Roots of Peace in Marin, fearing for the safety of more than 300 staffers in Afghanistan following the takeover of the country by the Taliban, is seeking help to evacuate them.
The organization manages more than 360 Afghan employees with over $75 million in U.S. funding, and they are struggling to get their employees safely out of the country. They are trapped, founder Heidi Kuhn of San Rafael said Tuesday.
“The people are so frightened and afraid … thousands of people lining the streets, the roads leading into Kabul,” Kuhn said.
“This is a very terrible humanitarian crisis and one that none of us imagined,” she added, noting she is worried about her female employees trapped in the country because of Taliban treatment of women.
The San Rafael-based humanitarian group ran a program that converts conflict zones in Afghanistan into farmland. Roots of Peace has cleared mines and restored farmland in Afghanistan since 2003.
The nonprofit, founded in 1997, has done similar work in countries including Iraq, Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Israel and Kyrgyzstan. Kuhn said since 2014 her organization has taken agriculture exports from $250 million to more than $1.4 billion. She wrote about these efforts in her memoir “Breaking Ground.”
One of the hundreds of Roots of Peace employees currently in Afghanistan is Yasar-Ahmadzai, founder of the nonprofit think tank Afghanistan Institute for Peace headquartered in Kabul. While he is currently Roots of Peace’s communications director, he has spent time in many countries, advocating for positive community change and peace-building initiatives.
Last week Ahmadzai met a woman whose baby had died due to lack of food, and in response he and staffers started raising money trying to bring more direct food aid to people currently on the streets escaping warfare.
“The staff all got together and raised $500 in Kabul and gave it to Yasar to save more mothers and babies,” Kuhn said.
Ahmadzai added the experience “was heartbreaking for me because I have a baby.”
He is currently located 200 meters from the Kabul airport, where they watched the situation deteriorate as thousands of people tried to evacuate out of fear of the Taliban entering the city. As he spoke, Ahmadzai pointed out gunshots firing outside.
He criticized the mismanagement of the situation in Kabul, having watched thousands of people seeking help and communication about whether they could evacuate.
“From my point of view, because I saw the Taliban the first time that time I was a student, I think nothing Is different,” he said.
“We don’t know what will happen, I can imagine that. Especially our female staff. It is something that we cannot control.”
He said out of worry for their safety, the organization let female staffers work from home for weeks, but now nothing is certain.
If there is no escape from Kabul available, he plans to lock down in his father’s home with his wife and children.
“We can look to each other to not think about what’s going on outside the door,” Ahmadzai said.
The control’s with them (the Taliban) and you don’t know what will happen to you. It is not possible to trust.”
He added he hopes the U.S. government will cover the reality of the situation and that many others like him feel there was little communication about how to safely leave the country.
“Unfortunately we did not see anything in reality here,” he said.
“If I find this chance to go, of course, I will leave this country,” Ahmadzai added — but not without his family and children, the oldest of which is 12.
“How can I leave them alone here … it is impossible for me. If I can’t have my family … I would accept this situation. If I die, it is good to be with my family.”
Former soccer player Kawser Amine, who prefers to go by BiBi, echoed his fears about the Taliban’s threat to her family in Afghanistan.
Amine met Kuhn at age 11 in Kabul and played soccer, meeting former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in an Afghanistan visit in 2003. She now lives in Concord with her husband who works with Roots of Peace. She earned her degrees from the University of New Delhi and has worked with Kuhn on international aid campaigns.
From her home in the Bay Area, Amine has been receiving constant updates from family, such as her parents and sister, and friends who play sports in Afghanistan, who ask for her help getting refugees out of the country. She said her sister was warned by the Taliban to stop playing sports and seeking an education.
“I’m ready to fight, I’m ready to work hard for those women who are left behind,” Amine said. “And I know they’re really in danger. Because we don’t believe the Taliban anymore, because we know from the past.
“Half of my mind is working for my friends and relatives, and half of my mind is very disturbed and nervous because of my family,” she added.
Amine added she is frustrated there is no exception to extradite relatives of those who live in the United States.
“It should be an exception for family,” she said.
While she said she understands the difficulty of accepting refugees in the United States, “There should be a way to get them all out of Afghanistan, to the third safest country. They could get targeted from the Taliban. They will get targeted by the Taliban in the near future. I can’t trust them anymore.”
Roots’ Director of Operations Hamed Sultani, who began working for the organization in Kabul in 2011, also has multiple family members in Afghanistan as well and said, “I am not sleeping a wink all the night.” He got a Visa to the U.S. in 2016 to work in San Rafael since he was threatened by the Taliban for working for an American woman-led organization.
All staff worry about being threatened for this reason, and indeed the organization was attacked by the Taliban in March 2014, he said. And yet “Nobody knew this was going to happening all at once.”
That Taliban suicide attack on her nonprofit’s compound in Kabul left five attackers dead and killed two innocent passersby, including a teenage girl. None of the 11 Roots of Peace staff inside the building were killed or seriously injured.
To protect the names of staffers and other information, Sultani said their computers in Afghanistan were wiped for safety. Some were destroyed “in a very safe place” and all data was stored on a cloud drive.
Kuhn said her staffers were not moved out weeks ago when the announcement came that American troops were being removed “because of the danger … we didn’t think this would happen.”
“Nobody in the world expected this to happen,” she said. “We were making very logical decisions based on the information that was presented. You don’t run away from the harvest when grapes are ripe on the vine.
“We have a job to do,” Kuhn added. “We’re not running away. We may be evicting our staff, but we will still have people there.”
She said she’s asking President Joe Biden, “Put my beloved employees who are at risk onto those planes. We should not just be evacuating the Americans. We have a responsibility to evacuate all those who were promised, if they worked for an American NGO (non-governmental organization), we would take care of them.”
Kuhn added Thursday is Afghan Independence Day.
