Najia Niazi

I was standing at the window in our apartment, looking over Kabul. From there I could see my neighbourhood. I saw the pickups full of Taliban and heard them celebrating their victory by shooting into the air. I was frozen with fear: “It’s over,” I thought. “Everything that we have worked for is now destroyed.”  

I was a psychologist at Medica Afghanistan. My colleagues and I offered psychosocial counselling for women which was free and easily accessible. We had counselling rooms in a women’s hospital and a contact point in a park. We had a container office in front of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and another one in the courtyard of the infamous Pul-e-Charkhi prison, in order to be able to offer the inmates psychosocial support. Today, women are forbidden from going to parks, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs has been closed, and the entire country is a women’s jail. 

Like so many other colleagues, I spent the first week after the Taliban seized power near to the airport. Friends had an apartment there, so with my husband and our two-year-old son, I waited to be able to fly out of the country. We hardly slept and did not eat much. We hoped, we lost hope, and we hoped again.

I was eight months pregnant and was terrified the stress could damage my baby.

My husband is a medical practitioner. He said: “We’ll make it.”  

Days went by without an exit route opening up. It became obvious we would have to wait until after the birth. We tried to prepare anything we could prepare in advance such as passports. People could be more easily evacuated if they had a passport. But only I had one, so we had to submit an application for my husband and our son. Additionally, soon we would also need a passport for the baby yet to be born. My husband refused to be discouraged: “We’ll make it.” 

And indeed we did make it. A cleric issued a birth certificate for us for October 27 and with a photo of our first-born we applied for a passport. It cost a lot. The passport authorities kept closing. But in the middle of November we had four valid passports in our hands – and on November 21 our second son in our arms. Twenty-six days after his birth I flew with him to Pakistan.  

Three months after the Taliban had seized power in Afghanistan, I found myself alone with my newborn in a small hotel room in Islamabad. My husband had to stay in Kabul with our eldest son because we had not received a visa for the child. For a week I kept asking myself: “How can I continue if this does not work out?” Seven days spent swinging between the relief of having escaped Afghanistan and the despair of not knowing whether we had made the right decision by separating.

However, my husband and my son did eventually make it safely to Islamabad and on January 6, 2022, we landed in Düsseldorf. In a strange country. But everyone was together and safe.

The first weeks in Germany were spent in refugee accommodation. We were lucky, since it was a good facility with shopping possibilities nearby and a friendly management. They were the ones who helped us find the apartment we now live in.  

Both of our sons are attending kindergarten. Together with some former colleagues, I completed postgraduate studies in Social Work at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, and I am part of a project organised by medica mondiale providing psychosocial support to refugee Afghans and to activists in Afghanistan. I am still counselling women in Afghanistan, but now I do this online. 

The women are the driving forces in society there. Families have always relied on the women because they are capable of facing up to challenges. Because they thirst for progress. They want to move forward – and when they manage to do this, they pull others along with them. 

It is unbelievably painful to see how these women are now compelled to be merely service providers to men, imprisoned in their own four walls.  

Many of my clients went to work until 2021. Now many of them have suicidal thoughts. “If I cannot be part of society,” said one young woman to me recently, who was previously the best in her year at university, “why should I continue living at all?”