Five times just after Afghanistan’s fall, Shaqaiq Birashk, holed up in her Kabul condominium, was contacted by a stranger offering to have her picked up and escorted to the airport for evacuation. The person claimed to get the job done for the U.S. government, said Birashk, an American citizen who, until finally the Taliban’s takeover, worked on a USAID task.
Immediately after some trepidation and encouragement from a friend who had by now gone by way of the approach, she recognized.
That night time, dressed in a flowing abaya that hid a backpack stuffed with cleanse clothes, Birashk, 37, nervously walked earlier the Taliban guards who had taken around protection at her developing and climbed into the back again seat of a environmentally friendly Toyota Corolla, hopeful it would direct to her independence.
“We had been driving in opposition to the website traffic,” she recalled in an job interview. “You
