Even today, when she turns the key in the lock of her house, Khadija Amin thoroughly savours an unexpected freedom. Although three years have passed since this journalist born in Kabul in 1993 set foot on Spanish soil, she is still thrilled, and surprised, by the fact that There is no man inside waiting for her. A father or husband who asks her where she was, or who she was with, and who will surely scold her for something. She is now a free woman who makes her own decisions, but the scar of trauma and the responsibility she feels for the fate of all Afghan women prevent her from being completely happy.
Khadija never thought of leaving her country. It is true that things were getting very ugly in the days leading up to the official withdrawal of US troops, announced for August 30, 2021. The Taliban advance was unstoppable and by the 15th the capital had fallen. However, her position as a presenter on public television kept her focused on her work and some voices claimed that the radicals were going to allow women to continue working. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Sitting in front of a café in Madrid’s Telefónica District, where she has been employed for over a year, Khadija explains how she experienced the amputation of her job: “My boss sent me home. I held out for three days and went to the editorial office to ask to be allowed to continue my work. At least I wanted to finish editing my last report. However, the Taliban soldiers threatened me and ordered me to go home. I insisted on speaking to my boss and he didn’t pay any attention to me. He asked me not to come back because they could kill us all.” The day after she was sent home, a Taliban took her place. That image of the bearded man sitting in his chair on the set went around the world after it was published in “The New York Times.” She did not back down. She began to give interviews day and night to the journalists who called her, who were legion, and it became clear that her visibility was going to be incompatible with staying alive.
Thanks to the journalist of «El País» Monica Ceberio, Khadija’s name was put on an army list. «They convinced me that I had to leave. I went home, took an Afghan flag and a small backpack and went to the airport covered so that I wouldn’t be recognized. I remember that I was wearing a yellow handkerchief so that the Spanish military would know who I was. We flew to Dubai and from there to Madrid. I arrived on August 22nd.
She remembers the first hours and days in our country as if it were a dream. She was greeted at the foot of the stairs by the embrace of the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, although she would not know who the woman was until days later, who told her that everything would be fine. She was soon transferred to Salamanca with another activist and there she learned the Spanish that she now uses in an astonishing way. “After a year, I decided to move to Madrid because I needed to work. My brother wanted to get married and needed money, so I had to look for a job. I have five brothers and a sister, there are seven of us in total.” She found work in a pizzeria and He spent days sleeping in the park out in the open until he managed to take turns with a friend in a rented room; one night he had to sleep in the bed and the next, on the floor.
Today, all of her family, except for a sister who did not have a passport, are safe abroad. In passing, she mentions that her three children are also safe and are in Germany. Oh, but was she married? With a tone that denotes courage and a complete lack of victimhood, she explains that at 19 she was forced to marry a man a decade older than her. gave him the worst life imaginableThat was her first resurrection. She managed to separate herself from her abuser and study at university once the Taliban were ousted from power by the US-led international coalition.
Not even in her worst nightmares did Khadija think that the horror of fundamentalism would return to her country. That women who had grown up in relative freedom would be locked up again. With nothing to do, no present or future. The latest horror has been a law that prohibits women from making their voices heard in public. What else can be taken away from them? “The situation is getting worse every day, and women are losing all hope. They live under enormous pressure, anxiety and depression“If the Taliban could, they would ban even breathing.”
The burden on the shoulders of this woman who does not rule out becoming the president of her country is perceptible in her tone, in her gestures. The joy that appears when she explains some “first times” in Spain, such as going to the cinema or travelling alone, disintegrates when she talks about the ordeal of her compatriots: “It’s that the Taliban believe that women They are a source of sin for men. They ban things as simple as wearing high heels or putting on makeup. Now even a woman’s voice is provocative.
In such a suffocating context, there are still some who are fighting back. “There are women and some associations who are trying to resist, but they are very much alone. Yesterday I was on an Afghan radio programme and a man called in saying that at least there is security now. I replied: “What good is security if our daughters cannot study, if women who do not have men in their family cannot work?” “What kind of life is that?”» She extends her disappointment to her fellow men to the international community. «It is a disgrace. They have left Afghanistan in the hands of the Taliban, not because the Taliban took power, but because they handed it over. They did not think about the future of Afghanistan. During the peace negotiations, there was not a single Afghan woman at the table. The US signed an agreement and left, leaving Afghanistan alone.»
Khadija’s second resurrection in Madrid, where she has accomplished the immense task of building a working and social life, is about to end. Once she discovered that her three children, still minors, had left Kabul, she knew that she would have to settle in Germany and go through another uprooting of uprooting: “Although my ex-husband hid from me that they were in Europe, I ended up discovering it this year. I was looking for a way to bring them to Spain and a friend sent me the identification documents. I realized that they were in Europe, and that they were in Spain. The father had written that the mother, that is, me, was dead.“It was very hard to find out that, to know that he had said something like that when I was alive.”
In May, she managed to convince her ex-partner to allow her to spend five days with the children, who are now ten years old, the eldest, and eight years old, the twins. Tears well up in her eyes as she remembers How hard it was to go three years without seeing them“When I saw them, they told me not to go any more and I explained to them that I had to work. The older one offered me 50 euros so that I wouldn’t have to. I told him that I would go back, but that I couldn’t stay for the moment.” This is what she also wishes for Afghanistan, where she was also unable to stay.