The story of Inas, mother of a 3-year-old child. “We haven’t reached the airport, we’ll try again. Don’t judge us, we are parents like you. I’m ready to give him a future and die of pain “
Before closing the door, Inas and her husband Salah make a pact. A subtraction pact: “If all three of us can’t leave, you and the baby will try it,” he tells her. Then it’s up to Inas to subtract: “If they stop me too, let’s try with Ayman.” Which means we try to entrust the life of our three-year-old son to strangers. To another family who manages to leave, to the volunteers of an NGO, to a soldier who stretches his arms behind a barbed wire. “Salah just nodded,” she tells us in a video chat they do from the roof of the house, near the center of Kabul.
In the end how did it go?
“We couldn’t even get into the airport. On the way we were stopped twice by the Taliban banging the Kalashnikov on the glass of our car. Then one of them stuck his head in the window: “I have to go to the hospital”, I told him, and they let us pass. Ayman was crying in despair ».
Then?
“There was a lot of people in front of the entrance. Hundreds of families like ours, lots of children. They beat us on the legs with cables. We were afraid they would shoot us and then we went home ».
If you managed to get through, would you really have the courage to give Ayman to a soldier to save him?
“Sure, I’d do it now too. It is from that day that my husband and I plan to leave: our priority is to secure Ayman and if that meant separating from him we would be ready to do so. Kabul is dead, everything else is better. Please don’t judge us. We are mothers and fathers like you. Here our children risk being killed or kidnapped and trained to become suicide bombers, our daughters risk rape. What would you do? I am ready to give him a future and to die of pain. My friends also say the same thing ».
How did you feel seeing the videos of those children passed to the soldiers?
“I cried and thought what I would say to my son before passing it on to those men. And nothing came to mind. I don’t know what I would do, how I would kiss him, how I would hold him. Or maybe my head feels so much pain to formulate such a thought that it won’t let me. But then I also thought: those children and those families are lucky, they run away from this hell. Do you hear? ».
He asks if we hear the shots from the street. We don’t hear them, but we understand the fear he has from how he widens his eyes and looks around. He tells us that this is the first time they leave the house, the internet is only good on the roof. “Since we got back from the airport we haven’t even gone to the balcony, we live with the curtains drawn.”
How’s Ayman doing?
“He is afraid of any noise and does not sleep at night. Two of my grandchildren haven’t spoken for three days. I was born in 2001, I knew the Taliban regime from the speeches of my family. I studied. I would have preferred the Americans not to have left. ‘
Did she feel betrayed?
“No. But I would like someone to help us get out of here. Only those who have a piece of paper, an email from a foreign country, leave. We have nothing. I have to think about how to save my father who is sick and is a former government employee. We live in fear that someone will break the door and kill us. Sometimes I think it’s lucky that mom died of Covid three months ago, she couldn’t handle all this. She sure knew what it means to be separated from children. ”
Because?
“My mother, like many Afghan women, let two children who were still minors go to Europe on foot ten years ago. She cried every day, she never saw them again, but their happiness was worth everything to her ».