Kabul Will Never Be the Same Again

I was finally, truly, in love.

Just before the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan collapsed in August 2021, I had made the decision to return to Kabul. I had long dreamed of owning a home in my hometown, tucked somewhere between the storied Jewish quarter and the city’s ancient Hindu temples, resting along the rugged slopes of Koh-e Asamai, the mountain at the heart of Afghanistan’s timeless capital.

In the evenings, the mountain blazes like a ball of fire, lit by the lanterns and bulbs of the homes clinging to its sides, and as the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, echoes through the valley, the entire landscape turns majestic.

That is where I was born, on a rainy evening, and was carried home from the hospital wrapped in a newspaper, as my parents were unprepared for my arrival, much like the city itself, never quite ready to hold me. For most of my life, I have lived unmoored, never fully rooted anywhere, and after years away, working as a journalist in Eastern Europe, I had decided it was time to go back. It was time to build a home, to reclaim love, a place, and a part of myself I had left behind.

But returning to Kabul meant facing memories I had tried to bury.

The last time I had stood in Kabul was only three years before, in August 2018, a visit shrouded in grief. I had buried three colleagues lost to the violence engulfing the city, and I was reminded of many others who were silenced before them.

Kabul continued to bleed in a war not of its own making.

I had become witness to the heavy cost our city and its people had paid.

Kabul was grim, the air thick with the smell of smoke and gas from heavy military vehicles and tanks roaming the streets. 

The taxi from Hamid Karzai International Airport to my neighborhood, Microrayon, just a few minutes away, couldn’t stop for the hungry children and women swarming the car, their outstretched hands pleading for money as we hurried through the crowded, weary streets.

As the taxi carried me onward, I made a quiet, painful, decision not to look toward the side of the street where a suicide bombing had claimed the lives of 25 media workers, including three of my closest colleagues at Radio Free Afghanistan.

I could look away, but I could never ignore the reality: The very streets I grew up on were now stained with the blood of my fellow journalists, those I spoke with each day about our shared struggle for a kinder, freer Afghanistan.

Maharram Durrani, 28, had just been hired and dreamed of using her programs to explain women’s rights in Islam to the Afghan public. At her funeral, her father wept; his gaunt face and trembling hands haunted me. I couldn’t help but wonder where people find the strength to raise a daughter in Afghanistan, to educate her, and then to lose her in an instant.

Abdullah Hananzai, 26, was about to celebrate his first wedding anniversary. A graduate of Kabul University, he was reserved and serious about journalism. He had come to work on his day off when he was killed.

Of the three, however, Sabawoon Kakar, 30, was my closest friend. He had an outstanding voice, steady, clear, and full of conviction, the kind that made you stop and listen whenever he spoke on the radio. And he was funny. Throughout my stay in Kabul, I often wondered whether I should visit his widow, a young woman left alone with two babies, the youngest born after her husband was killed.

And what could I possibly say? Telling them that it would all be okay would have been a lie.

The world I once knew, where hope lived in small, stubborn places and where people held on to a vision of a better future had almost disappeared. Twelfth Street in the Wazir Mohammad Akbar Khan neighborhood, once home to a small but hopeful press club that I had co-founded with fellow journalists, had become part of the Green Zone, sealed off behind cement walls and guarded by police. The Kabul Press Club was envisioned in the early 2000s as a gathering place for journalists committed to rebuilding a credible media in a country emerging from decades of war, but by 2018, many of my fellow club members including Sardar Ahmad, Sultan Manadi, and Zabihullah Tamanna were already gone.

All killed.

In the end, I barely stepped outside my parents’ home during that 2018 visit.

The city was buried in fear under the weight of bombings, suicide attacks, and the silence that followed each targeted assassination.

Just days before my visit, Azizullah Karwan, a feared commander of the elite 01 Unit, was gunned down while picnicking with his family in the park near my old school. He died in the most horrific way: in front of his children, in public. Even now, writing this, the horror has not faded; it was evident that the government was failing.