Correction: An earlier model of this story gave the incorrect quantity of further troops being deployed to Afghanistan. That quantity is 1,000.
CNN
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Mizgon Darby was an 18-year-old school freshman when she began a journal 20 years in the past giving voice to the rising numbers of Afghans residing in the United States.
“There was a sense of hope, of wanting to help, and wanting to do more and do better and go back to the country, and this sentiment of belonging and being both Afghan and American,” stated Darby, now 38 and the govt director of an academic program in the San Francisco Bay space.
But that sense of rebuilding their fractured nation is quickly fading as provincial capital after provincial capital in Afghanistan falls to the Taliban many years after their regime collapsed at the palms of the US army and Afghan opponents.
“It’s the complete reverse now,” Darby stated. “The Afghanistan that those in the diaspora, especially those in Fremont, had hoped for is no longer.”
The San Francisco Bay space is residence to about 60,000 Afghan immigrants, the largest focus in the cities of Hayward and Fremont, the place the local weather, the surrounding mountains and a strip of small companies and Aghan social organizations referred to as Little Kabul reminds them of their place of origin.
“The whole community is frustrated,” stated Rona Popal, 63, govt director of the Afghan Coalition, a neighborhood group.
“They’re very mad. They are confused. They’re mad not only at the United States but also at the Afghans themselves, those leaders who are sitting in the government with the power and are still talking about ‘we’re going to fight’ and every day you see the Taliban coming.”
As expatriates on the streets of Fremont communicate of American betrayal, the Taliban – greater than 7,000 miles away – on Saturday claimed to have captured more of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals on its march to the Kabul.
Mazar-i-Sharif, the most necessary metropolis in the north of Afghanistan, fell to the Taliban Saturday after authorities forces all of a sudden left the metropolis and headed towards the Uzbekistan border, in response to sources in the metropolis.
The fall of Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh province, means the Taliban now management 22 provincial capitals. Only two main cities – Kabul and Jalalabad – stay in the authorities’s management.
In Washington, President Joe Biden has defended his decision to finish the battle in Afghanistan, insisting no quantity of sustained American presence there may resolve the nation’s issues.
Biden stated US troops can be accomplished with the army mission by the finish of this month. After dismantling al Qaeda in the nation and killing Osama bin Laden, Biden stated the army mission had been completed.
“They’ve got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation,” Biden stated this week, referring to the Afghan authorities. “They’ve got to want to fight.”
In a press release Saturday, Biden introduced the deployment of an additional 1,000 troops to Afghanistan “to make sure we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of US personnel and other allied personnel and an orderly and safe evacuation of Afghans who helped our troops during our mission and those at special risk from the Taliban advance.”
“We have been displaced permanently,” stated Darby, who was born in the US and whose first language was Dari, the Afghan dialect of Farsi.
09:45 – Source: CNN
Stewart: Afghanistan collapse ‘shameful’ for West
“There is no going back to the country where our parents were born and raised. Or being able to provide services or assistance and watch children grow and do things there that would help society as a whole.”
Many expatriates concern the collapse of the Afghan authorities and full-blown civil battle again residence. They fear about Afghanistan once more turning into a haven for terrorists bent on attacking the United States.
“We shouldn’t fool ourselves and say that we won this ‘forever war,’” stated Darby, referring to the lengthy battle that has claimed tens of hundreds of Afghans and hundreds of US troops.
And civilian casualties in Afghanistan reached report ranges in the first half of 2021, in response to the United Nations, noting that deaths and accidents spiked markedly from May when the United States and its allies started withdrawing troops from the nation.
Some 5,183 casualties had been recorded in the first six months of the yr – a 47% enhance from 2020 – the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) stated in a report.
“We have created a breeding ground for terrorists and a place where 15-year-old girls will be mandated by the Taliban to marry their troops,” Darby stated. “I feel like we’ve been put in a time machine and taken back.”
She stated her father, who’s in his late 70s and left Afghanistan at the starting of the 1979 Soviet invasion, refuses to debate the newest spherical of turbulence again residence.
“There’s a sense of mourning in Fremont right now,” she stated. “Some of our elders, like for example my father, won’t even talk about it. I brought it up with him several times and he changes the topic. He’s heartbroken.”
Most of the Afghan refugees who settled in the Bay Area started arriving there after the Soviet invasion.
A brand new wave may come quickly. The first group of translators and interpreters who helped US troopers and diplomats in Afghanistan arrived in the US late last month, and hundreds extra wait in Afghanistan in concern of Taliban reprisals.
“A lot of these people, we’ve seen them end up homeless in the beginning,” Darby stated. “We’ve seen them basically travel from home to home – pregnant wives and husbands who are disabled. It’s a difficult living for them. It’s not like we have the infrastructure, even here in the United States, to support this.”
Popal, a longtime Afghan girls’s activist who has been in the US 43 years, stated she moved to Fremont in the 1980s largely as a result of it was an reasonably priced place to reside. That’s now not the case.
“Rent is so expensive now – $2,500 to $3,000,” she stated. “How are they going to afford it? When they bring these translators they usually give them rent money for six months and then they put them on the street and say, ‘Go, you do it yourself.’ All these translators, after six months, they come to our office and say, ‘What should I do?’”
01:46 – Source: CNN
Bergen: Afghanistan an unforced error blowing up on Biden’s watch
Farid Younos, a retired professor at Cal State East Bay in Hayward who considers himself each Afghan and American, traveled to Austria this weekend to present a presentation on the scenario in Afghanistan.
Younos stated the blame for a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan will fall totally on Biden’s shoulders for his choice to carry all US troops residence. But blame may also fall on what he known as a “corrupt” authorities in Afghanistan that has largely ignored the position of Islam in that nation.
“That has been very costly for Afghanistan,” he stated. “In that country, you can’t ignore Islam if they want to have peace. Islam is very much compatible with democracy but based on some principles of morality and ethics. But Islam cannot be imposed.”
He added, “Afghanistan is a country of freedom and freedom of the press and freedom for women. We have practiced democracy in the past. So this radicalism does not have any place in Afghanistan.”
Younos warned {that a} return of the Taliban won’t solely have an effect on Afghanistan but additionally the whole Middle East, Central Asia and finally Europe and past.
Waheed Momand, one of the cofounders of the Afghan Coalition in Fremont, is in fixed communication with representatives of political events, social and cultural organizations, tribal councils, non secular leaders, teachers and others in Afghanistan. The aim reaching a peace deal that brings an finish to the bloodshed. An worldwide digital convention of group representatives is scheduled for subsequent month.
American troops “left Afghanistan in the middle of the night,” stated Momand, president of the Fremont-based Grand National Movement of Afghanistan, which is pushing for a negotiated finish to the battle. “So the Taliban is claiming victory. Sure, they can say this is a victory. But it’s not about the Taliban. It’s not about the Afghan government. It’s about the people of Afghanistan. What’s going to happen to those 20 years of progress in Afghanistan?”
Darby recalled the hate and discrimination aimed toward Afghans in Fremont after the 9/11 assaults 20 years in the past. Now the Afghans in the San Francisco Bay Area, she stated, are being known as terrorists, unpatriotic and un-American for talking out towards the US troop withdrawal.
“There was that sense of being homeless before, post 9/11, where the Afghan community felt that those in America did not accept us as much because we were targeted as terrorists,” she stated.
“Now there’s a sense of homelessness because we know that the country of our birth or the country that our parents were born in … is completely different than what we heard in stories from our families. And I don’t know what’s worse.”
CNN’s Tim Lister in Spain, Nic Robertson in Delaware and Saleem Mehsud in Islamabad contributed to this report.