The Long Road Ahead
“I mean what I say when I say it, but to express it publicly was not the right thing to do.” »
THE LAST AMERICAN TROOPS HAVE LEFT Afghanistan. The news cameras have turned to other ssues around the world. But for the roughly 38 million Afghans who remain, and the 130,000 or so who managed to leave, the war is far from over.
Omaid Sharifi is president of ArtLords, a grassroots art movement based in Afghanistan. He was evacuated with his family to Abu Dhabi, where he has spent the last month in a refugee camp, awaiting resettlement to the United States.
“From the life I’ve lived for 34 years,” he says. “I could only get one T-shirt, a pair of trousers and my laptop. I lost everything else in this chaos.”
Unfortunately, Sharifi’s case is far from unique. “Refugees are people that have been forcibly uprooted from their homes and have had to flee violence and persecution on a large scale, often with nothing—none of their possessions,” Chris Boian, senior communications officer of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says.
