When the Taliban Took Kabul, She Fled, and Made a New Life in New York

The night Kabul fell to the Taliban, a young lawyer named Nargis Baran was holed up in her apartment there, scrolling through news reports in disbelief. Then her boss called.

It was Aug. 15, 2021, and the U.S.-backed president of Afghanistan had fled the country as militants closed in on Kabul, the capital. Their swift advance shocked Western officials and the world, bringing the Taliban back to power after nearly 20 years of war with the United States and allied forces. Thousands of people surged toward the airport, desperate to board the last flights out as the city descended into chaos.

Ms. Baran, then 26, was an unmarried woman living with her widowed mother, and now they were afraid to walk outside. Her boss had not called to reassure her. He warned her that people like her — Afghanistan’s rising stars — had suddenly become targets.

“He said, ‘You know the time we spent on our education, on our self-development and self-growth, now doesn’t matter at all,’” she recalled.

Now, almost three years later, she has been able to build a new life in New York City because of an audacious escape plan hatched by law professors thousands of miles from Afghanistan. Her story is one of liberation — from the Taliban, who were notorious for oppressing women — but also of loss for what she and other promising young people could have done for their home country had they not felt their lives were in danger.

Ms. Baran, a law specialist for the country’s largest bank, was part of a generation of idealistic, Western-educated Afghans who had pledged to rebuild their country as it emerged from years of conflict. The Taliban, ousted from power in 2001 when Ms. Baran was just a child, were also known to treat minority groups harshly. Her background as a religious and ethnic minority — she is Ismaili, a minority sect in Islam, and from the Pamiri ethnic group — intensified her fears about what might happen to her if she could not flee.

“The only goal I had always in my mind was to serve my country,” she said. “The moment it needed me the most, I couldn’t do anything.”

The United States’ failed attempt to defeat the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks had been destructive and deadly for Afghan civilians, and for thousands of military personnel and contractors. As the American public soured on the war, the Obama and Trump administrations had moved to withdraw troops. Then President Biden set Sept. 11, 2021, as the final date to pull out.

In the summer before the deadline, the Taliban conquered more and more territory. Even as Ms. Baran heard news each day that another province had fallen, including her home province near the Tajikistan border, she never thought the insurgents would retake the capital. Her ties to the United States put her at acute risk.

She had gotten a master’s degree at Ohio Northern University and had helped found the Afghan-U.S. Law Alumni Association, which received funding from a Washington nonprofit supported by the State Department.

As harrowing scenes of the chaos in Afghanistan filled television screens in the United States, Karen Hall, a former State Department official who had taught Ms. Baran and other Afghan students at Ohio Northern, started fielding panicked calls.

“It was just this immediate tsunami of insane worry,” recalled Ms. Hall, who had once been stationed in Afghanistan.

On Aug. 16, 2021, Ms. Hall wrote on Facebook, “Afghan graduates, if you are trying to emigrate, can you let me know in a PM.” But she noted that even as officials were compiling names of past staff members of U.S.-funded programs, safe passage was not guaranteed.

She and an informal network of U.S. law professors would ultimately help more than 150 people, including at-risk lawyers and their families, flee Afghanistan, mostly to North America and Europe.

The American military was scrambling to withdraw. Roughly 125,000 people were airlifted out on emergency flights by the end of August 2021. Some Afghans died trying to hide in the wheel wells of departing planes. About 170 others died in an ISIS suicide bombing at the airport that also killed 13 American service members.

Ms. Baran recalled her first attempt to flee during those two weeks of panic: She got a call at 4:30 a.m. one day telling her that her contacts had secured her a spot on a flight, and to leave immediately. She and her mother joined the crowds rushing toward the airport, trudging on a dusty, circuitous path, but they had to turn back when shots were fired.

“I felt totally hopeless,” Ms. Baran said. “I thought, now I’m not sure I’ll see another plane in the sky.”

She would not leave Afghanistan for more than a month, as Ms. Hall and others tried to devise routes to safety. In the meantime, she married her longtime fiancé, Bahlool, a civil engineer, in early September, on her 27th birthday.

The chance for the newlyweds to escape came the next month. Ms. Hall texted Ms. Baran with instructions to go to Mazar-i-Sharif, many hours from Kabul. They could bring only a small bag each. Their final destination was unclear. Ms. Baran, her husband and her mother stayed at the home of a trusted network contact, using code words to make sure they were not being lured into a trap.

Two days later, they flew to Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. They would spend the next year and a half there in a refugee camp. During that time, the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York offered Ms. Baran a fellowship, keeping it open during the long wait for extensive security checks to be completed so that she could receive refugee status in the United States.

“Just keeping hope alive was important,” said Valbona Myteberi, the law school’s associate dean for graduate and international programs. Ms. Myteberi, who kept in close contact with Ms. Baran, had escaped violent unrest in Albania in the late 1990s.

Ms. Baran was finally able to travel in April 2023. Before her plane took off, from Doha, Qatar, she sent a Facebook message to Ms. Hall, writing, “I’m extremely excited and happy!!!”

Her main worry now is the bar exam, which she hopes to take at the end of July. She had to take law classes at Cardozo that focused on American law to sit for the test. She also had to file special paperwork, because she could not get copies of her transcripts from Afghanistan.

She is still adjusting to life in a foreign city without a significant Afghan community. Brooklyn Law School gave her a temporary apartment, and her husband found a job at a construction company. Her mother struggled with English at first, but is improving through regular classes. They have found some sense of community at an Ismaili mosque in Manhattan, and a permanent apartment of their own in Brooklyn. Ms. Baran is immeasurably grateful for the help she has received from Cardozo since getting to New York, from the stocked refrigerator upon arrival to frequent check-ins as the months went by.

“I always say I’m blessed,” Ms. Baran said. “Life is very difficult, but I have this very good support.”

She gets regular updates from relatives who are still in Afghanistan, where human rights group say women and girls are living under “gender apartheid.” She struggles with a sense of guilt at having left her country as the Taliban reimposed their rules barring women from public life, and as the country fell further into economic devastation and isolation.

The efforts that helped Ms. Baran escape have continued.

Hadley Rose Staley is the former executive director of Friends of the Public-Private Partnership for Justice Reform in Afghanistan, the Washington nonprofit that had supported Ms. Baran’s alumni association. The group raised about $250,000 for the evacuations. It is still trying to help Afghan lawyers who want to leave or are trying to establish themselves in new countries, since they are at “grave risk” because of their connections to the United States.

To Ms. Hall, now a deputy executive director of the Rule of Law Collaborative at the University of South Carolina, the young Afghans who had taken risks and organized their lives with the goal of a better future in their country exemplify the tragedy of the Taliban’s return to power.

“Reformers, scientists, doctors, professors, all of the educated women who were doing so much work for human rights, that their voices, all that talent is now just silenced,” she said. “And the fact that there are Afghan women like Nargis who made it here and can use their voices, it’s a spot of joy in a very sad story.”