Trained by the U.S. Army, a group of trailblazing Afghan women turned into a formidable force in their homeland. They now live quietly scattered around the U.S., trying to reconcile their past with their present. MsReads via politico
Left: Mahtab at target practice in Afghanistan; Middle: Nafisa in fatigues Right: Nahid stops for lunch break at Chick-Fil-A.n the cramped kitchen of a Chick-fil-A in Pittsburgh, out of the customers’ line of sight, there is a slight 26-year-old woman in a headscarf making chicken sandwiches. She looks up every few seconds to check the drive-thru screen. It beeps insistently, like a hospital heartbeat monitor, detailing each new custom order for her to assemble: no cheese, yes bacon, no tomato.
And now she is here. One of 39 members of the Female Tactical Platoon to be evacuated to the United States in the chaos that followed the fall of Kabul in August.The Platoon members spent the fall in pop-up refugee camps on military bases.
I met with Nahid in Pittsburgh on a February morning before her shift at Chick-fil-A. Her new home is well-appointed with heavy, circa 1980s furniture donated by the people of Pittsburgh. A large Afghan flag sent to her by her U.S. military veteran friends hangs on one wall, right above an artificial white Christmas tree, donated by a local volunteer. Nahid hadn’t seen a good reason to take it down.
But whenever the conversation drifted back to her work with the Female Tactical Platoon, her eyes lit up. She talked about the intense workouts they did each day and about the time she helped rescue a group of six women and 13 children who had been taken captive by the Taliban. She earned a medal for that mission. It’s back in Afghanistan, along with everything else, she said, taking out her phone to show me a picture of the medal.“Everything,” she said smiling. “I was good at everything.
Female U.S. Army officers were charged with helping select and train the female Platoon members in Afghanistan. The women grew close over the course of their deployments, bonding over chai tea, Disney movies and their shared belief that they were helping to protect women and children from the Taliban. “It’s a special kind of dedication,” said Sarah Scully, a U.S. Army Company Commander who worked alongside the Platoon members in 2020.
Mahtab was recently resettled in the D.C.-area, and in January, I met her at Lapis, an Afghan restaurant in the city, along with Ellie, a U.S. army captain and one of the servicemembers most involved in helping the Platoon members resettle. When Mahtab thinks back to those early days, she remembers how hard and how thrilling it was, all at once. Each day was different from the one before, she said, barely touching her food. “On missions, you couldn’t predict what would happen next,” she said.
So that is what she began to tell other Afghan women, when she held recruiting sessions. “I always said, ‘This is war. You may die. You may lose your arm or your leg. But you are really serving your country — not just with your body but with your soul, your heart, everything.’” Everyday, Mahtab receives desperate messages from male commandos left behind in Afghanistan. “If the Taliban doesn’t kill them, they will die of starvation,” she said. Top: Mahtab sits at the dining room table in her one-bedroom apartment in Maryland. Left: Mahtab checks her mail after returning from a shopping trip. One of the relatives she lives with is in the foreground. She is drinking tea from Afghanistan.
One bitterly cold night, a Platoon member came to a mission wearing a long fur coat, with the hood up over her helmet and night-vision goggles. “I gave her a hard time,” an American female officer told me. “I said, ‘This is a joke, right? You’re not really wearing that, are you?’”Platoon members with their American counterparts during a deployment in Northern Afghanistan.
Nafisa and a fellow Platoon member in Afghanistan. The women now live together in an Atlanta apartment as they rebuild their lives.On one particularly memorable mission, in June of 2019 in Mazar-e-Sharif, Nafisa and about 50 Army Rangers and Afghan commandos were ambushed three separate times, repeatedly coming under heavy fire from the Taliban over the course of 24 hours. Nafisa was shot but uninjured because of her body armor.
Screenshots of text messages from American servicewomen telling Platoon members where to go to be evacuated from Afghanistan.“The Taliban is here. You have to take off your uniform.” Nafisa heard what the male Afghan soldier told her on the morning of Aug. 15, 2021, but she did not react, not at first. She knew the Taliban was gaining ground across the country as the Americans pulled out, but she’d thought they would not take Kabul — not for months, if at all.
For hours and, in some cases, days, Ellie and the other Americans bombarded the Platoon members on WhatsApp and Signal, trying to get the Afghan women close enough to the airport perimeter so that American soldiers they had connections with could pull them up over the fence. “Push faster please. Fight hard to get close. It’s the only way we can help you.” Back and forth the messages flew, changing from moment to moment, for hours. “Tell all the girls to get close.” Crying emoji. “To the tower.
But this time in her life, she said, is by far the hardest ordeal she has ever experienced. Even harder than war. “People clapped for us at the airport,” Mahtab told me. “I appreciate them. But my heart wasn’t there. My heart is with my people.”, Afghanistan’s elite special operations unit. They are trapped in a nightmare, begging her to help them evacuate, which she has no way of doing. “If the Taliban doesn’t kill them, they will die of starvation,” she told me.
Recently, to keep herself sane, Mahtab vowed to memorize a poem and make a drawing each week. Someone sent her a video of an Afghan woman in traditional dress dancing, whirling round and round, dancing in spite of everything. She drew the woman dancing in front of an Afghan flag, and she put it up on her bookshelf, next to her photos of the Platoon members.
In the months to come, the Platoon members may need to apply for asylum — through America’s dysfunctional asylum system, which has over 400,000 cases sitting in a backlog. Doing so may require expensive immigration lawyers and years of bureaucratic wrangling. On one end of the spectrum, there’s Nahid in Pittsburgh, who received all her papers months ago and, with the help of her American servicewomen comrades, got connected via Facebook to a group of enthusiastic local volunteers. They introduced her to Aimee Hernandez, the owner of a Chick-fil-A restaurant, who spent hours talking with her and her siblings, using their phones’ translation apps. It took about 45 minutes for Hernandez to ask if it was OK that the chicken was not halal.
I sat down on their donated floral couch and started asking the obvious questions. Why did you join the Platoon? What was it like?
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