Arezu Rezayee

I have been working for women’s rights for as long as I can remember. I became a midwife in Bamiyan because even then Afghanistan had one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world. While I was looking after the pregnant women, I could see the violence many were suffering. In 2013 I decided to study law in order to be able to better fight for their rights.  

Today, some ten years later, the universities have been closed to women. Because the Taliban know they will not be able to hold onto power if female Afghans are educated.  

I started working at Medica Afghanistan in Kabul in 2019. On the morning of August 15, 2021, I was in the office. I rushed home on foot because there were no taxis available. The Taliban were in the process of entering Kabul and on the streets of the city, men were jeering the women who were crying as they ran home, like me. There were elegantly dressed women, self-confident women, women in colourful clothes.

“Soon you will not be able to run around like that,” shouted the men. “Soon your time will be over.” 

I could not sleep that night.  

The next day I received a phone call from medica mondiale. We needed to make our way towards the airport since the medica team were in the process of organising our evacuation and it could happen at any time.  

Two young colleagues lived in my neighbourhood and their parents brought them to me. “Look after them as if they were your own daughters,” they said. Together with my husband and our three children we set off. Our aim was to reach the apartment of a colleague who lived close to the airport. Shots rang out quite frequently. At some point the taxi driver refused to continue and we had to get out. I tried to protect my children with my body while my husband looked for another taxi. Eventually we managed to get to the apartment unharmed. 

Seven days we ended up staying there. Seven days I never put my mobile phone down. Seven days I could not eat and hardly slept. But I tried to remain strong for my children and for my younger colleagues.

On the eighth day we moved into a hotel where other people from our team were also staying. The sense of community helped me a lot. It definitely is easier to cry together. 

On August 26 we got up at 5 o’clock in the morning and drove towards the airport in minibuses. Despairing people were all around us, besieging our buses because they knew that, as workers of an international organisation, we had a reasonable chance of getting into the airport compound. Blasts of machine-gun fire could be heard and when on the same afternoon a suicide attacker blew himself up, we gave up. “Who are the people shooting?” asked my children on the way back to the hotel. I did not want to scare them even more, so I answered: “That is the police trying to protect us.” My young daughter responded, “I hate all policemen, Mum.” 

We were worried about our safety in the hotel, so we rented an apartment whose address we kept secret. My parents moved in with us. It was our chance to spend any remaining time together. 

Finally, in October, we received visas for Pakistan. Again, we had to set off before sunrise. This time it was six hours driving east towards the border crossing at Torkham. Again, thousands of people were crowding there. Again, shots were being fired. My husband carried our young daughter on his shoulders for hours. It became more and more crowded, with people panicking and pushing in the direction of the border crossing. Towards midnight my husband said it was getting too dangerous for the children, so we gave up again.  

Eventually, in November we were able to fly to Islamabad and then Hannover. I will never forget the moment when the plane took off. I looked down onto Kabul and I was full of pain. I was leaving behind my country, my family, and my hopes for the women of Afghanistan. With my husband and our children, I was flying to a safe place. But what about all the others who did not have this opportunity? 

The colleagues at medica mondiale were like a beacon of light in the dark. They demonstrated the true meaning of solidarity amongst women, giving me back my hope that I would be able to continue my struggle for the rights of women – this time from Germany. 

In 2022 I volunteered as part of medica mondiale’s “welcome” project that supported us and other evacuee families when we arrived in Germany. In 2023 I initiated a range of empowerment offers for Afghan women, including a bicycle project and a workshop on violence within families, and together with other colleagues we set up Hami e. V. And in January 2024 I started working as part of the integration project Über den Tellerrand Frankfurt. I am a women’s rights campaigner. And I will be one as long as I live.