Once they arrived, the passengers were detained for several hours. Some of them had firearms and many did not have passports or visas.
After she was released, Ms. Sahar contacted a few friends and booked a flight to Northern Virginia. She arrived at Dulles International Airport on Aug. 17, just before thousands of Afghan evacuees arrived in the next few weeks.
Since then, she has been staying in a spare room in her friend’s apartment in nearby Arlington. The walls are mostly bare and the closet is nearly empty, except for a few shirts and pairs of pants her friends bought her.
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Security workers at her apartment building in Kabul, where several government officials lived, have told her that the Taliban have come four times. Most recently, 21 people from the Red Unit, an elite force, showed up. The Taliban have also visited her office three times, leaving messages with her colleagues saying they would give her amnesty if she returned and transferred power to a new head of the education authority she ran. But Ms. Sahar and many others have grown skeptical, given the increasing reports of detentions, disappearances and executions at the hands of the Taliban.
“The strength of your word is something I no longer believe in,” Ms. Sahar said.
Ms. Sahar, a U.S. permanent resident, hopes to get a job in Virginia. She came to America in 2002, graduating from Roger Williams University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She worked in Washington for a year before returning to Afghanistan in 2009.
She does not know when she will be able to fly her children to the United States. For now, she is submitting job applications and calling her children every night to read them a bedtime story.
Even though she fears retaliation, she hopes to return to Afghanistan. Staying in America permanently, despite its security, is not an option, she said.