Neither Maliha Karimi nor most of her relatives had ever been on a plane or even at the Kabul airport, but the idea of leaving was given an impulse and they headed for the airport.
“I just grabbed my passport and one phone,” she recalls, “We had no food, no water.”
Ms. Karimi, 27, the sole breadwinner for her parents and a disabled brother and his family of six, had a special reason to leave. As a beautician, she lost her job when the Taliban returned because she banned beauty salons as immoral, making it impossible for her to provide for her family.
“They thought they were brothels,” she said.
The Karimi family reached the airport at 6 am. “The crowds were terrible, they were pushing and screaming, and the Taliban fired into the air,” Ms Karimi said.
In the chaos, the family broke up. Ms. Karimi grabbed the hand of one of her brother’s children, 6-year-old Sorush, while a cousin, Soraya, grabbed the other hand of the boy. With their heads bowed, they fought their way to the gate.
“I just decided to move forward, not backward,” she said. “I just kept moving forward.”
Suddenly, with Sorush between them, the two young women were dragged through the gate. The other 33 family members were left behind, but there was no turning back.
It took them four full days to reach Fort Bliss in El Paso, where Ms. Karimi was finally able to access Wi-Fi and call Kabul to talk to Sorush’s anguished parents, who was so upset that he stopped eating. Everyone cried: the parents pining for their son and Sorush pining for his family.
Now that Mrs. Karimi is gone and no one in her family is working in Afghanistan, they are short of everything: food, heating oil and medicine and beg Mrs. Karimi for help.
