Afghanistan Peace CampaignBy Bill O’Driscoll
The 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan inaugurated the longest war in U.S. history. But the war’s end in 2021 came rather suddenly, accompanied by much chaos.
That was the case for the more than 120 Afghans in the orbit of the New York Times’ Kabul bureau, who were among the estimated 200,000 Afghans who fled in the midst of the Taliban’s rapid takeover of the country. Many of the refugees were women, who under the Taliban would have faced the heaviest consequences of the reinstatement of fundamentalist Islamic rule that the 2001 invasion had temporarily ended.
A new book tells the stories of four of those women, some of whom ended up in Pittsburgh. “The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape from Afghanistan & Coming of Age in America” (Grand Central Publishing) is co-written by Rebecca Blumenstein, who as Times deputy managing editor led efforts to relocate the refugees, and San Francisco-based journalist Diana Kapp.
WESA spoke with Kapp and Samira Rustami, one of the refugees now living in Pittsburgh.
‘Locked inside the house’
Rustami said she grew up in Kabul, one of six daughters in a family where daughters were not valued or even desired.
“It was very hard on us,” she said.
But coming of age in the 2010s, Rustami managed to get an education and, at 16, earned a scholarship to a business school in India. Three years later she returned to Afghanistan and got a job in a hotel. She’d been there only seven months when the U.S. occupation ended in August 2021.
Other women in the book were at similarly promising points in life. Mursal had graduated law school and her sister Marwa was months from graduating medical school.
Rustami knew what life under the Taliban — which had previously ruled from 1996 to 2001 — would be like: more restrictive for everyone, but far worse for women.
“We’ll be just locked inside the house and be a slave inside our own house, being jailed,” she said. “And if we go outside, we have to have a male [companion] with us, either our father or brother. We have to wear specific clothing that they want us to do. We would not have any freedom, any freedom as a human being.”
Rustami’s new husband, Wais, had had his job as a Times maintenance man for just three months. But that was enough to get both of them on the list of people the newspaper would aid.
‘A mad scramble’
The new book’s co-author, Kapp, said the Times was prompted to aid its Afghan workers by a note from one of its Afghan reporters in Kabul.
“It set off a mad scramble to find a way for their local reporters, drivers, translators, everyone who worked in the bureau, and their direct family members to get out,” Kapp said.
She said a small team led by Blumenstein “started calling embassies around the world and looking for a way to get their people out.”
The group eventually entered the U.S. under a status called humanitarian parole, which Kapp said hadn’t been used since the Vietnam War. The Times contracted with Catholic Charities, a resettlement agency, and Blumenstein led efforts to find jobs and living arrangements for people and to place young people in schools.
Kapp noted challenges like locating apartments for tenants who had fled their homeland with little notice and lacked three months of pay stubs.
As to refugees seeking higher education, Blumenstein (who today is President, Editorial, of NBC News) worked with Carnegie Mellon University president Farnam Jahanian, whom she knew, to assemble a consortium of local schools. Chatham University’s intensive English-language program made it the destination, ultimately, for five of the refugees, including Rustami, Wais and Marwa.
Rustami, who had initially been placed in Houston, said she chose Chatham and Pittsburgh largely for … the weather?
“I don’t like the hot weather,” she said. “We were in Texas, so it was like very hot. I was like, okay, so we, we were okay with Pittsburgh.” The city’s winters reminded her of Kabul.
Also, she added, “And I like [the] people here. They’re very nice and kind.”
‘A chance to build my future’
By the time Samira and Wais arrived here, in January 2023, they had an infant daughter, Durrin. But they had more help, too: Blumenstein’s sister-in-law, Laura Kessler, who lived near the Chatham campus
“She took care of everything, most of everything in our life,” Samira said. “And now she became more than a family to me.”
“If I have a troubling problem, I call Laura. If my husband has a problem, the first person that comes to our mind is Laura.”
Rustami is now studying both at UPMC Shadyside School of Nursing and as an undergraduate nursing student at Chatham. Her husband is also studying at Chatham while working at PNC.
Today, with the Trump administration ramping up deportations and narrowing the pipeline for asylum-seekers, the climate for immigrants and refugees is much less certain than it was in 2021.
While some of the Times-connected refugees have gotten their green cards, many, including Samira and Wais, have not. Kapp says the review process for Afghans is on indefinite pause following the shooting, this past November in Washington, D.C., of two National Guard members. The suspect was part of a secret unit of Afghans that operated under CIA direction.
While their future remains uncertain due to their legal status, Samira Rustami remains committed to becoming a nurse and grateful she was able to flee her homeland.
“I knew it was the time that I could, that it was a chance to build my future very differently because … I knew I could not have the future I do have now,” she said. “And I couldn’t even dream about it because I was not allowed to.”
“They’re limited in doing everything,” she said.
The publicity tour for “The Last Free Women” has included New York, Houston, and Kapp and Rustami’s Sept. 13 visit to Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum. There have been spots on NBC’s Today Show, the PBS NewsHour, and excerpts have run in the Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair.
“All of the women who are in the book are bravely using their voices to bring attention to this group of people who we lost this war, and it’s not something Americans seem to want to continue to think about,” Kapp said. “We really believe this is an important story to tell to bring attention to what is happening to women in Afghanistan.”