters were born there. Zahra’s father died of a heart attack after finding the bodies of five of his relatives who were killed by the Taliban. Zahra was 2, and Fatima was 1. When Zahra was 9, in 2011, the three women returned to Afghanistan. She says she then started working to support the family, teaching the Quran to orphans.
At the time, Bamyan was governed by Dr. Habiba Sarābi, the first woman to lead an Afghan province. Still, it was unusual for women to work in Bamyan, Zahra says. Bilqis, a widow with two young girls, didn’t have a choice but to work.
In Bamyan, Zahra says, it was considered shameful for women to shop in public; Bilqis noticed that the stores, owned by men, didn’t carry much for women. So she opened a shop, in 2012, where she sold makeup and women’s clothes—pretty things she couldn’t find anywhere else. She told her daughters: “Women and men are equal, and women can work in society. It’s not a shame.”
But it wasn’t easy, either. Shortly after the shop launched, Zahra remembers, she and Bilqis arrived for work around 8 a.m. and noticed an old bicycle parked out front, covered in a blanket. They think it held the bomb that detonated shortly after. The pair were unharmed.
In 2015, they decided to launch a handicraft market and started with 10 women makers. The family grew the women’s market to 25 shops and began exporting goods to India, Turkey, and Pakistan.
It was at that market that they met Andy Bass. In 2019, Bass arrived in Afghanistan to prepare for an adventure marathon. A former Marine and long-distance runner, Bass has competed in races in Uganda, Lebanon, North Korea, and Russia. That year, he ran the Marathon of Afghanistan, held in Band-e-Amir National Park.
To acclimate to the change in altitude, Bass arrived a week early, and while exploring the market, he met the women. They showed Bass around. The friends later connected on Facebook and kept in touch even after Bass returned to the United States.
When the situation began to deteriorate after the U.S. started the process of pulling out troops, Bass grew worried for his friends.
And then a Facebook message came from Zahra: People in town had told her that her name might be on a Taliban kill list. Others messaged her on WhatsApp to say that the Taliban had been to her house looking for her. She now suspects that her advocacy for women and work at the market made her a target.
She needed help.
For Bass, the decision to help the women was an easy one. “You spend five minutes with them, and you just fall in love with them,” Bass says. “I thought, If I can help, I should.” Once the women arrived at the Kabul airport, they arranged for Bass to help them obtain their visas.
But the Taliban had arrived, too. The airport was crowded with thousands of Afghans trying to escape to safety. The Taliban gathered around the perimeter. From the airport, the military lobbed flash-bangs and tear gas to maintain control of the crowd. The women were caught in the middle.
Zahra sent a message to Bass: It’s crowded. It’s scary. I don’t think we can enter. Bass told them to be strong. He told them he would try to find another gate for them. Bass tapped his contacts, looking for a different entry point.
“If Mr. Bass wasn’t with us in Kabul, especially in Kabul airport, we couldn’t [tolerate] it,” Zahra says. “We thought, We don’t have anyone to help us. We are completely alone. But Mr. Bass, he was in contact with us night and day. I thought he left all his work and he was only with us—calling to us, sending messages to us, and finding a way for us. He was in the U.S.A. but directed us in the Kabul airport, too: You can try another gate; you can go another way.”
For days, the three women hid in a sewage ditch 10 feet deep with other women, small children, and babies. Fatima’s glasses were broken in the filth and chaos. Finally, a Marine pulled them out and helped them through, Zahra says.
Ten days after the women arrived in Kabul, Bass received a message from Zahra that she and her mother and sister were boarding a military plane.
Then, for nine days, Bass heard nothing.
The next message that came from Zahra read: I am at somewhere named Dulles. Where is this?
Afghanistan’s fall happened faster than U.S. officials anticipated. In April 2021, President Joe Biden announced a plan to withdraw the remaining 3,500 troops in Afghanistan by September 11, 2021. But by August, the Taliban had overtaken Kabul, and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country. Chaos erupted at the Kabul airport amid evacuation efforts, and a terrorist attack left 13 American service members dead. On August 26, Biden called the situation—one of the biggest air evacuations in U.S. history—“messy.”
Earlier that same month, Biden announced that he was expanding refugee status access for Afghans, and, by August 30, when the last U.S. service member left Afghanistan, concluding the two-decade war, 120,000 people had been evacuated in just over two weeks. More than 68,000 Afghans relocated to the U.S. through Operation Allies Welcome, according to PBS Newshour. More than 500 came to St. Louis.
Afghans were able to leave with Special Immigrant Visas, reserved for those who worked with the U.S. armed forces. Afghans—like Zahra, Fatima, and Bilqis—can also seek refuge here through humanitarian parole, though it isn’t a path to permanent residency and only lasts two years. Those granted parole—70,192 people as of November 2021, according to the Department of Homeland Security—would need to take another step, such as apply for asylum. The asylum process, however, is backlogged, with 412,000 cases according to CBS News.
There are other challenges to the system as well. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump capped the number of refugees to be admitted in the next fiscal year to 18,000—a historic low. More than 100 resettlement offices closed during Trump’s term, according to the Associated Press. Biden announced a cap of 62,500 for fiscal year 2021, but only 11,411 refugees were admitted that year.
The caps came at a critical time: The world is in the midst of a refugee crisis. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, at the end of 2020, 82.4 million people worldwide had been forcibly displaced from their homes.
Paul Costigan is the state refugee coordinator for the Missouri Office of Refugee Administration. “When I came on, it was basically all Bosnians coming in, in large numbers,” he remembers. “Since then, we’ve had other flows of groups coming in…but now the refugee crisis is real. Most of that 82 million is internally displaced… But there are countless Congolese who are in Rwanda and Tanzania. There are Somalis who are in Kenya in refugee camps. One of the more recent crises are Venezuelans who are along the border with Colombia but on the Colombia side. Refugee problems happen in our own hemisphere. It’s not just an Africa thing or Southeast Asia thing or an Eastern Europe thing.”
Fleeing one’s country presents a set of dangerous challenges. Arriving can be intimidating, too. “What will be our future?” Zahra recalls wondering. “We don’t have anyone in the USA. So many people have brothers, sisters, uncles.”
Employment is one of the most important issues for these new arrivals, because it is often tied to health care. “The push is to get them into employment quickly,” Costigan says. “The great thing is that the eagerness for this group of people to get into jobs really quickly to support their families is super high. They come to their agencies and say, We don’t want to be on public assistance.”
Fortunately for new arrivals, it’s a good time to job hunt. (Costigan remembers the Great Recession of 2007–2009 and how difficult it was to find work for new arrivals. He never wants to return to that time.) Not everyone coming from Afghanistan speaks English, but many do because they worked with the U.S. military, he says. There are options for those who don’t. If a company wants to hire 10 people, maybe one is someone who was an interpreter who can help the other nine. “Employers are really trying to figure out how to make it work,” Costigan says.
Housing is another hurdle. Many families resettling in Missouri are large and multigenerational. Affordable housing that’s roomy enough for bigger families is hard to come by right now, particularly in St. Louis. MO-ORA is working with HUD, FEMA, and other organizations to find homes that people can afford on entry-level job wages.
Those needs—a job, a place to live, plus transportation—are what’s most pressing for many new arrivals, Costigan says. But once settled, they can experience forced migration trauma due to having to leave home but not on their own terms. Costigan says most resettlement agencies across the state have social workers and therapists on staff. Whether someone taps those services, Costigan says, often depends on “how successful their resettlement, how comfortable they feel within their community, and the support they’re getting from the broader community.”
Once refugees resettle in the U.S., they are free to move—and they will. MO-ORA has to calculate the comings and goings for federal reporting purposes. It’s too soon to tell if the Afghan arrivals are making permanent homes in St. Louis, but Costigan predicts that the state will know more in the next year. What this represents, he says, is the opportunity for St. Louis to make Afghans feel at home. In January, the International Institute, Archdiocese of St. Louis, Arch Grants, and other groups announced plans to start an Afghan chamber of commerce and newspaper to make St. Louis attractive for Afghan families. But Costigan says someone choosing St. Louis over another city might also depend on “the families of the folks who are here telling them, ‘Come to St. Louis. It’s a great place to live.’”
In August, after boarding a military plane in Kabul, Zahra, Fatima, and Bilqis embarked on a 22-hour journey to Germany. (A widely circulated photo of a C-17 departing the airport showed 640 people packed inside; Zahra estimates that their flight held at least that many.)
A week later, they arrived in Washington, D.C. From there, they traveled to Camp Atterbury, in Indiana, where they underwent extensive vetting and medical exams and received vaccinations. They were there for three months—and they reunited with Bass, who was there volunteering with the organization Save Our Allies.
Bass was able to arrange for a caseworker in St. Louis, and on November 24, one day before Thanksgiving, he drove to the resettlement agency in Springfield, picked up the women, and brought them back to his home.
Since then, Bass has helped them get Social Security numbers and employment authorization documents, figure out health insurance and make doctors’ appointments, call around to potential landlords, and enroll in English classes at St. Charles Community College. Finding a doctor who is accepting not just new patients but also new Medicaid patients hasn’t been easy. (Fatima did, however, get a new pair of black cat-eye glasses, courtesy of one of Bass’ friends.)
Sitting in Bass’ living room, Zahra checks her phone. Bass asks her playfully, “Is that J-Hope?” Zahra laughs. “She loves that Korean boy band…” he pauses, searching for the name. “BTS. They’re very good,” he says, in a tone that suggests he’s not a fan. “Country music is the best,” he says, teasing her. Zahra laughs again and tells him that she doesn’t like country. He shrugs, but he’s smiling. Teens will be teens.
Bass plays little pranks on Zahra and Fatima. Recently, he took the women
to a Cracker Barrel. Fatima tucked into pot roast. “See that animal?” Bass asked her, pointing to a stuffed raccoon on the wall. “That’s what you’re eating.” She bugged out for a second before realizing he was joking.
Bass is warm and gentle with the young women, too. He tells them not to apologize for things they don’t have to be sorry for. He tells them it’s always OK to say no.
They take what they call “fighting class”—krav maga. Bass jokingly calls them his bodyguards. They got jobs at Schnucks; Zahra and Fatima are working in the deli, and Bilqis in the bakery.
They still have dreams and goals—the Taliban didn’t take those away—though they’re not quite sure yet how to set them into motion here. Fatima wants to restart her skiing career. Zahra aspires to again work in advocacy for women and children. She wants to write a book about her experience leaving Afghanistan and arriving in the States. Both young women want to continue classes at a university.
What they do know is the type of people they want to be.
“When I become bigger, I want to be a person with a kind heart and good,” Zahra says. “A wonderful person like Mr. Bass.”
He pauses, smiles at her, says softly: “I would be lucky to be like you.”
Bass has organized a GoFundMe to help Zahra, Fatima, and Bilqis adjust to life in St. Louis. You can donate here.
