Va. Afghans Caught Between Old World and New
Unheeded Warnings Weigh on Immigrants
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 5, 2001; Page A01
washingtonpost.com
Years ago, they noticed changes in the little things. In phone calls, when a sister's voice trembled as she explained why she was home during work hours. In odd photographs, where once cleanshaven cousins were wearing long, untrimmed beards.
Larger worries quickly followed. Surreal tales shared at the Annandale mosque or the Alexandria Afghan supermarket -- stories about children back home not getting food the Taliban had promised, news about women being publicly executed in stadiums, calls about people walking hundreds of miles to escape to Pakistan.
Before anyone else, they saw the brewing turmoil in Afghanistan. And though Washington's Afghan American community -- one of the largest in the country -- could never have imagined how it would spill over into the United States on Sept. 11, they tried to alert Americans to their country's horror.
They arrived here in waves: after the Soviet invasion in 1979, during the civil war that followed, after the Taliban crackdown in 1998. They were privileged, cosmopolitan, well-educated, from the country's capital of Kabul: the only ones who could get out. They brought a lively culture that blended easily into America's multiethnic mosaic, with ornate hand-woven rugs and restaurants serving cucumber and yogurt salads and marinated kebabs. Once settled, however, they were constantly frustrated by the lack of attention to their country's problems. In their own ways, they tried to change that.
From his nine-bedroom Springfield home, Yosuf M. Mir started writing letters to members of Congress. Merchant and wedding videographer Mohammad Siddiq collected footage and made films of human rights abuses.
Fashion designer Samira Atash spoke to other young Americans about Afghanistan, a place few of her peers could point out on a globe. And Nazira Karimi, once an Afghan celebrity journalist, lobbied editors at fashion and teen magazines to write about the abuses against women under the Taliban.
"But still, America seemed almost blind," Karimi said. "I wanted to tell everyone here, every day, 'Stop what you are doing. Look at what's happening. Please, I beg you.' But it didn't get much attention."
"I would tell people that my country exists only in my imagination," said Siddiq, 48.
"It was like no one listened," said Mir.
Then came Sept. 11. They watched in shock with the rest of the country, then learned that the fanatics blamed had been harbored in Afghanistan. Just as they could do nothing before, they were helpless now, as war spread across their homeland yet again.
The United States walked away from Afghanistan after the Soviets pulled out in 1989. How would it end this time?
"I believed in America," saidMir, "and they left. I hope -- I pray to God -- that they will stay this time. I hope they learned their mistake."
A New Kabul
There are places in Northern Virginia -- vibrant markets and mosques and rug stores -- that remind Afghans of Kabul before war swept regular life away.
Neon signs in swirly Farsi script glow in windows, advertising warm chicken kebab. Retired men -- Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks -- crowd the Mustafa Center every afternoon arguing politics and religion as they sip strong green tea.
The number of Afghans here is hard to pinpoint, but local leaders offer estimates between 30,000 and 80,000. A census survey estimate is far smaller -- about 3,000 -- but the ancestry question is an optional, write-in category that demographers say probably understates the true number. The reality, they say, is probably somewhere in between.
Many are professionals by training -- lawyers, engineers, doctors. Those who couldn't transfer their skills to U.S. society opened shops and restaurants, drove taxis or offered translation services.
But because they arrived here with family savings, many own comfortable homes and late-model cars and send their children to expensive colleges.
Immigrants in Annandale raised money to build a mosque, where some pray five times a day and others show up only for major holy days. Women interpret Islam's modesty rules as they choose -- many younger Afghans do not cover their hair, while their grandmothers wear headscarves. The all-encompassing burqa is rarely seen.
"There is a real diversity here for Afghans in America," said Makhdoon Zia, spiritual leader of the Annandale mosque. "Just like there was in our country before the wars. The people here are Americans, but are also keeping their Afghan roots."
Children study Farsi on weekends at the Afghan Academy. The population also supports a poetry club, a massive soccer league, three lively newspapers, a cable TV program on Fairfax's public access station and a Tuesday radio show on WUST (1120 AM) called "Voice of Afghanistan."
Back home the Taliban, trying to wipe out secular music, beat or jailed people found to own taped music or instruments. Now, the country's entertainment industry has reestablished itself along Braddock Road.
A half-dozen stores sell campy Afghan movies and musical artists' CDs. The national instrument, the rubab -- a skinny, three-stringed, deeply resonant lute -- is displayed in shop windows.
The music, with its high-pitched melodies and fast tempos, can be poetic and lyrical, about love and homesickness, or it can be political, with strong anti-communist and anti-Taliban references.
Just as Americans dress up like Elvis, Afghans impersonate the late singer Ahmad Zahir, "the Bruce Springsteen of Afghanistan." And for the younger generation, there's Ehsan Aman -- the "Afghan Ricky Martin" -- who lives in Springfield. He frequently tours the United States and Europe as part of the "world music" circuit.
Omaid Weekly, the most popular Afghan American newspaper, published a special edition after the Sept. 11 attacks. "We condemn the terrorist attacks," the newspaper's headlines said. The paper urged the United States to get the Taliban out without hurting Afghan people, a theme repeated again and again on local Afghan radio and TV stations.
The other emerging concern is this: the more innocent lives lost to U.S. bombs, the more chance of the Taliban gaining support in a backlash effect.
"We are so torn," said Joma M. Mohamadi, a retired senior engineer of the World Bank, in the mosque on a recent afternoon chatting with a group of men. "We want to support the military action, but then you think of all the regular people who could be hurt or die, our people."
The community's politics are nearly as complex as they are back home.
Some support giving the Taliban a small role in any new government; others want it out completely.
Almost everyone backs the return of exiled 86-year-old king Mohammed Zahir Shah, whom older expatriates affectionately refer to as "Baba." And yet that kind of hope is mixed with panic over relatives back home, tears over U.S. bombs and horror over the terrorist attacks and the anthrax scares that are part of their daily lives in the United States.
A Brother's Awakening
"What isgoing on over there?" Mir anxiously asked his relatives. It was 1998. The Taliban had been in power for two years.
One day, Mir woke up in his colonial in Springfield, turned on the Afghan cable station and saw doom: women being pummeled with sticks, young militia members searching homes and smashing television sets. The Taliban demanding that women cover themselves and that men grow long beards. Gaunt children with flies stuck to their bodies like clothing. He rushed to call home.
"Okay, so what exactly is happening?" he recalls asking one of his three sisters, who began to weep.
She described a place where a radical brand of Islam had almost suddenly become law. Worse, there was stark poverty. Children were not getting the food that the Taliban said they would.
"It sounded like something out of ahorror movie," said Mir, 43, as he wistfully showed photographs of his family from the early 1970s. The menin the pictures wore butterfly-collar shirts and had shaggy Beatles haircuts. His sisters were wearing skirts and makeup and go-go boots.
Mir traveled to the United States in 1973 to study public administration at the University of Iowa, became a citizen and never went home. He was part of the first wave of Afghans, many of them aristocrats, who came when the fashion was to get an American education before they took up their professions in Kabul. Because of the Russian invasion in 1979, they all stayed. Some, including Mir, still own land in Afghanistan.
Mir, who had hoped to take his government skills home, now works throughout Northern Virginia as a translator of several languages.
From his home, where a lush garden blooms over several outdoor decks and a 65-inch television offers up the day's news, Mir had long supported the Taliban. He began sending them money in 1989 when, with U.S. backing, they helped force the Soviets out. They were thought of as heroes then, by Afghan Americans and by the Reagan administration.
"When the Taliban came, I was the first one to pray: 'Please. Please. Help our country,' " Mir said. "There was so much fighting. We needed order. We needed food. We thought that they wanted us to go pray, to go to the mosque. That sounded okay at the start."
On the day that he called his sisters, he said, he stopped sending money to the Taliban and started calling senators and members of Congress.
He warned them in letters: "The Taliban are monsters. Help us."
He now sends money to the Northern Alliance, the rebel force fighting the Taliban. But since the United States began bombing, Mir, like many others, worries that people will start to support the Taliban again, looking at America as one more foreign invader.
And he worries all the time about his sisters. He's had no news since three days into the bombing. The phone lines are down.
'America's Blindness'
Nazira Karimi, 35, still wears her huge, heart-shaped rhinestone-studded earrings. And she still dresses in her red suit, the one she wore as a prominent Afghan celebrity TV journalist. She was like a young Barbara Walters, as much a celebrity as those she interviewed.
But then the Taliban came to power, a regime that oppressed women and banned television. Karimi openly criticized them. She spoke out so frequently that the Taliban openly "plotted her murder," beat her husband and tried to rape her sister, according to reports issued by the U.N. high commissioner for refugees.
After months of begging the commissioner for help, she escaped with her husband andtwo children to Pakistan, where she worked for the British Broadcasting Corp. From a hidden location, Karimi continued to denounce the regime, and she and her family continued to receive death threats.
On April 28, 1998, she was granted emergency asylum in United States.As soon as she arrived, she, like Mir, started writing letters to officials.
She settled quickly into the comfortable rhythms of the immigrant community, one of several thousand women who were able to escape the Taliban and obtain asylum in the United States in recent years. Many live together in plain apartments across Fairfax County. Some left husbands behind and live here now with their children. A network of Afghan social workers runs free clinics to treat them for the trauma they endured.
"I wasn't ever going to give up trying to get America to see," said Karimi, who once threatened to set herself on fire in front of the White House if the members of her extended family were not given visas. (They were, 16 in all.) She now works for the Afghan American TV and radio stations that operate out of Falls Church.
At some point, women's magazines, which were starting to write about the Taliban's strict laws against women, found Karimi. Her name showed up in article after article. The headlines blared in Seventeen magazine last year: "Girls Interrupted," and in Glamour magazine, "Taliban: The World's Most Woman-Hating Government." But still it failed to register with the public.
"People are dying," Karimi said. "Our women are suffering. This is important. But there was really zero attention."
The Merchant and His Videos
In the back room of the store on Backlick Road, the men are watching the videos over and over. The images make them sick, but they can't stop watching.
Mohammad Siddiq -- who owns the store, who used to be a TV cameraman himself -- sits with his friends and watches, then he turns away and weeps. His friends try to comfort him.
He has assembled the tapes into a program from footage supplied by human rights groups. They show what's left of his country -- women covered in cloth, gaunt children covered in dirt and his city covered in destruction. He has sent his videos to CNN, hoping they will air them, hoping people will see and do something to help.
After Sept. 11, when the nation went into a sort of shock-induced retail hibernation, almost no customers came into his Afghan video store. The seven weddings he was hired to videotape were canceled.
His friends still visit, though,to watch the tapes of human rights abuses. The chicken kebab cook, the gas station worker who looks like James Dean, the famous Afghan crooner with puffy hair -- they all crowd into the back of his store and watch. Aside from them, the store is empty.
Siddiq is one of the refugees who fled during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s. This is the largest segment of the local population; the Reagan administration was free with immigration visas for anti-communists. Siddiq made pizza while he saved money to open his own store.
He cries now when he watches the videos and when he speaks about his sister, Sorya Alim, who died from an infection that turned into kidney failure because she couldn't obtain medical treatment under the Taliban regime.
As he tells his sister's story, a friend pops in another video by a popular Afghan singer, who also lives in the United States now:
"Freedom birds. Please come over. Please bring peace. Please help us," the lyrics plead.
They make Siddiq wonder: Will there ever be peace again in my country?
"I pray so. I hope so," he said. "I hope America will help us."
Youthful Idealism
The beautiful people pour in, clad in hip black sweaters and the latest shiny platform shoes. They are all energy on this Friday night, all running on caffeine and mints and a goal: rebuilding their suffering Afghanistan.
It keeps Samira Atash's brain buzzing all night, like the high that comes from being in love.
That's how this new sense of purpose feels for this crowd. They are Generation X Afghan Americans, wearing Levis, sipping Cokes and dreaming up ways to form a sort of Afghan Peace Corps. Children of the Soviet-era immigrants, they are lawyers and filmmakers and graphic artists and engineers.
Atash, a 26-year-old fashion designer with long brown highlighted hair, came here when she was a toddler. Now, with a George Mason University degree, she cherishes Jackie O and finds solace in the music of U2 and the self-help advice of Oprah.
"I am everything the Taliban is against," said Atash, who is wearing a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt under a zippered New York sweat shirt. "I love Burger King and 'General Hospital' and Conan O'Brien. I pray that Americans realize that we are not the Taliban. We want them out. We want to save our suffering people."
This is their second meeting this week. They came together to plan a fundraiser for Afghan refugees, which raised $36,000. But a bigger idea emerged: After the U.S.-led forces expelled the Taliban, they would leave their easy American lives and hard-won careers and go back to rebuild their country.
"There are now thousands of Afghans just like us," Atash said. "Educated people who have money, who know our homeland's languages and who know English. We can teach the children how to read, how to build roads."
This call to action is happening with young Afghans all over the United States, some of whom had assimilated to the point where they started to forget their country's hardships, said Maliha Zulfacar, an Afghan American and a professor of sociology at California Polytechnic State University.
"These Afghan Americans are urbane intellectuals, and they really flourished here," said Zulfacar. "They dream of going back to a place where girls wearing miniskirts would walk next to those in a veil, and it was the girl's choice. To a time when children had food and were going to school."
This is Atash's hope. She's been crying and watching television since the bombing began. She talks about quitting her fashion work, even though one of her designs -- a puzzle-piece dress -- will be seen in the movie "Men In Black 2" next year. That sort of accomplishment used to make her ecstatic. But now:
"I can't sleep. I can't work. Fashion feels so trivial," she said. "Now, all I want to do is go back and help and liberate our people. Our parents are like, 'What are you going to do there?' "
She is considering returning to school for a teaching degree to make herself more useful in Afghanistan. But, as evidence of just how American she is, she's trying not to act impulsively. She's listened to the experts, watched the TV shows.
"Dr. Phil on 'Oprah' said not to make any big life decisions right now."
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