The Lovers

by Rod Nordland

  Later we would learn that the police arrived at Haji and Zahra’s that evening, only hours behind us. They might well have passed us on the road, lost to sight in the dust swirls our cars stirred up.

  On the long drive down to Nayak Bazaar, we had time to talk with the couple about their flight so far, and I asked if it had been worth it, escaping from the women’s shelter and eloping. “Yes, it’s worth it because we love each other,” Ali said.

  “If we had only had one day together, it would have been worth it,” Zakia said. “How can I be sad? We’re together. I’m with my love.”

  One thing that became clear talking to both of them was that their time on the run had convinced them they had no long-term future in their own country; they said they had decided that their ultimate solution would be to flee abroad.

  Then Jawad and I swapped cars, letting the photographers have some time with Zakia and Ali for the rest of the ride. Ben was happy to interview and video them inside the car, but Diego wanted them outside again, against the dramatic backdrop of the barren mountain landscape.

  “Look, Diego, we’re on the run,” I said. “The cops are searching for them. Half the country is talking about them. You can’t possibly shoot them outside the car.”

  He was insistent, and I finally gave in a little. “But only if the road is empty and then only for three minutes, no more.”

  Our car was in front, some distance ahead of them, and when we arrived on the outskirts of Nayak Bazaar, we realized that the second car with Zakia, Ali, Ben, and Diego inside was nowhere to be seen and was a lot more than three minutes behind us. We doubled back, only to find Diego posing them on top of a hillock, a fair walk from the road but in clear view of anyone who came along. I often wonder how differently it all would have ended if they’d been captured there and then by that carload of police on their way back from where we’d just been, because one of us had been too journalistically eager for yet another piece of the story.

  I took over the lovers’ car and banished Diego to the other one. We carried on into the town, dropping the couple at the top of a side street that headed off into the mountain up a jeep track. It was nearly dark. Another two hours’ walk from there would take them to a safe house, one they had used once before, and after that they would set off across the mountains for Wardak, now that they had enough money to find a driver with a jeep, and then find buses to take them to southern Ghazni Province, to one of the Hazara communities in that otherwise dangerous province. Ben Solomon wanted to follow them.

  “Out of the question,” I said. “How could they possibly escape with a big white American tagging along?”

  My story ran in the Times three days later, on April 22, along with the video15 by Ben on our website, and Diego’s stills,16 which were so good that his presumptive perfidy had to be forgiven. The cumulative effect was to take a terrific story that already had generated a great deal of interest and increase that manifold.

  The print story17 had a suitably nonspecific dateline, “HINDU KUSH RANGE, AFGHANISTAN,” a large area that traversed more than a third of the country. It ended:

  They hoped to be hundreds of miles away by Saturday morning, but were not sure which way they would go. The road to the north went through Taliban country. To the west, bandit country, where they risked being robbed—or worse. The road to the south went over passes still blocked by snow.

  There was no road east, but they could always walk.

  That was a bit of protective obfuscation. Their real plan was to wait for the snows to melt to the south and then make it over the passes to Wardak Province: Taliban country but also Hazara country. Before they took their leave, I told them I didn’t think they could keep hiding in these barren, unforested mountains; every stranger was a subject of suspicion. Two youthful strangers in love and on the run were a red flag.

  “Give it a few weeks, then come to Kabul,” I said. With five million people in the city, there had to be somewhere they could find to disappear among them. But then what right did I have to be giving Zakia and Ali advice?

  6

  MYSTERY BENEFACTOR

  Zakia and Ali were saved again and again by the kindnesses of strangers. Villagers who sheltered them on the run. Passersby who spotted them and chose not to call the police. Journalists who wrote about them and made it harder to dispose of them—not just ourselves but also many Afghan journalists who had picked up the story. Women’s advocates who lobbied on their behalf in the face of official disapproval. Then there were the strangers all over the world, but particularly in the United States, who were moved enough by their story to try to do something about it, readers who both encouraged and sometimes shamed me into keeping on their case and later became contributors whose money, mostly in modest donations, kept the couple going. When you’re on the run, poverty is a potent enemy.

  There were hundreds of such readers who reached out. An American named Walker Moore wondered if he couldn’t pay a bride price that would make Zakia and Ali’s match acceptable to both their families; Walker Moore turned out to be a nom de pinceau of two collaborative painters, John Walker and Roxann Moore; the Zakia-and-Ali story reminded them of their own union, which had been bitterly opposed by Roxann’s conservative Southern Baptist family in Texas, Mr. Walker said. Adele Goldberg, a professor of psychology at Princeton University, offered to make a donation to help relocate the couple. Dr. Douglas Fleming, a physician and cancer researcher from Princeton, offered to donate a hundred dollars a month to them for a year to cover their expenses on the run, and his later donations proved critically helpful. E. Jean Carroll, who wrote a relationship advice column for Elle magazine and also runs a matchmaking service, Tawkify.com, offered them “airfare to the US, a chaperone for Zakia, and a place for them to stay”—until they were married. She, too, later sent money that helped in their escape. Beth Goodman also offered to host them in the United States. Many had vaguer but also heartfelt requests. “I’m French, I’m a woman and I live on the same planet,” wrote Louisa Roque. “How can we help their parents to open their minds and hearts?”

  The response went ballistic after we finally had both photographs and video of them together to accompany the words. It was gratifying that we’d touched a nerve and moved so many people. I no longer felt that this was a case that lay outside the boundaries of hope. At the same time, it was frustrating. Helping Zakia and Ali stay on the run was no more sustainable in the long term than many of the other things that well-intentioned Westerners have been doing for Afghans, whether paying them salaries ten times the Afghan norm1 or providing their military with steeply subsidized fuel, much of it diverted to the black market.2 There was little that anyone could do to help the couple in any permanent way unless a government stepped in and made it possible for them to leave their country. For those countries that might have been so inclined, that was politically difficult—in part because of popular backlashes against immigration in many Western countries and in part because so many of those countries needed to show skeptics back home that Afghanistan was improving on human rights and merited their continued national investment. With criminal charges hanging over the lovers, it became diplomatically awkward and contradictory for countries that had donated so much money to rule-of-law development work in Afghanistan to then turn around and say they had no confidence in the Afghan justice system, however many flat-earthers wielded its gavels. The United States alone had by 2014 spent more than $1.2 billion on rule-of-law programming3 to do things like train judges and promote equal rights for women.

  President Hamid Karzai could always choose to step in and pardon them or order the charges dropped. But this was even more of a long shot; Karzai’s wife, an obstetrician before their marriage, had rarely been seen in public afterward and no longer practiced her profession.4 Once seen as a champion of women’s rights, Mr. Karzai was now widely viewed by most women’s activists as having betrayed their cause.

  While there was little these readers could do to help the
couple directly, their money could buy some breathing room, and it soon began accumulating in the account of Women for Afghan Women5 after I began answering reader mail with this note:

  Dear Readers,

  Pardon the impersonal e-mail but so many people have written me about the Afghan lovers that I can’t answer everyone right away, although I aim to do so eventually.

  Many of you have asked how you could help and, previously, I haven’t had a satisfactory answer.

  However, now a well-respected and long-established organization, Women for Afghan Women, has decided to start a fund dedicated to assisting the couple. The group’s executive director, Manizha Naderi, has assured us that 100 percent of any donations to that fund will be passed directly to the couple.

  … .

  I feel sure that WAW has the means and the capacity to get donations to them personally.

  With warm regards,

  Some people had taken the initiative even earlier and sent money to a trusted accountant to deliver to Zakia and Ali, which, I had quietly had assured a few of the more persistent among them, would be a safe way to do it. Before that money could clear from the bank for the accountant to deal with, however, we had rushed off to our rendezvous with Zakia and Ali up in the mountains in Yakawlang, so it had been my own money I gave them, telling myself I was just fronting it temporarily. WAW later made donations to them easy and efficient, and the group was beyond any reproach; it was undoubtedly the most effective NGO in Afghanistan fighting for women’s rights on a basic, practical level and the biggest operator of women’s shelters.6 WAW’s seven main shelters are in some of the country’s most difficult areas. It also runs family-reconciliation and counseling centers and homes for children whose mothers are in prison. Eventually the Times ran a notice on its website telling people how they could donate to help the couple. The money that came in was not huge, a few thousand dollars, partly because I advised donors who asked how much to give that large sums of money were not necessary and might be distorting or cause problems in their own right. In Afghan terms the donations were adequate to keep the couple alive and help finance a safe place for them to hide. I suspect this was the first time the New York Times had in effect encouraged its readers to send money to criminal fugitives, which is technically and legally what Zakia and Ali were, however bogus the charges against them. Editors in New York were as moved by the story of the Afghan lovers as everyone else was.

  If only we could find Zakia and Ali to let them know about all these offers of help. For quite a while, they were not aware that a fund-raising drive was under way on their behalf. Since we had left them in Nayak Bazaar in late April, there had been no word from them at all, and Ali’s phone went unanswered, sounding not so much as a lovesick ringtone. His father and brothers said they had heard from him and thought he was in Ghazni Province or maybe Wardak, they weren’t sure. He called them when he had a signal; they couldn’t really call him, and of course nor could we. I was beginning to think that they had gone ahead and fled to Iran, and if they had, the story ended there—my story and possibly their story. Iran would be a dead end in almost every respect. While there are 950,000 legally registered Afghan refugees in Iran, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees7 the real number is as much as three times that, most of them living there illegally.8 The Iranian government has long since stopped granting refugee status to new arrivals, so all those who have arrived in recent years are undocumented illegals, without even the limited rights afforded refugees and guaranteed by international conventions and United Nations agencies. They cannot legally work, have no civil rights, cannot send their children to school—and could never be legally resettled to a third country.9 At any moment they could be forcibly deported back to Afghanistan, and they often are. Some are killed and their bodies returned to the nearest border post with no explanation from the Iranian authorities. For Afghan refugees, just getting to Iran could be a dangerous crossing through forbidding deserts, far worse than anything Mexican and Central American immigrants face in the American Southwest. And since an American journalist could not follow refugees to Iran, there would likely be nothing more I could do for them and little more to write about them. The only thing Iran had in its favor as a destination was language; Farsi or Persian, the language spoken in Iran, and Dari, which Ali and Zakia spoke, are nearly as mutually intelligible as British and American English.

  Finally, late in April, Ali called us; they could be in Kabul the next day, he said, if it was okay with us. He wanted assurances they would be safe there, and we told him that the big city could give them anonymity they would never find elsewhere, and there was donor money waiting to help them with expenses. Two days later Zakia and Ali arrived with his brother Bismillah and moved into the home of his aunt, his father’s sister, who lived not far from the old city in central Kabul, in a neighborhood of squatters’ buildings erected on the steep slopes of the Chindawul Hill.

  Historically, Kabul had been settled on a flat plateau with several small mountains that jut up singly from the plain, but in the past decade its population had increased from less than a million to more than 5 million residents, and squatters had moved higher and higher on the steep slopes of places like Chindawul that were once viewed as uninhabitable, carving small plots out of the rock and filling the reclaimed space with slapdash cinder-and mud-block constructions.

  With no services but electricity, if that, such homes were cheaper the higher up the hill they were located. The aunt’s house was a one-room shack made of mud brick and concrete, reached by a fifteen-minute climb up an already steep dirt path, which soon becomes so steep that it’s replaced by a nearly vertical stone staircase, with two hundred fifty steps to reach the aunt’s house. The entire dwelling was no bigger than an American-size bedroom, with a primitive latrine and a gas burner and a bowl for a kitchen; a curtain hung across the room to give the couple some privacy. They stowed their few possessions, mostly just clothing, in the plastic bags they’d carried them in; at first they didn’t even have mattresses to sleep on, just fake-bamboo mats. The nearest water was at the foot of the hill, and they hauled it in a pair of big plastic jerry cans, like those used for gasoline, slung across their shoulders at either end of a stout stick.

  Although Chindawul was a safely Hazara neighborhood, Jawad and I decided not to draw attention to Zakia and Ali by meeting them there. Instead we arranged to meet Ali alone, reasoning that they were easier to recognize as a couple than singly. We would pick him up outside the Pamir Cinema, at the foot of the hill, one of the few places he knew in the city. Half an hour before the meeting, Ali called to tell us his brother Bismillah had gone ahead to the meeting place to check it out and saw one of Zakia’s older brothers on the street nearby. Did we know anything about that?

  Of course we didn’t, but our meeting was canceled and Ali again stopped answering his phone when we called. Another week went by before we were able to make a meeting happen, and then only by calling his father and persuading him that we had no reason to expose them to risk; spotting the brother there was just bad luck—or good luck that they saw him first and not the other way around. If that brother was in Kabul, he was probably working as a day laborer, and the Pamir Cinema is a common meeting place for laborers looking for day work, so in the future it would probably be a good place for us to avoid.

  The night before, E. Jean Carroll, the advice columnist, had emailed to let me know she had done something that had never occurred to me would work—she sent money to Ali via Western Union. She gave me the coded number of the money wire to pass along to him so he could collect it. We relayed the details via Anwar, hoping that the prospect of receiving money would reassure Ali we were on his side.

  I let Rabbi Shmuley know that Ali had come to Kabul, as I did several of the other well-wishers. Shmuley activated the fixer we had found him, Aimal Yaqubi, but Aimal had no more luck getting through to Ali than we had earlier. While we were waiting to meet with Ali, though, Shmuley had come up wi
th a plan. He was outraged at how hard this had become. He’d gone straight to Samantha Power, the United States representative to the United Nations, and tried to persuade her that she had to push the American government to save the couple. By his account she had in turn persuaded the U.S. secretary of state, John Kerry, to try to do something, but despite their efforts both finally had come to the conclusion that they could not force the American government to change its policies and issue the couple a humanitarian visa to save them from persecution. With criminal charges against them, and the United States supposedly an ally of Afghanistan, taking them directly out of the country would mean using the visa system to help Afghans escape their own, American-financed criminal-justice system. They would have to resolve their case first, legally, or they would have to get to another country and apply for a visa there, a process that Shmuley said he was told would take them six months or more even with Samantha Power behind it.