An Afghan singer who has used her worldwide fame to amplify calls for girls’s rights wore an all-enveloping veil to flee her homeland because the Taliban took Kabul.
Aryana Sayeed has divided her time between Turkey, Britain and Afghanistan and had been in Kabul in latest months to start out a clothes enterprise. She instructed Reuters in a weekend interview she acquired a name on Aug. 14 warning her that the Taliban had been closing in on the capital. When the Taliban final held energy from 1996 to 2001, they brutally enforced an interpretation of Sunni Islam that banned ladies from work and faculty.
Sayeed and her fiance Hasib Sayed made reservations on a business flight scheduled Aug. 15, the day the Taliban entered Kabul, months after American troops ended U.S. involvement within the Afghan battle.
The overcrowded business flight by no means took off, Sayeed mentioned in a Washington-area lodge, describing airport scenes of panic punctuated by the sound of gunfire.
She and Sayed, afraid of being acknowledged by Taliban fighters, left the airport and sheltered with relations in Kabul. The subsequent day, they heard Taliban forces had been looking door-to-door of their neighborhood. Sayeed once more went to the airport, sporting a veil that exposed solely her eyes and touring with Sayed’s younger cousin as if on a household outing.
“We passed through five Taliban checkpoints. One of them stopped our car,” Sayeed mentioned. “The minute he saw me and the little boy, he said, ‘Go.’”
Sayed, in a separate automobile, was the primary to succeed in the U.S. military-controlled airport. Sayeed mentioned he was acknowledged by an Afghan on the airport who instructed a U.S. official: “This is the fiance of a very famous singer in Afghanistan, and you should let him in because if they catch him, they will kill him.”
Sayed, a Canadian citizen, was allowed in and contacted Sayeed. His relations escorted her to the airport. The two flew out on a U.S. navy airplane early Aug. 17, touchdown first in Doha, Qatar. On Aug. 19 they reached the United States. The couple deliberate to depart Tuesday for Istanbul by way of Amsterdam.
“I got lucky to get out of Afghanistan. But what about the rest of the people that are there?” Sayeed, a British citizen, instructed Reuters. She was wearing a T-shirt with a U.S. flag on the sleeve that she had been given in Doha. She had left Kabul with solely the garments she was sporting that night.
Some of her 1.4 million Instagram followers have wished her properly since she left Kabul.
Taliban statements have created uncertainty about whether or not ladies in Afghanistan right here will be capable of work, research and select how they gown. Women have been pressured from jobs right here because the Taliban swept throughout Afghanistan in latest weeks. Sayeed known as on the worldwide neighborhood to not neglect Afghans, significantly ladies and youngsters.
“For the past 20 years, I mean, so many girls and so many women, they went to schools, they got educated. So many of them are school teachers, doctors … so many achievements,” Sayeed mentioned. “How can it all just end, just like that?”
