Zahra was heading home from work on June 23 in business attire and a headscarf when she was stopped at a checkpoint manned by Taliban guards in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. They reprimanded her for not wearing clothing they deemed appropriate and demanded that she instead wear a head covering that conceals everything besides the wearer’s eyes.

“Many times the [Taliban] stopped us on the street,” Zahra said, adding that on some occasions, fighters have even pointed guns in her face and yelled at her. “I changed my outfit because I have no choice.”

After returning to power last August, the Taliban imposed sweeping restrictions on women, including the types of jobs they could do. According to the International Labour Organization, the share of women in employment is expected to fall by 21 percent by mid-2022,

Zahra – who is not using her real name for security reasons (like all Afghans mentioned in this story) – said she is able to work in the United Nations compound in Kabul thanks to an agreement the organisation reached with the Taliban. However, her brother, who worked with the United States military in Afghanistan, received two letters containing death threats from the Taliban in March and has been forced to remain in hiding.

Zahra and several of her family members have applied for the special immigrant visa (SIV) programme, open to people who worked with the US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, as her own SIV case languished, she also decided in October 2021 to apply for humanitarian parole, a procedure that allows certain at-risk applicants to temporarily enter the US. Her SIV case was eventually denied by the State Department in January 2022 and Zahra then placed all her hopes on the parole process.

But to her dismay, she has not received any response to her application in almost nine months – and since March, has watched Ukrainians being processed more easily. According to US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) statistics, more than 60,000 refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine have received parole status between March 24 and June 23.

This leaves thousands of at-risk Afghans in limbo in third countries or in many cases in hiding from the Taliban government as they wait for their humanitarian parole applications and SIV cases to be processed.

The Taliban had promised amnesty to those who worked under the previous Western-backed government, but reports of the group’s fighters allegedly killing people have instilled a sense of fear among Afghans affiliated with the previous administration, various international organisations and the US.

Now, having watched Ukrainian refugees receive comparatively quick processing – first under the general parole programme and later under the one the US set up specifically for Ukrainians in April – many Afghans have expressed frustration with what they see as discriminatory treatment by US immigration agencies, which has compounded the deep psychological distress many had already been experiencing as they wait to be evacuated.

Abdullah, 25, worked for years with the Afghan army as a cybersecurity engineer and after the fall of Kabul, started receiving threatening phone calls from Taliban members. When he changed his phone number, the Taliban authorities sent his family a court summons. So when he heard he could apply for humanitarian parole he was overjoyed.

“Suddenly news came that there is a programme, humanitarian parole. If you apply for that, all Afghans that are at risk are eligible for this programme,” he said. “The hope I lost, I got that hope back.”

But Abdullah, who applied in October, has now lost hope. In May, he fled to Iran in the hope of getting a visa to Brazil.

Although Abdullah is glad Ukrainians are able to seek shelter in the US, he said he feels disappointed and discriminated against.

All eight Afghans Al Jazeera spoke with, including Abdullah, said the disparities between the handling of Afghan and Ukrainian immigration cases, together with the vagaries of their long visa processes, have affected their mental health.

Fawzia, an SIV applicant who relocated to Pakistan from Kabul in early May for her visa interview at the US embassy there, landed in the hospital twice that month due to panic attacks after she received an initial refusal of her application through the consular system.

She later found out that the refusal did not necessarily mean the end of her case, but the 37-year-old was nevertheless devastated.

“In Afghanistan, the Taliban might kill the person,” Fawzia argued, “but being this much disappointed, that 100 percent will kill the person.”

Javed, 38, an SIV applicant in Kabul, said he lives in fear every day because he worked as an operations manager and translator at Bagram airbase, the largest US military installation in Afghanistan.

“Be sure, they will kill me, suddenly, without any daylight,” he said, noting that he has already been interrogated twice by the Taliban but was able to conceal his past work.

According to a January report, the UN has received “credible allegations” that Taliban authorities and their allies have killed individuals who previously worked with the US-led coalition in Afghanistan.

Javed added that in his view, Afghan SIV applicants have taken a back seat since the war in Ukraine started.

Although US authorities maintain that they are doing their best to adjudicate Afghan parole and SIV applications, a lawsuit filed in May by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts against DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claims that the department arbitrarily shifted its standards for humanitarian parole for Afghans.

“In September we were hearing … [that Afghans should] file humanitarian parole,” said Dan Berger, a lawyer at the law firm Curran, Berger, and Kludt who is supervising the ACLU lawsuit. “Sometime around the late fall, early winter, the messaging changed.”

During the Kabul airlift in late August, Mayorkas authorised US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers to parole certain Afghans, including those eligible for SIV. And according to the ACLU complaint, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) promoted humanitarian parole as a solution for people trying to escape the crisis in Afghanistan.

But the complaint states that after the US had received “tens of millions” of dollars in application fees, USCIS changed the rules for parole, leading to denials or indefinite delays for thousands of people.

According to a DHS spokesperson, USCIS received more than 46,000 properly submitted parole applications from Afghans between July 1, 2021, and June 2, 2022, of which the vast majority remain unadjudicated. Only 297 Afghans were approved during that time.

Meanwhile, under the Uniting for Ukraine parole programme for Ukrainian refugees announced on April 21, more than 38,000 Ukrainians have been authorised to travel to the US according to the DHS, in addition to more than 22,000 Ukrainians who arrived on other types of parole outside the programme. Another 34,000 Ukrainian nationals have also arrived on visas since March 24.

“I think a lot does have to do with political will,” Berger said. “The programme that’s been set up for Ukraine, I’ve had people get here in weeks, literally, with very little processing and no filing fee.”

According to the DHS spokesperson, this is because it is thought that Ukrainians will return to their country after the conflict, while Afghans will require permanent resettlement in the US.

On the SIV front, a spokesperson for the State Department maintained that it is committed to “streamlin[ing] the SIV programme,” and is “developing processing alternatives” for those unable to reach countries where US consular services are available.

But even if Afghans make it to third countries, their problems are far from over. Sardar, an SIV applicant who relocated to Pakistan in May with the help of EVAC, an American non-profit organisation, will likely have to wait for a decision on his case without the right to work in Pakistan after the US delayed his case by eight months.

The US evacuated some 116,000 people during the Kabul airlift in August 2021, and according to the DHS, more than 79,000 Afghans have arrived in the US since then. However, due to the chaotic nature of the airlift at that time, not all the evacuees were from groups thought to be in jeopardy.

According to Berger, there was a window to rectify the problem by the swift processing of humanitarian parole applications for eligible Afghans at that time but creating a programme like the current one for Ukrainians remains unlikely.

For Zahra, her options for evacuation are dwindling, and if her humanitarian parole requests remain undecided, she can only hope her family gets the SIV – but not her. She says she has little hope in Afghanistan where there are few work opportunities and secure existence.

“I don’t think there is going to be a hope in what next is coming,” she said.

“It’s like a hell, like you are burning in a fire every second. I’m completely disappointed from life,” she added.

Gardez, Afghanistan – Over the last year the Afghan people have faced a number of upheavals — the end of the US occupation, the Taliban’s return to power and sanctions — and tragedies — a series of ISIL (ISIS) group bombings on places of worship and the Kabul Airport. But it was last month’s 5.9-magnitude earthquake that really rallied Afghans all over the country to reach out and help the thousands of victims.

The June 21 earthquake reportedly killed at least 1,100 people and left more than 1,500 injured in the southeastern provinces of Paktika and Khost. Those numbers startled Afghans inside and outside the country and spurred them into action, as groups of volunteers headed towards the remote districts of Gaiyan, Spera, Barmal and Orgun.

One of the first ones to set out from Kabul was the team behind Aseel, a mobile app originally designed to sell Afghan-made handicrafts to global markets. Over the last year, they have transformed the app to become an aid distribution and fundraising platform in response to the sanctions, banking restrictions and aid cutbacks that were imposed on Afghanistan after the Taliban returned to power last August.

Initially, they were warned by other businessmen against going from pivoting the business but as a group of young Afghans, the team behind Aseel felt they had to do something to help their fellow citizens in a time of need.

“I was told that pivoting a business model based on such an urgent situation is going to kill your company, but I thought to myself, ‘The whole country is collapsing,’” Nasrat Khalid, the founder, told Al Jazeera by phone.

As an Afghan who grew up in Pakistani refugee camps before returning to Kabul in 2009, Khalid felt the chance to provide some aid to the Afghan people was worth the risk to his business. The 30-year-old recalls a conversation he had at the time with Aseel’s Kabul-based Technical Lead, Mohammad Nasir, who grew up in refugee camps in Pakistan during the civil war and Taliban rule of the 1990s.

Nasir told his friend that thousands of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) from several northern provinces that had been taken by the Taliban, were flooding into the capital. This rush of desperate families who escaped a Taliban blitzkrieg in the middle of the night reminded Nasir of life in the refugee camps across the Durand Line.

“It’s not the same Kabul. We’re losing hope,” he said to Khalid.

This spurred Khalid into action. He ordered his team in Afghanistan to take the $42,000 they had in profit and use it to help the people. They started creating emergency food packages of rice, flour, cooking oil, tea and lentils, to deal with the hunger crisis the UN said could affect 22 million people. From there, they began selling, at cost, wood for winter, first-aid kits, diapers, tents, baby formula, scarves, blankets and tents.

Since they already had a relationship with more than 400 vendors, they were able to source many of the materials very quickly.

All of which could be bought directly through their mobile app by anyone with a smartphone anywhere in the world.

Because they were a consumer-based startup and were not reliant on foreign funding, Aseel did not have to worry about the aid cutbacks. They just needed to make sure their customers could still use the app to buy things. So instead of selling handmade glass from Herat or carpets from Faryab, they created different care packages customers could buy with their credit cards anywhere in the world. Those packages would then be distributed one by one to needy families.

“We are very, very local,” Aseel’s founder Khalid said by phone from the United States, where he has been based for the last four years. Of the 42 people currently employed by it, the majority are based in Afghanistan, and all are young Afghans.

‘Local knowledge’

Khalid says his team’s response to the earthquake, getting in a car and driving nine hours to the affected districts, is an example of how he wants all aid distribution to be handled in Afghanistan going forward.

“Plane-based cash delivery with bullet-proof vehicles and trucks, that’s not the way to go any more.”

Rather than large-scale, high-profile operations that require security escorts, layers of bureaucratic red tape and flying in staff from outside countries, Khalid says Aseel is “relying entirely on local knowledge” for their operations.

To do this, they have reached out to 180 young Afghan volunteers across 25 provinces whom they call “Atalan”, the word for heroes in Pashto. These Atalan go to different communities to conduct multi-step surveys and assessments to identify the most vulnerable in each community. Each Atalan is compensated with a phone card, which helps them to enter the data on the app and 300 Afghanis ($3) for every delivery.

Again, this served them well in the earthquake response.

“We were able to cut out the middleman,” said Ihsan Hasaand, the lead distributor. Hasaand also led a team of fewer than 10 people to Paktika. Being an entirely Afghan team, including residents of the affected areas, was also a big advantage when dealing with Taliban authorities who were very receptive to the Aseel team once they proved that they were singling out “the most vulnerable” families that had lost several people in the earthquake.

Khalid said the government, which is struggling under the weight of the international sanctions and aid cutbacks, has been supportive of their efforts specifically because they have no interest in “lining up 60,000 people for a distribution.” Instead, Khalid said Aseel wants to focus on assisting one family at a time.

Afghans, as aid distributors and recipients, have been critical of large-scale distributions, which they say are usually poorly run and create the opportunity for fraud and corruption at all levels.

Khalid says initially the Ministry of Information and Culture did ask for a representative to come to the ministry for questioning, but he said the authorities quickly changed their stance to one of appreciation and support, “they said that this operation needs to scale.”

But some people fear that Aseel’s efficiency and good work is actually creating a situation wherein the government can pass off some of its responsibilities to NGOs and private companies, rather than coming up with their own mechanisms.

Safiullah Taye, an Afghan academic whose work focused on subnational aid allocation in Afghanistan between 2002-2018, says the actual responsibility of responding to disasters and emergency situations lies solely with a nation’s government.

“Despite its noble intentions, an app should not be seen as a replacement for the responsibility of a government” to provide for its people, Taye told Al Jazeera.

Taye also worries that Aseel and other potential apps may lack the tools and capabilities to scale up at a time when 22 million people are at risk of starvation, “It is really hard to see how this app could take the load that even smaller NGOs carry … Aseel can be efficient with smaller parcels, but given what the demand is, Aseel would have to operate as a major business enterprise” to reach all the people in need.

UN, an archaic institution

But Khalid does not think the solution lies in agencies such as the United Nations.

Since no country currently recognises the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate as the official government of Afghanistan, the UN has been put in charge of transferring international aid to other foreign and local NGOs, which aid workers say has made their work much more difficult.

Khalid said the UN relies on an “old mentality and operational methods” to deal with the enormous humanitarian crisis that has been caused by the sanctions.

Since the UN is the sole source of aid contracts in the country, it places an inordinate amount of power in the hands of a bloated, archaic institution that Khalid says does not understand how to properly work at a local level.

One worker at an international aid agency said the UN’s terms for funding are not only unrealistic but make it more difficult for aid agencies to engage with smaller local organisations, including female-led ones.

“They say they want us to work more with women-led NGOs, but they have these ridiculous standards that many really local organisations can’t meet. How many small women or youth-led organisations in Laghman [province] have a finance team that is compliant with some specific accounting standard,” said the aid worker, whose work does not allow them to be identified.

The aid worker said the severity of these guidelines leads to a situation where the NGOs of former politicians and businessmen often accused of corruption and fraud are the only ones that would qualify.

Though criticism of the UN is nothing new in Afghanistan, there are others who have reservations about adopting Silicon Valley-type methods of aid in developing countries. Academic Taye says while Aseel is providing a much-needed service, there are still questions about regulation.

“In theory, the more apps, the more options and people around the world can donate to whatever cause they want, but this also could mean very little monitoring, protection and accountability.”

This lack of monitoring is where Taye says the UN could have an upper hand on apps like Aseel, “the UN is no saint, but there are more checks and balances to how it operates” in general.

Turning a traditional aid model on its head

Usually, local NGOs rely heavily on foreign embassies, international organisations and the UN, but Khalid, a former World Bank worker himself, has turned the traditional models of aid work in Afghanistan on its head, relying entirely on donations made by individual users on the app, for their distributions.

After the fall of Kabul last year, Aseel used the funds it had raised for its initial marketplace business to launch an emergency response operation and to cover operational costs associated with that. Now it has added a tip function to each donation which goes toward covering those costs. Most donors add a tip, says Hasaand, the lead distributor, adding, “All of the donations that we receive go towards the beneficiaries and the cost required to get them the assistance.”

According to Khalid, this direct relationship between the donor, Aseel and the recipient is one of Aseel’s strongest assets.

“You can buy a specific aid package for somebody that you know in Afghanistan and be confident that it will get delivered directly to them. You can’t do that with these international NGOs or the UN or World Bank,” he said.

This direct, human touch led to great amounts of free, word-of-mouth advertising. “Everyone who donated would tell someone else, it just kept growing and growing.”

Since August, the Aseel team has reached more than 212,000 people, all of which was funded through individual donations made through credit and debit cards, including by Afghans outside the country.

Most importantly, Khalid said Aseel is entirely transparent about its beneficiaries, by creating what they call an “Omid”, or hope, card for each beneficiary, which allows the Aseel team then to share all the details about an individual beneficiary with a specific donor.

The Aseel team keeps its efforts local and buys products for distribution from local wholesalers and converts donations into cash through the number of crypto exchanges that have opened up in Kabul over the last two years.

Working with local wholesalers was a very deliberate decision for Khalid, who said he “Wanted to support the Afghan economy and not take over the whole supply chain ourselves.”

Khalid said he wants Aseel and other ventures that are looking to give back to the community to grow larger, not only because of the help they can provide but also as a way to challenge UN hegemony.

“I don’t see any problem other than the UN losing a huge opportunity to expand their own operations.”