The replies I received were warm but noncommittal. In May and June, I contacted refugee-aid groups, nonprofit legal organizations, and academic entities to see whether they could help Tahir and Wahid. “They are going to the soft targets,” Wahid told me in a phone call. In a new tactic, the Taliban had begun placing magnetic bombs under the cars of their victims-to terrorize the city. In 2020, the Taliban carried out a wave of targeted assassinations that killed more than a hundred Afghan civilian leaders, including doctors, journalists, and human-rights advocates. He helped to rescue the driver and take him to the hospital. Wahid was not in the vehicle at the time and is not sure whether he was the one being targeted. In 2019, a gunman had fired on a car that was supposed to be taking Wahid to the airport, wounding the driver. Wahid had made repeated visits to the United States but always returned to Afghanistan, determined to stay in his homeland. I assumed that Tahir, as an American citizen, would be able to secure visas for his wife and remaining children, the youngest of whom is four.Īround the same time, another Afghan friend of mine, Wahid Wafa, who spent a decade as a reporter for the Times in Kabul, had come to the same conclusion as Tahir about the prospects for his country. Now he was focussed on safely getting his loved ones out of the country. For years, Tahir had hoped for a peace deal in Afghanistan. troops would pull out of Afghanistan by September 11th. Days earlier, President Biden had announced that all U.S. Thousands of afghans are leaving kabul everyday.” He said he had applied for visas that would enable the rest of his family in Afghanistan to join him in the U.S. “I am in kabul since March the 28th,” he wrote, in the fragmented English that I’d come to know well during our months in captivity. Alarmed, I sent him an e-mail, and he responded right away. Concerned, I sent him a series of text messages. In April, I tried calling Tahir but couldn’t reach him. Tahir Luddin and David Rohde at the office of the New York Times, for which Rohde reported, after escaping the Taliban. We were held all together, in the same room, and Tahir and I spent hours talking, regretting the anguish that we were causing our families. They treated me far better and demanded that the Times, my employer at the time, pay millions of dollars in ransom and secure the release of prisoners from Guantánamo. Our guards told Tahir how eager they were to execute him and the many ways that they would mutilate his body. Our captors moved us from house to house and eventually brought us into the remote tribal areas of Pakistan, where the Taliban enjoyed a safe haven. Twelve years ago, Tahir, an Afghan driver named Asad Mangal, and I were kidnapped by the Taliban after one of their commanders invited me to an interview outside Kabul. Our communications were sporadic, but our bond was unusual. At the time, I didn’t worry and assumed that he would get back to me. Your son is very tall!!!” Tahir did not reply. “See the pictures of your children on FB. “How is your family? How are you?” I wrote. My text was banal, a quick check-in to see how he and his loved ones were faring amid the isolation of the past year. In the middle of March, I texted my friend Tahir Luddin, an Afghan journalist who lives in the Washington area, after I saw a video he had posted on Facebook of his teen-age son running on a treadmill. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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