DispatchesJURIST EXCLUSIVE – Law students in Afghanistan are filing reports with JURIST on the situation there after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. Here, a female law student in Kabul offers her latest observations and perspective. For privacy and security reasons we are withholding her name and institutional affiliation. The text has been only lightly edited to respect the author’s voice.
Which is better: money or education? The topic is one most of us have discussed in school, and have had many debates about. Some of us have chosen money because mostly education is costly, while others (depending on the country) have chosen education as they have a free education system available in their country. I have debated over primacy of education hundreds of times. Until a week ago, I believed that education must be everyone’s priority. However, neither education nor money helped my people. People who are highly educated with the highest degree, exceptional knowledge of their field, and highly paid are now begging for the safety of their lives.
Today, I along with three of my friends went to Kabul airport at 3:30 a.m. thinking that we may have a chance to speak to the people in charge and show our documents and find our names of the list evacuation submitted to them so that we would have a chance to flee Afghanistan. On the way to the airport, our car was checked twice by Taliban soldiers; youths who were roughly 17, with guns on shoulders who might not have taken a shower for days. They had no uniforms but they were very distinct from other people. Each time our car was stopped by them, I felt fear in every one of my bones, the kind of fear that I have never sensed.
We arrived at the gate of Kabul airport, the one that is not controlled by Taliban, at 4 a.m. It took us two hours to get to the US military area where people show their documents. In this two hour journey, I have seen what I had never heard or could imagine in 21 years of my life. I saw injured people, unconscious children, pregnant women, people who have been sleeping on the ground for days now, mothers who were screaming their lost children’s names. I have seen my role model lawyers and the judges I have seen in their court house falling in sewage but getting up and trying to approach the military troops to show their documents. Academics the publication of whose articles I waited for, and the doctors who cured me many times, were begging for a gate pass. [Ed.: the author and her friends were turned away for insufficient documentation of US visa status]
If anyone asks me about my biggest regret in a month or two if I am still in the country and cannot flee, my answer will be studying and getting an education. For a person whose priority was always education, admitting such a regret is like healthy person being diagnosed with a deadly disease and given a deadline of her death. Education is now the biggest threat to me and my people and money cannot help us.
