The distance from Afghanistan’s south-western province of Nimroz to Iran’s historical city of Yazd is 480 miles (773km). To survive the journey, Zahra Amiri and her family ate snow.

Since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last August, more than 76,000 Afghans have been resettled as part of the US government operation labeled Allies Welcome. Zahra, 21, and her family are among the newly arrived Afghans, relocating from the cities of Kabul and Nimroz to Yazd and Tehran in Iran, then to Ankara, Turkey, before finally resettling in Denver, Colorado, in February.

Zahra and the rest of this new Afghan community are set to contribute nearly $200m in taxes and $1.4bn to the American economy in their first year of work, according to new data released this month by the International Rescue Committee (IRC).

Since their arrival, more than 41,000 working-age Afghans have been placed into various industries including accommodation and food services, retail trade, manufacturing, transportation and warehousing. This new community of Afghans arriving in the US with a multitude of skills and degrees has the potential to contribute significantly to the American economy, especially as the country grapples with inflation and supply chain issues.

Zahra Amiri’s trek, spanning four countries and more than 7,000 miles, illustrates what these refugees had to endure to begin their new life.

Zahra’s father, who held a government-related job, was killed in a 2014 suicide attack. After her father’s death, Zahra and her four siblings in Kabul had lost not only a parent but also their family’s chief provider – and with that, the sense of peace that he helped shroud them with had been shattered.

Being the eldest, Zahra was suddenly confronted with two options: either forcibly marry a husband who could financially support her or flee.

“I did not want to end up … jobless and uneducated, so I chose to become a refugee,” Zahra told the Guardian.

One day in 2016, Zahra sat down with her mom and revealed her plans to her.

“Let’s move out of here,” she said about Afghanistan, where 65% of all civilian casualties from suicide attacks globally occur and where 57% of girls are married before the age of 16. “We are not in a situation where we can live out our lives in peace in Afghanistan.”

Her mother agreed. That year, Zahra, her mother and her siblings – the youngest of whom was two at the time – journeyed from Kabul to Nimroz, a south-west Afghan province that lies east of Iran. From Nimroz, Zahra and her family traveled to Yazd, one of Iran’s largest cities, with scarcely any food or water, forcing them to eat snow in a desperate attempt to nourish themselves.

Border officials in Yazd turned Zahra and her family away, deporting them back to Nimroz. They tried the trip a second time and finally made it through to Tehran where the next leg of the journey awaited: Ankara, Turkey.

“They would just throw families in each truck,” Zahra said, recalling how she was separated from her family for nearly two weeks on the way from Iran to Turkey before finally reuniting with them in Ankara in March 2016.

In Ankara, Zahra and her family filed for refugee status with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and submitted a visa application to the US. In the six years that it took for her family’s application to be approved by the US government, Zahra completed her high school education while working as a dishwasher and a coffee maker, earning between $1.10 and $1.93 daily.

“It’s not unusual for an application to take that long, especially considering that she applied during [Donald Trump’s presidency] where refugee arrivals were repeatedly cut, where we had things like the travel ban that really damaged the US government’s ability to process refugee applications,” an IRC spokesperson, Stanford Prescott, told the Guardian.

The US government approved Zahra’s family’s visa application early this year. On 2 February, Zahra donned a knitted sweater and pushed two pink quilted suitcases across the terrazzo tiles of the Istanbul airport.

She was finally bound for the United States.

Federal immigration services chose Colorado as the state in which to resettle Zahra’s family. With the IRC’s assistance, Zahra and her family arrived in Denver, initially to stay at a hotel for two months before being relocated to an apartment.

As with many of its refugee clientele, the IRC provided financial literacy classes, job training courses and an interpreter to Zahra and her family. The IRC helped Zahra lock down a job with the airline caterer Sky Chefs about a month and a half ago, building on the skills she had amassed while working in restaurants and kitchens.

At Sky Chefs, Zahra earns $19 an hour as she takes orders, packages them and gives them to customers. She earned a promotion to a manager assistant’s position two weeks ago and now trains new hires.

“I can move up positions here, unlike in Turkey where even when I gave my 100%, I could not move up because I am a woman and because of my refugee status,” she said.

Top job titles held by newly arrived Afghans include general production, warehouse worker, food preparer, driver and security guard, according to data from the IRC.

Typically, Afghan refugees are placed in their first jobs within 126 days of their arrival and earn an average of $16.67 an hour – which amounts to an annual income of $34,673.

“For most of these families, this is their very first job,” the IRC’s director economic empowerment, Erica Bouris, told the Guardian. “They are getting lots of things situated in the first year.

“In a lot of ways, this is very much step one in that much longer process of rebuilding their home, their life and integration into the communities.”

Bouris added: “We see lots of really interesting pathways, whether it’s that they try to pursue a certification so that they can work in a job that’s similar to what they had back home, or they might, as they settle into a new community, see for example that there are a lot of jobs in healthcare in this community and they pay well so they might pursue education and training so that they can move into a healthcare job.

“Each story is really individual, but people absolutely do take steps towards additional education, skills and training and have medium and long-term career goals that they pursue.”

Zahra is currently taking English as a second language (ESL) classes as she prepares to enroll in Aurora University’s dentistry program at the start of next year.

As many Afghans carve out new lives for themselves in the US, many still face the possibility of losing their legal right to reside in the country. The US government allowed them to enter the country in attempts to bring thousands of fleeing Afghans to safety as quickly as possible.

But humanitarian parole lasts only two years. It is not like the US’s refugee resettlement program, where participants have a clear path towards American citizenship.

Afghans on humanitarian parole must seek other paths of obtaining permanent immigration status, such as asylum, at the end of the two-year period in question.

However, without the assistance of specialized lawyers, the Byzantine asylum process is particularly difficult to navigate. Many Afghans who fled their country were also advised to destroy identification documents, professional certifications and other information that could support their asylum claims, further complicating their situation.

Although organizations like the IRC have launched various programs and collaborate with pro-bono lawyers to assist Afghans with their asylum claims, there’s another hurdle: The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is facing its own mounting backlog of asylum applications.

With the pandemic exacerbating processing delays, the USCIS is currently struggling with a backlog of nearly 5.2m cases and 8.5m pending cases. The backlog was significantly lighter – 2.7m cases – in July 2019.

“This year, even though the [Joe Biden White House] set an ambitious goal of [admitting] 125,000 [refugees], they’re only going to admit a fraction of that amount and what that shows is that refugee admission is broken and needs a lot more work so that ambition can be reality,” the IRC’s senior director of resettlement, asylum and integration policy, JC Hendrickson, told the Guardian.

As a result, the IRC has been calling on Congress to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, a bipartisan bill introduced earlier this month that would provide Afghan refugees with a pathway to lawful permanent residence in the US.

“This bipartisan legislation will provide a pathway to lawful permanent status for certain Afghan civilians, offering them a way out of legal limbo and the looming threat of deportation with great risk to their personal safety,” said Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a co-sponsor of the bill. “Congress has a track record of passing similar legislation on humanitarian grounds, and we must swiftly do so again.”

Many Afghans remain optimistic as they settle into American society’s fabric and rebuild their lives. To Zahra, being in the US means more than just experiencing upward economic mobility.

“I know I’m new,” she said. “I know at the moment I have no voice, but in the future, I would like to raise my voice and let people know that men and women can work equally.

“If anyone needs help now or in the future, I’m willing to show them a way that they can pursue. I want to let Afghan women know that they can do what a man can do. It’s my dream to let Afghan women know that we are as equal as men.”

It has been described as Afghanistan’s brain drain, after the Taliban’s return to power last year precipitated an exodus of politicians, academics and journalists who fled in anticipation of reprisals and censorship under the militant group’s draconian regime.

For a small group of Afghan women, however, the work of running the country has not stopped, even in exile.

Fawzia Koofi is a former member of Afghanistan’s parliament and was its first female deputy speaker. Despite moving several times since leaving the country in August last year, the 47-year-old has kept talking with her former colleagues and contacts in international governance, working to find solutions to the political and humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.

“They [the Taliban] don’t know how to govern and they don’t respect the social mosaic of Afghanistan, which makes them more fragile, but is also hurting Afghans,” says Koofi, who has been working in Europe and the US with member states across the UN for the past year. “I don’t believe they will last very long, but I am concerned over the damage they inflict on Afghanistan’s social and political fabric.”

The work of Koofi and fellow Afghan women has helped to fill the gulf that exists between the Taliban, which are operating under severe sanctions and are domestically consumed with an economic crisis and enforcing gender apartheid, and the international community.

“We call them the ‘group of six’,” says Sarah Douglas, of UN Women, referring to a core group of Afghan women who have been instrumental in steering international policy towards their country over the past year. The group also includes Asila Wardak, a former diplomat and one of the founders of the Afghan Women’s Network; Sofia Ramyar, the former executive director of the youth-led organisation Afghans for Progressive Thinking; and the journalist Anisa Shaheed.

Giving an example, Douglas says: “There were negotiations around the mandate renewal of the UN assistance mission in Afghanistan (Unama) – and concerns that the mandate would regress in terms of gender equality and human rights, and that this would be reflected in the budget. But the mandate remained intact, and central member states actually reached out to me and said that the advocacy by these women really made a difference in those negotiations.”

Mariken Bruusgaard Harbitz, part of the permanent mission of Norway to the UN, says: “Norway initiated closed-door dialogues for these women to present their priorities to key member states at a critical time. During the process of renewing Unama’s mandate, these women came with clear expectations to the wording of the mandate, which in turn contributed to a strong monitoring and reporting mechanism for Unama on the ground.”

Mariam Safi, director of the Afghan Organisation for Policy Research and Development Studies, has not allowed the chaos and shock of the last year to stop her continuing her work from Canada, collecting crucial data from Afghanistan, specifically from women. After a brief hiatus, Safi improvised and restarted her work a few months ago through a digital platform, with female researchers across Canada and Afghanistan working from home.

One of their key projects, called Bishnaw, which means “listen” in Dari, continues to hold surveys with women across Afghanistan. “There’s a narrative [in the media] right now that says Afghans are predominantly concerned with the humanitarian crisis,” says Safi. “But our data from women across nine provinces shows that right after that, women are most concerned about women’s rights and closure of girls’ schools.”

Bishnaw’s surveys have also revealed a pattern of women being excluded from receiving international aid. “Of about 295 women, 163 told us that no women in their household had access to aid, contrary to the Taliban claims that women-led households were being provided aid. Only about five women out of 532 surveyed said all women have access at all.”

“Such data can actually provide [the international community] with a lot more leverage in their discussions with the Taliban,” she says. “In every meeting they are always asking, ‘What do Afghans want? What do women want? What are their concerns?’ We want to be able to provide data to answer those questions,” she says.

Naheed Farid, one of the youngest Afghan parliamentarians when she was elected at 27, describes her work with the group of six as reviving her sense of mission after she left Kabul for the US last year. “I had lost all hope after the Taliban takeover. But watching Afghan women and youth marching across Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif and Jalalabad demanding for their rights gave me the strength to reignite my advocacy,” she says.

Douglas says there is a danger of international focus drifting away from Afghanistan without the efforts of these women and others like them. “My assessment is that they are being extremely bold because they want to keep the momentum and the visibility, and the issue of Afghan women, high on the agenda. And especially with the situation in Ukraine, they’re very concerned that the international community is forgetting about that.”

One member state whom she highlights for their continued commitment to working with the group is Ireland. Their outgoing ambassador to the UN, Geraldine Byrne Nason, says: “With my team, I meet with them on roughly a monthly basis. We cover the latest developments in Afghanistan as they affect ordinary people, and women in particular. I keep them abreast of developments at the UN and in particular, at the security council. I seek their views on the issues of the day as they relate to the council’s work on Afghanistan. We exchange views on how to use our respective leverage to make a difference.”

“Discussions of and decisions on peace and security in a conference room in midtown Manhattan can only be effective if they are informed by the voices of those directly impacted,” says Byrne.