The Safi family’s arrival at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport Tuesday marked the end of a harrowing journey that began over three years ago when Arif, his wife Zainab and the couple’s four children fled their homeland of Afghanistan and the stable life they’d built there.
Their safety was at imminent risk.
In August 2021, following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban quickly rose to power, presaging a human rights crisis and turn to authoritarianism in the war-torn nation. Arif was eligible for a new U.S. program to bring in Afghans who worked with the U.S. government, media outlets, or aid agencies — potential targets under a Taliban regime.
Getting out required navigating a crush of people and bomb threats at the Kabul airport, and finding a spot on an evacuation flight.
“I can’t believe that time. I don’t know how we did it,” Arif said late last month before flying to Atlanta.
In what the U.S. government has said was its largest airlift in history, approximately 120,000 Afghans, Americans and citizens of other countries were flown to safety during the last two weeks of August. Once in the U.S., most Afghans were able to stay through an immigration program known as humanitarian parole. But the Safis couldn’t get on a U.S.-bound flight. Still, they considered themselves lucky: there was room for them on an Italian airlift.
They landed in Rome on Aug. 23, 2021.
What they hoped would be a short layover turned into a years-long limbo before the U.S. cleared the Safis.
“We were just waiting around for three years,” Arif said.
The family’s first full day on American soil was Sept. 11 — the 23rd anniversary of the paradigm-altering terrorist attack that set in motion the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which came to a chaotic end in the summer of 2021.
Having just arrived in metro Atlanta, the Safis are eager to make up for lost time and build new lives with the help of the U.S. refugee resettlement program, which the Biden administration has expanded following Trump-era cuts.
Through a local resettlement agency, the Safis have found an apartment in Lithonia, but much is up in the air. Arif must find a job, get his Georgia driver’s license, buy a car. Still, being here has brought an injection of purpose, and the feeling that the family is finally back on track.
“I’m thinking about my children’s future,” Arif said.
In just the first year since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, over 1,500 Afghan evacuees have resettled in Georgia.
Credit: Courtesy of Jennifer Glasse
Credit: Courtesy of Jennifer Glasse
‘Waiting for my life to begin’
Before Afghanistan fell under Taliban control, Arif had spent years translating for U.S. journalists in Kabul, contributing to reports that wound up in outlets such as The Los Angeles Times, CNN, NPR, and others.
“He was kind of like my professional husband,” said Jennifer Glasse, a U.S. correspondent who was based in Kabul from 2011 until 2020, and who leaned heavily on Arif during her day-to-day reporting. “I have trusted him with my life.”
According to Arif, shortly after Kabul fell in 2021, Taliban soldiers visited his neighborhood asking for him. He knew his affiliation with foreigners had made him a target, and decided to avoid stepping foot outside his home for a week.
The opportunity to evacuate to Italy came via a contact of Glasse’s. Just four days after the Safis made it out of the cramped Kabul airport, a suicide bombing there killed at least 182 people.
The U.S. government opened a pathway into the country for people like Arif and their families, when it created the Priority 2 (P-2) admissions program in August 2021, meant for Afghan nationals who worked with U.S. agencies, nonprofits, or media. The P-2 program allows beneficiaries to stay in the country permanently, with support upon arrival from the U.S. refugee resettlement system.
But processing P-2 applications has moved at a sluggish pace, exposing thousands of Afghan exiles to unsafe, destitute conditions in third-countries while they wait for visas. In a December 2023 letter to Biden administration officials, a group of Afghan community advocates said that pathways such as the P-2 program “largely exist in name only and provide no short-term or functional pathway to safety.”
According to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, over 21,000 Afghans have arrived in the U.S. via the P-2 program and another similar initiative, the P-1 program, since Oct. 1, 2021. As of September 2024, more than 29,000 Afghan refugee cases are currently being processed.
In a statement, an agency spokesperson said the State Department is “laser focused on simultaneously increasing domestic capacity, expediting overseas processing, and resolving long-delayed ... applications, all while continuing to maintain the program’s rigorous screening and vetting standards.”
The spokesperson added: “The Biden Administration continues to strongly support our Afghan allies who served alongside U.S. armed forces, development professionals, and diplomats for more than two decades.”
Arif said the years his family spent in Italy were challenging. After landing in Rome, the family was quickly moved to a rural zone of the country’s more impoverished south, where the only job prospect for the 37-year-old was agricultural work.
It took several months for the Safi children to be enrolled in local schools, a source of anguish for their parents given that safeguarding their daughters’ access to education was among their chief motivations in leaving Afghanistan. Since retaking control of the country, the Taliban have prohibited girls from attending school beyond sixth grade.
“Arif said to me last year: ‘I’m just waiting for my life to begin,’” Glasse said. “It’s been tough being a refugee.”
Arif’s arrival in Georgia marks the third time he’s had to start his life from scratch. Growing up, his family was also forced to spend several years in exile in Pakistan, having fled violence back home.
“I hope this is the last time,” he said. Being a refugee is “totally tiring.”
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