their AMERICAN dream
WHEN ZAHRA NAZARI RECEIVES WORD THAT THE PROVINCE OF BAMYAN, HER HOME IN AFGHANISTAN, HAS FALLEN TO THE TALIBAN, THE TEENAGER THINKS SHE’LL DIE.
It’s around midnight on August 14,2021. The fundamentalist group is on the cusp of seizing the country’s capital, Kabul. A month earlier, Zahra, 18, had taken a call from a Bamyan official, whose name St. Louis Magazine is withholding due to safety concerns. Zahra says that the official asked her to join a group of 15 women in helping feed Afghan troops fighting the Taliban near Shahidan.
Zahra feels a sense of duty. So she says goodbye to her family and sends her mother, Bilqis Rezai, and 17-year-old sister, Fatima Nazari, to the mountains to hide in a cave–it will be harder for the Taliban to find them there.
“I had a strong spirit, and I knew I [would be] stronger than 1,000 men, and I would save my mom and my sister,” she says.
Zahra goes to Shahidan, where she provides food and water to Afghan troops and sews uniforms. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Zahra says that an Afghan commander stationed a soldier with the women. If the province fell to the Taliban, Zahra recalls, that soldier’s orders were simple: Kill the women. Don’t let the Taliban sell them into slavery or kill them.
So when the province falls, Zahra feels despair. “I always had so many dreams for my future,” she says. “We work so hard in Afghanistan society for equality, for women’s rights, for girls’ rights, for children’s rights, for human rights, but the Taliban attacked
