‘Purest form of hell:’ California woman stranded in Afghanistan waits in hiding for way home
It was a Tuesday morning in California and somewhere in Kabul, Afghanistan, Narwan was holed up in an apartment hiding for her life.
She had returned home to tend to a sick family member before the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August that signaled the end of America’s longest war.
Now Narwan is stranded in a nation under Taliban rule, a married, 23-year-old mother of two from the Sacramento area praying for a way out.
“She’s been subjected to the purest form of hell,” John Moses, her volunteer case manager here in the states told The Sacramento Bee on Tuesday. “This is a California resident. She’s alone, unaccompanied. It’s a bad scene. People in Sacramento, this is their neighbor.”
She narrowly escaped the Aug. 26 suicide bombing at the Abbey Gate entrance to Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. service members including a Marine from Roseville, wounded at least 18 other service members and killed nearly 200 civilians. She endured a severe beating by the Taliban and escaped from a passenger bus that came under aggressors’ attack.
For several desperate hours, Moses said, she was missing and feared dead.
The Bee is only using Narwan’s first name because Moses says her life remains in danger.
For her husband, at home in the capital region with two children including a toddler, the wait has been an agonizing one.
“He just wants his wife,” Moses said.
Narwan is a Lawful Permanent Resident, a step away from U.S. citizenship. Like other LPRs and those seeking coveted Special Immigrant Visas (SIV), she’s a target of the Taliban regime.
Narwan’s story is particularly wrenching in the capital region where thousands of Afghan families have resettled during the 20-year war and where The Bee has chronicled the plight of Sacramento-area Afghan children still trapped in Afghanistan more than a week following the U.S. pullout and the mass evacuation of more than 116,000 people from the war-torn country.
Commercial flights out of Kabul only restarted in earnest on Thursday, but getting to the airport is where the danger lies.
‘Brutal’ and ‘relentless’ experience
Moses is her lifeline thousands of miles away in a town near Boston, a retired Army soldier once stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and now Narwan’s case manager.
He’s one in a network of unofficial volunteer advocates working back channels in official Washington and with nonprofit groups like No One Left Behind — the organization helping Afghan and Iraqi interpreters who served with U.S. combat forces and their families find safe passage — to get her out of harm’s way.
Moses has been calling on old contacts in-country, following new tips and leads, anything to bring her back home to Northern California.
“She’s holed up in Kabul. She’s in the worst possible position,” Moses said. “She has a green card stamp (the temporary proof of permanent residency issued to LPRs while the green card is still being produced) but no green card. I’m letting her know that I’m still here. Another American is at the end of the line.”
Moses has also written of Narwan’s ongoing ordeal in harrowing detail in an op-ed pressing Congress to pass emergency legislation to designate lawful permanent residents as U.S. citizens, offering them the diplomatic heft and road home that the blue passports provide.
In the piece, Moses called Narwan’s situation “one of the most brutal and relentless experiences a human can endure.”
“Singled out as an LPR, she was beaten at the Ministry of Interior, fired at by the Taliban at a gate with Marines in sight, and she barely missed being killed in the terrorist attack at Abbey Gate,” Moses wrote. “Finally, she was sent to a bus that was harassed by assailants for 6 hours before she escaped. I have other families like this who are still hiding and waiting for the Taliban to come after them.”
Moses said during the waning days of the evacuation he specifically sought out lawful permanent residents to help get them on flights out of the country and return home. Moses said he was able to help eight families, 68 people by his count. He’s a case manager for five more families along with Narwan.
They want to return to the U.S. but cannot cross Afghanistan or Kabul safely, he said. Food, money and housing are scarce. Time, he said, is running short.
“They don’t have the resources or backing of the United States to keep them and their families safe,” he said. “These people are Americans all but in name, and they need our help.”
This story was originally published September 9, 2021 at 11:20 AM.
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