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Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
A War Hero, Wounded Pride, and a Killing to Shame Us All
Four years after unsung war hero Abdul Rahman Waziri flew out of Kabul Airport to start a new life in America, his remains returned there in a coffin. The 31-year-old was shot to death by a Texas gunman on April 27 in a parking lot dispute. Waziri was unarmed, and his killer has so far escaped arrest by claiming self-defense. As Waziri was buried in an elegantly simple, stone-lined grave in the Barmal District of Paktika Province, his grief-stricken wife was 8,000 miles away in Houston with their two daughters, aged 4 years, and 9 months. The older girl was repeatedly asking a question that her family did not want to answer. 'Where is my dad?' When Waziri fled Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban had targeted him for torture and execution as a member of the Afghan National Mine Reduction Group (NMRG). This elite, highly trained unit cleared improvised explosive devices (IEDs) ahead of American Green Berets, whose missions from 2019 on were conducted entirely at night. The NMRG had demonstrated year after year, without Hurt Locker-style bomb suits, that the bravest acts are sometimes performed on hands and knees. Waziri had been on Team 7 and had disabled two dozen bombs before he became an instructor training NMRG replacements for those who died. His older brother, Abdullah Khan, was on Team 8 and disabled 40 bombs. Khan's 12-man unit lost three members. 'The hazards they undertook were immense,' former Green Beret Thomas Kasza told the House Foreign Affairs Committee last year. 'From 2015 onwards, 22 Green Berets died, compared to 47 NMRG members. We owe them and their families a debt.' During the chaos of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, Waziri took the time to establish safe houses for his comrades before he escaped to America. He had communicated while still in Taliban territory via encrypted messaging apps with Shireen Connor, a U.S.-based volunteer with an Afghan evacuation team. 'I really have tried to underscore the panic and level of danger that was present at the time,' she told the Daily Beast. 'He was a high-value Taliban target, and despite that, was still putting his life at risk to set up safe houses for other people to try and wait for potential evacuation.' She added, 'That really gave me a sense of who he was; someone who's willing to step forward and keep doing the right thing for other people, people he doesn't even know. A good person down to his core.' After arriving in America, Waziri went to work for a Houston security company. He settled into an apartment complex at 3400 Ocee Street with his wife, Malalai, and their two daughters. He was returning from the gym in his white Toyota Camry shortly after 9 p.m. on April 27 when he pulled over outside the apartment complex's mailboxes. He put on his hazard lights, apparently to signal that he was just pausing there and would proceed to a parking spot closer to his apartment after he collected his mail. He never got the chance. Surveillance footage shows that a black Kia pulled up moments later. But a carport roof obscured from the camera much of what followed in the minutes before a Houston police dispatcher put out a call for that address. 'Person shot is a male, gray shorts, gray shirt,' the dispatcher said. 'Caller is a male, black, striped shirt, blue pants. Gun is in his pocket.' The caller was the shooter. 'It's about a male trying to take over this parking spot, and he shot him,' the dispatcher added. Officers arrived moments later, where they saw the man in gray shorts and a gray shirt lying in the parking lot with gunshot wounds to his head, chest, and leg. 'This guy isn't moving or breathing,' a cop reported over the radio. An ambulance responded and rushed the unconscious Waziri to Ben Taub General Hospital. There, Abdullah Khan Waziri was pronounced dead. Back at the scene of the shooting, the caller surrendered his gun to the police. 'We've got one male detained,' a cop reported on the radio. 'Suspect's on scene. He says it's self-defense.' A sergeant called over the air for the usual ritual to begin: 'Do me a favor and start putting up yellow tape.' A cop responded, 'Yeah, this is going to be a homicide most likely.' In further keeping with standard procedure, the deceased's family was notified. Word reached 36-year-old Khan in Florida, where he had settled with another brother, Gul Shabar Gul, 44. Gul had served as an interpreter with the Americans. Khan and Gul flew together to Houston and arrived at the apartment complex the following morning. They saw Waziri's blood where he had fallen. Khan asked several residents if they had seen what happened. They seemed fearful and did not respond. 'I asked them to give me a bucket,' Khan recalled. Khan poured out bucketful after bucketful of water and borrowed a brush. He crouched down just like he and Waziri often had while finding and disabling IEDs with NMRG. He set to scrubbing away what remained of his younger brother's blood. 'It was, like, in between the cracks,' he told the Daily Beast. Khan became aware of a man who was casually walking back and forth nearby, carrying clothes and other belongings from an apartment complex to a car in the lot. A resident told Khan that this was the man who killed Waziri. The police had briefly handcuffed him when they responded to the scene of the shooting, but had quickly released him. He claimed he had acted in self-defense. The 'stand your ground law' in Texas allows private citizens to use deadly force to defend their person or property, and there is no duty to retreat. He now remained at liberty. 'He was normal, walking in front of me,' Khan recalled. 'He was not feeling like, 'I did this with his brother, I should not show my face.'' A retired Green Beret who learned of this disrespectful indifference and knew Khan's physical capabilities as a highly trained special forces operator marveled at his restraint. Khan simply finished scrubbing and went with Gul to the rental office. There, the brothers viewed the surveillance video from the time of the shooting. They saw Waziri's Toyota and then the gunman's Kia arrive and largely disappear from view. At one point, Waziri and a Black male from the Kia can be seen above the upper edge of the obscuring carport roof, speaking to each other and pointing. At another point, the other man's feet appear below the lower edge of the roof, moving toward the Kia and then quickly back toward Waziri and the Camry. What appears to be the man from the Kia then strides into full view in a striped shirt and blue shorts, almost be-bopping, as if he had nary a care. The detectives in charge of the case did not speak to the brothers until the day after they arrived. They declined to identify the gunman. They would only say that the case was under continuing investigation and any charging decisions would be made by the Harris County district attorney. The D.A.'s office would only say the investigation was ongoing. But while the police officer who responded to the shooting could be heard on the radio following the usual routine, there is some question about the detectives who then took the case. A spokesman for the Houston police department says the detectives have been conducting a thorough investigation from the very start. But a lawyer for Waziri's family says that he discovered a spent 9-mm Hornady Luger shell casing in the vicinity of the Camry that almost certainly should have been taken into evidence. The lawyer, Omar Khawaja, also says the detectives failed to conduct a full canvass for witnesses with an interpreter who could allow them to communicate with the numerous Afghans in the complex who do not speak English. Five days after the shooting, Khawaja brought a woman to the police who said she had witnessed the entire incident from the balcony of her second-floor apartment. Khawaja says she told them that after Waziri continued on toward the mailboxes, the other man began kicking the Camry. Waziri had turned back before he could get his mail, and there had been a verbal dispute that turned physical. As the woman told it, Waziri had quickly subdued the man without inflicting serious injury to anything but, perhaps, his pride. The man had gone to his car and gotten a gun, loading it as he headed back toward Waziri. The witness said Waziri raised his hands to signal 'don't shoot.' The man allegedly shot him three times and then walked off with an improbable bounce in his step. That a soldier such as Waziri would meet such an end was particularly heart-wrenching for Green Berets who served with him in Afghanistan. Retired Master Sgt. Ben Hoffman remembered that when he met Waziri, he had first been struck by the size of the 6-foot-4-inch, 230-plus-pound Afghan. Hoffman then came to know Wazari as a 'gentle giant' who, at his core, embraced the U.S. Army Special Forces motto De Oppresso Liber (To Free the Oppressed). 'It's not about conquering the enemy; it's about freeing people that are being conquered by the enemy,' Hoffman said, 'And he was all about De Oppresso Liber. He saw his own crew, men and the kids and the women being persecuted by the Taliban, and he wanted to see them free, which is why he was willing to go and crawl on his hands and knees to clear IEDs for us.' Hoffman went on, 'Crawling on hands and knees at night under night vision goggles, digging up IEDs that could kill American special forces and other Afghans. I definitely saw him on multiple occasions doing stuff like that. 'And then you get into contact with the enemy, and see him rear up and return fire, and then, come back to us, and we're fighting side by side.' He added, 'It's a story of a teammate that I definitely would have gone side by side with at the gates of hell.' Hoffman says he and Waziri shared a mindset. 'Which is, we are strong, we are trained, we are absolutely capable of destroying the enemy,' he said. 'But at the same time, we are calm, and we're able to see a situation and draw back and escalate or deescalate as needed.' That was Waziri. 'He was all about bringing peace to a situation, if he could.' In the meantime, Khan and Gul brought their brother's widow and children to Florida. 'My brother's wife, she's like, 'My husband was not a person to hurt anybody. My husband was always trying to save other people's lives,'' Khan told the Daily Beast. 'She was talking the whole night and day about that, and now she's panicking and doesn't know where she is. But then we spray water on her face… and then, she gets better.' The 9-month-old is too young to even remember her father, but the 4-year-old keeps asking for him. 'She's always asking, 'Where is he? When is he coming?'' Khan told the Daily Beast at the start of last week. 'And I'm like, 'He's in work. He's coming. He's doing (his) job right now.'' The family decided to hold off telling the girl the truth, partly because that would include telling her that, so far, nothing has happened to the man who shot her father. She had become only more insistent on Wednesday. 'She said, 'Tell my father to take me back to Texas,'' he reported. 'And I'm like, 'OK.'' He told the Daily Beast that he felt the time was nearing when he would have to tell her the truth. 'I will just say, 'He's not coming to you anymore, he is not with us anymore,'' Khan said. 'Maybe that's all I can say to her.' But over breakfast on Friday morning, the girl's mother told Khan to hold off. 'She said, 'No, just keep it like this, don't tell her,'' Khan told the Daily Beast. 'I said, 'One day, she needs to know.' [The wife] said, 'Yeah, but we can say, like, 'He's here, he's there.'' And maybe she forgets later on. And then I'm like, 'OK, whatever you say.'' Khan called the police and was told he could leave a message, as he had been instructed to do on at least five other occasions. He has yet to receive a call back. 'I've been calling so many times, and nobody responded, and my message is, 'I want to know where is the investigation and what's going on?'' Khan reported. 'So they said, 'Okay, she will call you back. I'm gonna take a note and leave it on her desk with your phone number.'' A spokesman for the district attorney was saying, 'We are still awaiting investigation results before making a decision.' Khawaja told the Daily Beast that he had heard that the district attorney will turn the matter over to the grand jury and let it decide whether the gunman should be charged. He said that the witness from the second-floor balcony had become so frightened after the gunman remained at liberty despite her account that she had left the country. But the police have her statement, and when Khawaja spoke to her, she told him she would still be willing to testify. 'I don't know what the mechanics of that look like in terms of getting her back over here,' he said. Khawaja added that there was supposedly a second witness who had been smoking a cigarette nearby at the time of the shooting, but he had apparently not come forward. He had likely also seen the police handcuff and immediately release the gunman. In the weeks since the shooting, Hoffman and other Green Berets have issued calls for justice. Reports of the shooting appeared in various news outlets, including local TV stations, the Daily Mail, People, the New York Post, and then in greater detail by NBC News. Shireen Connor wrote an impassioned letter to Houston Mayor John Whitmire describing Waziri's selfless courage. 'Always helping other people in the face of significant personal peril,' she wrote. 'How do you define a human being like this?' Whatever the authorities do or do not do, the 4-year-old daughter of that magnificent human will never see her daddy again.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
He Saved Americans' Lives in Afghanistan. Then an American Took His Life in Texas.
ON APRIL 27, 31-YEAR-OLD ADBUD RAHMAN WAZIRI was shot outside his apartment complex in Houston, where he lived with his wife and two young children. According to security camera footage, the shooter became frustrated when Waziri briefly double-parked in front of a mailbox to get his mail. Waziri's family's lawyer, Omar Khawaja, said the two men then engaged in a heated exchange before the shooter went back to his car to grab a weapon. With his hands raised, Waziri pleaded, 'Please don't shoot.' Seconds later, gunfire took his life. The shooter later called 911 on himself. When the police arrived, he surrendered his firearm, and law enforcement took him into custody—but then, after questioning him, the police released the shooter without charges. Houston District Attorney Sean Teare, who initially declined to bring charges, said he may reconsider convening a grand jury. 'Let's not kid ourselves: Had it been me or another American veteran killed over a parking spot, Sean Teare would have charged the shooter outright long ago,' Thomas Kasza, a former Green Beret and founder of the charity 1208 Foundation for Afghan veterans, told The Bulwark. Get the news that matters—independent, unafraid, honest. Become a Bulwark+ member. KASZA WAS REFERRING TO WAZIRI'S service with the American military, in which he saved countless American lives as a member of the elite National Mine Reduction Group (NMRG). American Green Berets trained NMRG members to preemptively detect mines, IEDs, and other explosive ordnance before the Green Berets and American Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technicians advanced. They went in first to protect not only the lives of Afghan local nationals but also their American brothers-in-arms. 'With a fairly high degree of confidence, I'd call sweeping IEDs during a special forces night raid the most dangerous job in Afghanistan,' said Kasza. NMRG was a 'family business,' whereby members were hired upon the recommendation of another member. Many NMRG members worked for nearly twenty years—almost long enough to qualify for a pension if they were American. However, as Afghan contractors, they received no such compensation. A Green Beret who requested anonymity for fear of retribution told The Bulwark, 'On missions where we drove, they were the lead vehicle, [or] often walking on foot in front of the vehicle and defusing or blowing up IEDs. On missions we flew to, they were the first ones off the helicopter, rushing into dusty uncertainty and leading the way for their American brothers.' Nearly twice as many NMRG members were killed in action as Green Berets between 2015 and 2021, according to Kasza. Consequently, many Green Berets have a deep respect and trust for these men, and NMRG members were the only Afghan service members officially permitted to carry weapons on American bases. According to one special forces soldier, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, they were 'a group that was recruited, trained, paid by, and fought with the U.S. Army Special Forces—and fought with such bravery' that if they were American, 'there would be a Medal of Honor ceremony once a month.' Waziri spent more than five years with the NMRG. Ben Hoffman, a Green Beret who served alongside him in 2019, told The Bulwark, 'He was a lion of a man but also one of the most gentle warriors I have ever seen.' He was so talented that he was selected to be an instructor—a role he held until NMRG members received their last paychecks in April 2021. Due to his close work with the U.S. military, Waziri had a price on his head when the Taliban retook Afghanistan. Despite the enormous target on his back, he worked tirelessly to create safe houses for fellow Afghans to survive until they could secure a ticket to safety. Due to his extensive service, Waziri's American special forces counterparts were able to initiate the process for him to obtain a Special Immigrant Visa. His flight to America departed just two hours before the ISIS-K attack on Hamid Karzai International Airport. Two months later, his wife and infant daughter joined him in Houston, where they put down roots and had a second child. Join now NOW WAZIRI'S WIDOW AND THEIR CHILDREN, 4 years old and 9 months old, have fled the state out of fear of living near the gunman. The inaction of the Houston Police Department and the prosecutor's office has left the Afghan refugee community feeling rattled with fear and despair. 'We want answers,' Hamid Yousafi, a former special immigrant visa and current green card holder who resides in Houston, told The Bulwark. Why is a cold-blooded murderer running wild? . . . How can we tell our children that following the rules will not get them in trouble?' 'I'm a lawyer. I understand how these cases unfold. . . . There's no reason why we don't even have the assailant's name,' Hajji Omar, an Afghan-American citizen in Houston, told The Bulwark. Frustrated and seeking answers, members of the Afghan community have protested at the Houston Police Department in hopes that the police will give the case the attention it deserves. Share
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘I think it's here': Uprooted Afghan family settles in Chicago after being rescued ahead of refugee program suspension
The route to Kilmer Elementary School is about a mile and a half each way for Hamid Azizi, who heads out every afternoon to walk his daughters home. What would seem like a mundane activity for most is a joyous occasion for the father of seven, who arrived in Chicago a little more than a month ago. The 30-minute walk has been Azizi's easiest journey in many years. At the start of the summer of 2021, his family fled its village in Afghanistan, moving quickly and often to evade the Taliban, which swiftly took control after United States armed forces began withdrawing from the region following a 20-year war. 'We were very, very worried about our situation,' Azizi, who speaks Dari, told the Tribune through a translator on a recent Tuesday afternoon at his apartment in the North Side neighborhood of West Ridge. 'Once the Americans left, we could not live in our own city where we grew up or in the other cities that I went to (with U.S. troops) because if anybody knew me and saw me, just to get some credit, they would tell the Taliban, 'This man worked with Americans.' I had to keep moving.' Azizi, 41, is one of thousands of Afghans who were waiting to resettle in the U.S. after being promised safety and relocation for serving alongside American troops as a member of the National Mine Removal Group, or NMRG. He assisted U.S. special forces in various zones in Afghanistan from 2017 until 2021, and received a Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, intended to facilitate the resettlement of individuals who have risked their lives by collaborating with the U.S. government. Despite the stamp cemented in his passport for years, Azizi and his family had to find help on their own, and be rescued by organizations such as No One Left Behind after President Donald Trump's inauguration added a sense of urgency. Days after taking office, Trump signed an executive order that suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, pausing foreign aid and ending operations of U.N. organizations such as the International Organization for Migration that were vital for processing refugees. The administration also suspended government programs that buy flights for refugees who have SIVs. 'We found ourselves in this interesting situation where you had Special Immigrant Visa holders who were still being processed, but there were no flights for them to travel on because they basically had to buy their own flights,' said Andrew Sullivan, executive director of No One Left Behind, a nonprofit focused on evacuating Afghan and Iraqi SIV applicants to safety. 'For many of these folks, they left their lives behind in Afghanistan. Many of them have been sitting on a State Department processing platform in either Albania or Qatar. It's not like they can work there. They really just don't have the finances to buy flights.' Sullivan said the executive order thwarted thousands of families' prospects for resettlement, a process that often takes years. And many of those families, like Azizi's, have been on the run. Within a month of U.S. troops leaving, Azizi had to flee from Parwan, his home province where the U.S. military had a significant presence. His wife and six daughters —his son, the youngest of seven children, wasn't yet born — kept a few essential items and hid in homes of various relatives in nearby provinces and villages, staying mere weeks or days at a time. '(The relative whose home we were staying in) would say 'don't leave, because (the Taliban) are all over the village. Don't go out, because they're going to get you. You're safe in the house until they find you,'' Azizi recalled. 'But after that, (the relative) said we couldn't stay anymore because it was dangerous for them, and then in two, three days, we went to another relative's house, which was by the river.' With the Taliban rapidly taking over rural areas, Azizi said his family went to the bordering city of Kabul, the country's capital, 'because it had not fallen yet.' Azizi's wife, Fahima, knew a family in Kabul who took them in for a couple months. But on Aug. 15, 2021, the Taliban seized control of Kabul, signaling a full recapture of Afghanistan. Civilians soon swarmed Kabul's main international airport hoping to evacuate. Azizi said his family attempted to get on a plane out of Kabul. 'We were one of the people that went to the airport. They were flying everywhere and there were barriers and everything. But my younger daughter, Zhra, stayed behind. I couldn't take it that my daughter won't have a family, won't have a father, a mother. I can't just go and leave her behind,' Azizi said. 'We all went back from the airport. We got her, and from there we stayed but at that time we knew the Taliban said, 'We have forgiven everybody, blanket forgiveness — but not for people who worked for the Americans.'' Will Reno, a professor at Northwestern University, said the images out of Kabul's airport were a stark representation of America's frantic departure from a country it occupied for 20 years. 'That first day or two was chaos when there were people on the airfield grabbing onto the landing gear of the aircraft — that got that very bad, politically, pictures like that,' said Reno, who was a contractor for the Department of Defense while the U.S. was involved in Afghanistan. Reno said in the days following the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban takeover, there was a rush to get high-priority groups such as military intelligence and Afghan special forces that trained American soldiers onto evacuation aircrafts. He explained that President Joe Biden's administration was late in getting a system in place that would effectively vet and process all SIV holders and their families, leaving many, like Azizi, to flee, as the situation with the Taliban became increasingly dangerous for them. Despite the desperate circumstances, Azizi shared fond memories of working with U.S. troops. 'Those times were our best memories; they were like our brothers,' Azizi said. 'We will eat together, either on the floor, or if we find a table, we'll all sit together. If, God forbid, one of us got injured or something like that, we all would get together, be around him like a family. So the relationship was very nice, very beautiful and brotherly.' As a member of the National Mine Removal Group, Azizi's team was the first line of defense for American soldiers, clearing hazardous devices off a battlefield and seeking out snipers trying to target U.S. troops. Azizi said there were several teams of NMRG personnel stationed across the war zone. One of his friends was a guard with the NMRG and immigrated to the U.S. on an SIV years before the war ended, when the U.S. still had an embassy in Afghanistan. In Kabul, Azizi's family continued moving around, hiding in homes of friends and acquaintances. This went on for several months, Azizi said. The family finally found a reason for optimism after connecting with the 1208 Foundation, a nonprofit providing immigration assistance to the surviving members of the NMRG. The organization helped the Azizi family cross into the last leg of its tireless run and eventually paved the way for No One Left Behind to link up with Azizi's family. Eventually, Azizi's family left Kabul for Islamabad, Pakistan, where they lived for 11 months. Through a website launched by No One Left Behind, Azizi was able to fill out an online form to share his visa status and resettlement plans. They didn't have much in terms of money or food, 'but plenty of hope,' Azizi said. Life on the run was especially hard on Fahima, who gave birth to her son, Mohamad, at home without medical care, all while caring for her six other children. In January, No One Left Behind helped Azizi and his family fly to Doha, Qatar, where the organization had sent many Afghans and Iraqis who have already immigrated to the U.S., many through the SIV program, to help facilitate the process. The endgame was America, but Azizi said he knew the 'situation with Trump' was not ideal for refugees seeking asylum. Anticipating even more upcoming limitations for Afghans, and the looming threat of the Trump administration introducing a travel ban that could restrict their entry, No One Left Behind urgently started tapping into existing infrastructure and raised money to buy flights for families and individuals in places such as Albania and Qatar. Between Feb. 1 and March 17, the group said it successfully booked flights for 659 Afghans. And since they began this 'all-out sprint,' Sullivan said, No One Left Behind has spent $1.5 million on 1,300 flights for stranded Afghans with a U.S. visa. 'Life is not easy for people who just come from one place to another place, especially for kids,' Azizi said, looking around his new home. 'We were very, very happy when they told us, especially when we're leaving the (hotel) room and there was a bus to take us to the airport. It was a different feeling … we are really going right now.' After 50 days in Doha, Azizi's family got on a flight to Chicago. No One Left Behind covered the cost of their one-way flights from Doha International Airport to O'Hare International Airport. 'When they told us we are going to take you all, buy tickets for all of you, and you don't have to pay it back — wow, (we asked) how is that going to be possible?' Azizi said. 'We couldn't believe it.' In West Ridge, a volunteer from No One Left Behind comes by weekly to help the family with chores or tasks that require an English speaker. She carries around an English/Dari phrasebook and flips through it regularly, but uses the Google Translate app for faster communication. She helped set up Azizi's three-bedroom apartment off Devon Avenue, furnished with just enough: two comfortable couches, a dining table with six chairs, a bookshelf fashioned into a shoe rack stacked with tiny sandals and sneakers. There isn't a TV, so Azizi's cellphone is typically where his youngest children, Mohamad and Hfsah, watch cartoons on YouTube. Azizi laughed that his phone is not his anymore. Although No One Left Behind offers resettlement assistance to several of the refugees it helps, Sullivan said the group prefers sending its families and individuals to cities in America where they know someone — even just a friend. If there isn't any contact person, the group will send Afghans to areas with a higher volume of Afghan refugees, such as Sacramento, San Francisco or the greater Washington, D.C., area, so there's a sense of community and shared language. In Azizi's case, he got in touch with his friend from the NMRG who resettled in Chicago while the U.S. was still in Afghanistan. The friend invited the family to stay at his home for a couple weeks, then borrowed $3,000 to give to Azizi to secure a month's rent for their apartment. The No One Left Behind volunteer set up a GoFundMe for Azizi's family to help raise money that could go toward rent and basic necessities. The situation for Afghans has become more fragile in some of the places where many have temporarily sheltered, like Azizi's family did in Pakistan. Having hosted millions of refugees, Pakistan has recently increased deportations. And an agreement that made Albania a way station for Afghans expired in March, Sullivan said. Sullivan said for individuals like Azizi who have SIV status, going back to Afghanistan was not an option. 'If they got deported, they would, by definition, go back to a Taliban-controlled immigration checkpoint and fly back into Kabul, where they would be greeted by Taliban immigration authorities who would see their passport and see a U.S. visa in it,' he said. 'We very much worry that it would very much open them up to questioning at the very least, and at the worst, detention, torture and possibly murder from the Taliban.' During the final months of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, an American documentary film crew followed the intimate relationship between American Green Berets and the Afghan officers they trained. Since its release in 2022, the film 'Retrograde' faced criticism for failing to protect the identities of its subjects, leading to the killing of one of the Afghan men by the Taliban. Earlier this month, the Hollywood Reporter wrote that the man's family is suing the producers and distributors of the documentary, including Disney and National Geographic, faulting them for the man's death. Azizi said he was also featured in the film and knew of the man who was killed by the Taliban. Had he not found his way out, Azizi said, he might have faced a similar fate, or would have had to endure the harsh restrictions of Taliban rule. Fahima would not be allowed to work or move freely, and their six daughters wouldn't be allowed post-secondary education. When he drops his daughters off at school and picks them up — both times on foot — he said he often thinks about all the what-if's. His 14-year-old daughter Surya has dreams of becoming a doctor. His youngest daughter, Hfsah, 4, wants to be a hairstylist. Roya, 13, would love to be a teacher. When the girls enrolled at Kilmer, the culture shock and language barrier made going to school dreadful. But now, Azizi said, he watches them run up to their teachers in the morning and looks on as they're immediately enveloped in a hug. 'I'm super proud and full of happiness,' he said. While fleeing from place to place, Azizi said, the family often took pictures to capture the memories of being in each location. Even though circumstances were far from ideal, he said they were together, safe, healthy. It was worth capturing. They have pictures in Pakistan, in Doha, and now in Chicago, as they traverse the new neighborhood curiously. A few weeks ago, Azizi said, as he was taking a selfie with his children, his daughter Sarah, 7, turned to him and asked, 'Baba, where are we going next?' Azizi wiped his tears as he recounted that moment. 'Because we were leaving every city, going to different places, my little girl was thinking maybe America is not home as well,' Azizi said. 'I said, Sarah jaan, we are not going anywhere. I think it's here.'
