The interpreters returned to Afghanistan with their wives and children to visit family and were stranded.
From his Chicago home, Gul watched in horror as the Taliban advanced on Kabul in mid-August.
He worried about his wife and their two-year-old son, who had traveled to Afghanistan in March so she could visit her parents for the first time since she’d moved to the U.S. in 2019.
A lot of people knew that Gul, 28, had once served as an interpreter and cultural adviser to the U.S. military and that he was now a U.S. citizen. If word got out to the Taliban, Gul knew his wife and son could be targeted. He was overcome with a feeling of helplessness, he said.
“Your family is stuck,” he said. “Their life is in danger, and you know if they get caught they could get kidnapped any moment, they could get killed any moment. Anything is possible.”
Gul had a ticket to fly into Kabul on August 15 so he could reunite with his family. They were all scheduled to fly home together in early September. Considering the chaos, he tried to book an earlier flight back. But by his departure date, everything was canceled, he said. There were no more flights into Afghanistan, and there was little Gul could do to rescue his wife and child.
Gul’s wife and son were two of the thousands of U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and allies who were trapped in Afghanistan after the U.S. military’s withdrawal on Aug. 31. He said they were at the Kabul airport in late August when a suicide bomber aligned with the radical ISIS-K terrorist group killed 13 American troops and more than 160 Afghan civilians. For nearly a month after the U.S. withdrawal, Gul’s wife and son remained in the country, hoping to avoid detection by Taliban thugs or anyone else who might rat them out to the Taliban.
“I was just . . . telling my wife, just stay sheltered. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t even mention anything about America,” Gul said.
Last week, Gul’s wife and son returned home to Chicago. They were among the 116 Afghanistan evacuees — mostly U.S. passport and green-card holders, along with some Afghans with special immigrant visas — who were rescued by Project Dynamo, one of the dozens of civilian groups that have organized over the past two months to get Americans and American allies out of Afghanistan, and out of the clutches of the Taliban.
Gul and two green-card holders who were on the Project Dynamo flight shared the stories of their escapes with National Review. They are being identified by their first names only to avoid security concerns for their family members who remain in Afghanistan.
In all three cases, the people who were eventually trapped had traveled to Afghanistan to visit family members, including family members who were sick or dying. Like President Biden himself, who said in early July that it was “highly unlikely” that the Taliban would take over as the U.S. withdrew, they all misjudged the severity of the threat, expecting that the Afghan government and military could at least protect Kabul and the surrounding areas.
And they all expressed great appreciation for the folks at Project Dynamo, a donor-funded group, who checked out their paperwork, coordinated movements on the ground, received Taliban permission to fly out of the country, and worked with the U.S. government to fly the evacuees into Chicago on Thursday.
“I cannot repay what they did for me,” Gul said. “In that situation, nobody can help you. But these guys did.”
‘Everything Was Just Getting Worse’
After serving as an interpreter and cultural adviser to the U.S. military from 2011 to 2014, Gul received a green card and moved to the Chicago area, he said. He worked briefly in a factory before taking a job as a taxi driver and then as a truck driver, which is what he does now.
His marriage to his wife was arranged by their families, he said. He brought her to the U.S. in 2019, he said. It took about two years to get her into the country.
In March, Gul said he flew with his wife and son back to Afghanistan so she could see her parents. But he couldn’t stay. The plan was for him to fly back to Kabul in August to escort his wife and son back home to Chicago. That’s why Gul wasn’t too concerned when his wife realized she’d forgotten to bring her green card with her.
“I was like, ‘Okay, no worries. I’m going to go, and when I come back to pick you guys up, I’m going to bring the green card,’” Gul said.
He never got back to Afghanistan. After his flight out of Chicago was canceled in August, Gul booked a flight to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, hoping “day after day” that “everything might get better,” he said. “And everything was just getting worse.”
Gul had hopes of flying into Kabul, thinking that as a U.S. citizen and passport-holder, he might be able to help his family. At the very least he could bring his wife her green card. Instead, he was stuck in Dubai. He sent emails to U.S. embassies and U.S. government officials, and he worked the phones to coordinate with U.S. military officials he still knew on the ground.
On August 26, Gul’s brother, in coordination with a U.S. military member, attempted to take Gul’s wife and son to the airport, he said. It was the day of the suicide bombing. None of Gul’s family members were hurt in the blast, he said, “but, to be honest, after that I did not dare them to go back to the airport.”
Gul eventually went back to Chicago, thinking he might be able to connect with a U.S. political leader who could help him. He also registered with Project Dynamo, which was able to confirm that his wife and son were eligible to come to the U.S. But not having her green card could muck things up for Gul’s wife. So Gul arranged to fly into the UAE to meet them at the airport after their flight out of Kabul and drop off the card himself.
In late September he flew back to Dubai, thinking that’s where the Project Dynamo flight was headed, only to learn that the flight was instead going to Abu Dhabi, a couple of hours south. He took a taxi and booked a room at a hotel connected to the airport, he said. It took a few days before the flight departed Kabul, and when it eventually arrived, he was able to drop off his wife’s green card with one of the Project Dynamo leaders.
He was not, however, able to reconnect with his wife and son. The landing clearance for Project Dynamo’s flight into the U.S. had been canceled by the government, which said it was working to verify the flight’s manifest. The passengers were being held in custody at the airport.
The U.S. government flew the group home on Thursday, and instead of flying into New York or Washington, D.C., as they had planned, they flew instead to Chicago, convenient for Gul.
He said it’s an “incredible feeling” to have his wife and son home, but he said the situation in Afghanistan makes him sad. He was a young child the last time the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, and he doesn’t remember much about their rule. But, he said, he’s heard nothing good. Now he worries about the safety of his parents and siblings.
“I’m trying to get everybody out of there, to be honest, as soon as I can,” he said.
Stuck in a Bad Situation
Mohammed and his family traveled from their home in the Washington, D.C., area to Afghanistan in July after learning that his father was dying of COVID-19 and his mother was hospitalized with heart and kidney ailments.
The 28-year-old green card holder, ride-share driver, and one-time interpreter for the U.S. military had been living in the U.S. since 2018 with his wife and four children, ranging in age from nine months to eight years old.
Over the summer, he said, his mother pleaded with him to come back to Afghanistan.
“She said, ‘I haven’t seen you since four or five years.’ So she was crying all the time. ‘Come here. We want to meet you. Maybe I will die one day,’” Mohammed recalled of his conversations with his mother. “That’s why I got here, then we stuck with this bad situation.”
Mohammed said he stayed in Kandahar with his family for only two days. The Taliban was on the move, and his family urged him to head back to Kabul. He said he didn’t expect the Taliban to advance as fast as they did, and he expected the Afghan government and military to hold up, in and around Kabul at least. He said he had talked with his family about leaving early, but “they said, ‘No, it’s not possible that all the government is going down.’”
By the time he tried to buy tickets out, there were no more flights leaving the country, he said. He sent emails to the U.S. embassy and the military asking what to do. He had to go to the Kabul airport, he said they told him. He tried six times, but it was too chaotic and dangerous.
Mohammed said he asked for a military escort to the airport, “but they said, ‘No, we can’t. You have to come to the gates. We can’t do anything.’”
After the U.S. military left on August 31, Mohammed received three emails from the U.S. government instructing him to stay put, stay safe, and wait for further instructions, he said.
“I spent all of September, I didn’t get any emails. I didn’t get any phone calls,” he said. “Then one of my friends, he was also stuck there. He found this Dynamo project.”
To avoid detection by the Taliban in September, he and his family moved every week — one week at a sister’s house, one week at another sister’s house, one week at a hotel, one week with a cousin. He heard that the Taliban was looking for people who had worked with the U.S. or Afghan government and taking them from homes.
“I always know that if they found me it’s possible, 100 percent possible, that they will kill me, they will kill my family, and my kids. So I was scared of that,” Mohammed said.
Mohammed and his family spent three days at the Kabul airport with others who were part of the Project Dynamo rescue mission. It was a “very happy time” when they finally got out.
“When we land in Abu Dhabi, we think that we are seeing dreams,” he said. “Everybody was saying it’s a dream. No, this is real.”
Never Dreamed Kabul Would Fall
Over the summer, Zakirullah was amazed at the speed of the Taliban’s advance through Afghanistan. In May, he and his sister had traveled from their home in Virginia to Kabul to take care of their sick parents. His wife and two sons, 14 and 12, had come two months earlier.
At 40 years old, Zakirullah is old enough to remember life under the Taliban in the late 1990s. “It was so terrible,” he said. So, he was understandably worried about the Taliban’s advance. But, he said, he trusted that the Afghan military would be able to keep the Taliban out of Kabul.
“We never dreamed of such a thing,” he said of the Taliban’s taking over Kabul, the nation’s capital. “The people thought the central provinces in Kabul would never . . . be captured, because there were still American forces and other forces in our military and police, and other armed forces.”
Before the U.S. military left, Zakirullah said he tried to go to the Kabul airport three times to escape, but he wasn’t successful getting out. He heard stories about people being shot in the chaos at the airport, people having their documents stolen, and children being abducted.
Zakirullah said he worked as an interpreter for the U.S. military for six years and at one point was in charge of interviewing, vetting, hiring, and managing other interpreters. He is now a green card holder, and he has lived in the U.S. for about five years, he said. Because of those American connections, he believed that if the Taliban found him, “definitely, 100 percent, I think that they would kill me.”
He is grateful for Project Dynamo for rescuing him from Afghanistan, but his wife and sons are still there, talking care of his parents.
“They said, ‘Please don’t leave us alone,’” Zakirullah said of his parents. “Even my wife said, ‘I just want to be with them, because the situation changed.’”
“I’m worried about them, and I’m anxious.”