How a Girls’ School Fled Afghanistan as the Taliban Took Over

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2021

⏱️ 19 minutes

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Summary

In the summer, Shabana Basij-Rasikh came on the Radio Hour to speak with Sue Halpern about founding the School of Leadership Afghanistan—known as SOLA—which was the country’s only boarding school for girls. She and those around her were watching the Taliban’s resurgence in the provinces anxiously, but with determination. “It’s likely that Taliban could disrupt life temporarily here in Kabul,” one woman told Basij-Rasikh, “but we’re not going to go back to that time. We’re going to fight them.” In fact, Basij-Rasikh had already been forming a plan to take her girls’ school abroad, and soon settled on Rwanda. When the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan led to a precipitous collapse of the government, she suddenly had to sneak nearly two hundred and fifty students, staff, faculty, and family members to the airport to flee as refugees. She seems traumatized by the terror of that experience. “That thought still haunts me—it suddenly takes over all my senses in a way, just this idea of ‘what if’? What if we lost a student?” She spoke with Halpern about the evacuation to Rwanda, and what she hopes for as the school resettles.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:13.3	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This summer, as the U.S. withdrawal
0:18.6	from Afghanistan was looming, we heard on the program
0:21.7	from Shabana Basij Rasuk. She's the co-founder of that country's only boarding school for
0:27.5	girls, the School of Leadership, Afghanistan, Sola. And when we spoke to her in July, she was
0:33.8	certainly concerned, but also determined. I spoke with another woman who said, I see this coming.
0:41.0	It's likely that Taliban could disrupt life temporarily here in Kabul,
0:48.0	but we're not going to go back to that time.
0:50.5	We're going to fight them.
0:52.4	But we know what happened after that. The Taliban swept into
0:55.8	Kabul far faster than anyone had expected. And despite some lip service to preserving rights for women,
1:02.5	the Taliban in power remains hard line to say the least. They've blocked women from holding
1:07.6	government jobs and banned girls from attending secondary school.
1:12.5	As the Taliban were seizing control, Shabana worked desperately to evacuate the students and staff of Sola.
1:20.2	Sue Halpern, who's a staff writer, had been trying to keep in touch with her, and last week, she was
1:26.0	finally able to get the full story.
1:29.4	Over the summer, as the news was coming in from Afghanistan, I was concerned for Shabana
1:34.9	and her students, because I knew they'd be an obvious target for violence.
1:39.7	Shabana had already lived under the Taliban as a child.
1:43.1	And when we talked back in July,
1:45.3	she told me how she had to dress as a boy to attend school in secret.
1:50.7	I remember my father saying this to us quite repeatedly at that time,
	...

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