Four years on, exile has become a state of being and resistance for me and a global cohort of Afghan human rights defenders, journalists, civil society leaders, and educators. Those of us in exile carry two intertwined burdens: the grief of displacement and the longing to return, and the enduring responsibility to act. We share the same unfinished goal: to reclaim democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in Afghanistan.
On August 15, 2021, my wife, Shaharzad Akbar, the former chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, and I, along with our two-year-old son, boarded the last commercial flight out of Kabul’s airport. It was a FlyDubai flight, scheduled to depart at 10:30 a.m. As the plane took off, I looked out of the window and saw the familiar crisp Afghan skies extending into the distance. It would be the last time I would see those vistas.
When we landed in Dubai a few hours later, news broke that the Afghan government had collapsed and President Ghani had fled the country. The Taliban were in control of Kabul.
Guilt arrives before grief. As dire report after report filtered out of Afghanistan, our new apartment in Istanbul became an improvised command centre. Nights blurred into mornings as my wife and I sat hunched over our laptops, filling out evacuation forms for activists, journalists, and civil society leaders still trapped inside Afghanistan. Every list had its own format, and every process had its own bureaucratic requirements.
Our two-year-old slept in the next room, sometimes rubbing his eyes as he wandered out, sensing tension in the air. His tiny presence was our only hope in a sea of desperation.
After the fall of the country, small groups of brave Afghan women took to the streets, holding placards and chanting for the right to work, learn, and exist. As predicted, the Taliban responded with arrests, beatings, and worse.
I will never forget the night my wife woke me at 2 a.m., sobbing. A young female protestor had been detained. We later learnt that hundreds like her were sexually abused by the Taliban, and their families threatened if they spoke to the media. That news made us desperate; we couldn’t sleep. We sat in our living room, discussing what we could do. And somewhere between those words and the silence that followed, I made a decision: We would fight back. We will launch a resistance from exile against oppression in Afghanistan.
The “reformed Taliban 2.0,” a version that the Americans sold before the takeover in August 2021, was a myth. They had not reformed; they had become more efficient in their cruelty and more barbaric in their oppression. My wife, Shaharzad Akbar, established an organisation, Rawadari, which has since documented their atrocities in painstaking detail. This was not a regime to be accommodated. It was a regime to be resisted — not with guns, but with the stubborn tools of civil resistance and disobedience through the use of Gandhian methods and persistence.
Afghanistan’s democratic experiment may have been fragile but it was real. In the two decades before 2021, we had one of the most progressive constitutions in the region. We had institutions designed to protect human rights, systems to hold leaders accountable, and a generation of young people — especially women — who believed that education was a right, not a privilege.
All of it was dismantled by the Taliban within weeks. But our aspirations remain.
The fight now is not only to survive in exile but to keep alive the vision of an Afghanistan where girls walk freely into classrooms, where women serve in government without fear, where ethnic and religious minorities are protected, and where laws are not instruments of oppression but shields against it.
This is why, in early 2023, I co-founded the Hamrah Initiative. “Hamrah” in Persian means “sharing a path.” Our aim was simple: to build the resilience of Afghan civil society organizations to survive, adapt, and continue their work. Since then, we have been supporting a cohort of organisations that run underground schools for girls, provide legal aid to women and returnees, offer online classes, and mentor young leaders who may one day rebuild democracy in the country.
It is not glamorous work. For us and our cohort, there are no frontlines in this kind of battle but rather long nights, encrypted calls, and the constant awareness that a single leak could destroy months of effort. But it is work that matters. For now, we must hold the line and keep alive the hopes of millions of Afghans.
This time, airstrikes or foreign armies will not liberate Afghanistan. It will be reclaimed by the persistence of its people — by teachers who teach in secret, by journalists who report from secret locations, and by activists who refuse to be silent. What the world can do to help is to stand in solidarity with us, to offer continued support to brave activists inside and outside the country, and help us keep the vision of a democratic Afghanistan alive.
Timor Sharan is co-founder and director of Hamrah Initiative.
