Escape from Kabul: one woman’s perilous path to freedom

By Michael Ruffles

Arifa Hakimi safely in Australia.Credit:Janie Barrett

Arifa Hakimi sat down for her exam knowing the Taliban were coming. She was finishing her third year at the Marshal Fahim National Defence University, and before setting pen to paper at 9am had been told the resurgent Islamist forces were attacking the western part of Kabul where she trained with the Afghan National Army and were targeting the Hazara community to which she belonged. She struggled to focus on the questions in front of her.

“I was just thinking about the Taliban, that they were coming,” Arifa says. “What would be next? My family was not there. Most of the students, their families were not there, and they didn’t have any place to go.”

The one teacher who stayed behind was blunt: the students should finish only five of the 10 questions, return to their barracks, change out of their uniforms and leave. There was no time for anything else.

“By 11 o’clock they took the whole city.”

Arifa Hakimi made a daring escape from Afghanistan during the Taliban takeover.Credit:Janie Barrett

Arifa and a classmate walked for 90 minutes through the capital before reaching a basement in a safe house. It was August 15, 2021. The fall of Kabul was swift, but not entirely unopposed. Pockets of resistance kept the Taliban from ransacking the defence academy until the following day.

The insurgents tore through on the hunt for information about army staff and students and, in the economic collapse that followed, would pay desperate people to inform on their enemies. Arifa counted among the wanted: a modern woman who at nearly 24 had been given an education in Pakistan, competed at national level in taekwondo and joined the army on her return to Afghanistan. She had earned threats from the Pakistani Taliban for tutoring girls in English and training them in martial arts. Afghanistan was no longer safe, but the Taliban never found her.

Arifa regretted leaving photographs of her family in the barracks: her mother and sister in exile, a father missing and likely dead since the civil war, one brother killed by the Taliban, another in Melbourne after making a difficult journey to Australia as a teenager. It was to him she turned as the Taliban circled on the streets above.

In Melbourne, Bis Hakimi called everyone he thought might help his sister. A Deakin University master’s student and refugee advocate, he had found a mentor in former foreign minister Bob Carr. They had crossed paths because of Carr’s role as chair of the Crescent Foundation, an Islamic-based charity for refugee education and employment, and struck up a rapport.

Carr answered the call in Sydney and promised to help. Neither of them knew at the time, but rescuing Arifa from Afghanistan would turn into a three-month mission in which she narrowly avoided a deadly bombing at Kabul airport, resorted to disguising herself and hiding in safe houses, and faced a perilous border crossing. Top politicians, bureaucrats and diplomats would all be involved, along with a small band of advocates and friends of the Hakimi family in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Arifa Hakimi in uniform as a member of the Afghan National Army before the fall of Kabul.

Carr turned to Kristina Keneally in Canberra. Both former NSW premiers, Carr and Keneally lobbied Immigration Minister Alex Hawke about Arifa’s case.

“It was quite clear she was in considerable danger … if the Taliban had been able to locate her she was very clearly at risk,” Keneally says. “Given that her brother is here in Australia, it seemed natural that the Australian government should do what it could to protect her as it was doing to protect hundreds if not thousands of others in those frantic days.”

Keneally’s office put Arifa’s name “among the top of the pile”. She spoke repeatedly with Hawke and Department of Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo about the case, along with others her office had received.

”The message very clearly to me was ‘Kristina if you’ve got an urgent situation just let me know and we will get going’. That kind of clear, quick, non-partisan, ‘we’ve got an emergency let’s pull together and get the best outcome we can’ response truly is a very Australian response,” Keneally says. “This was at a level of urgency and danger that we don’t normally have to respond to in Federal Parliament.”

Arifa was among those granted a short-term temporary protection visa, the kind issued on the ground to get Afghans out of the country in the aftermath of the Taliban takeover. “That was our overwhelming concern, that she had the paperwork,” Keneally says.

The visa was one problem, but getting a passport into Arifa’s hands was an international operation. The Afghan embassy in Canberra issued one for her, and it was sent to her brother in Melbourne. Bis sent it to Lahore in Pakistan, and used trusted contacts to have it transported from there to Quetta, then across the border to Kandahar and on to the safe house in Kabul.

Arifa says she did not expect this level of help, but was aware of her brother’s efforts. “I was in contact with Bis, he was saying ‘I will do something for you’,” she says. “I was trying not to lose my hope. It was very difficult for me.”

On August 25, Arifa was ready to make her move to the airport. She took hours to reach a US checkpoint at the Abbey Gate. A US soldier told her there were no Australians to be found. She was unsure what to do.

The message filtered through to Carr, who was stunned. He felt he had to call the Prime Minister to tell him “we have got refugees desperate to get out of Kabul and names on a list” who could not get on a flight. The Immigration Minister answered Carr’s call.

“Hawke’s advice was clear: She must leave the airport,” Carr says.

There were credible reports of an imminent attack. Telephone connections to Arifa were patchy at the airport, but she received the warning and left. Shortly after she reached the safety of the basement, suicide bombers from the terrorist offshoot Islamic State-Khorasan Province struck the Abbey Gate, killing 13 US troops and more than 100 civilians.

A US Air Force image of the evacuation at evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, in the days before the bombing.Credit:AP

Carr says there was a lot of nail biting and tension until Bis confirmed Arifa was safe. “Alex Hawke couldn’t have been more helpful,” Carr says. “He took my call and he gave the warning about Arifa needing to leave that airport.”

Hawke’s office passed questions to the Department of Home Affairs, which declined to discuss Arifa’s case.

“While the arrivals and settlement of those who have departed Afghanistan is progressing, the welfare, privacy, safety and security of this cohort is our priority,” a departmental spokesperson said.

Between August 18 and 26, Australia evacuated about 4100 people on 32 flights from Kabul. A Home Affairs spokesperson said: “Australia’s military air evacuation operation in Afghanistan was one of the largest humanitarian airlift operations in our history.”

But Arifa Hakimi was not among them. Her flight would come three months later.

While hiding in Kabul, Arifa saw women suffer from the changes wrought by Taliban rule.

“They’re not letting women out, they say ‘you should go with a man’. They’re not letting girls get education,” she says. “They’re saying it’s not allowed in Islam that you can get an education, they’re saying you should sit at home and do the housework.”

Of those who staged protests in the early days of Taliban rule, Arifa knows of four prominent women who were made to disappear: “Even now it’s not mentioned [whether] they killed them or they’re alive or not.”

The Taliban have plunged Afghanistan into a human rights and humanitarian crisis, and an economic quagmire that has resulted in high unemployment and food shortages. David Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program, said in October: “We are on a countdown to catastrophe.”

Arifa Hakimi in 2016 with the three gold, two silver and one bronze medals she won at the National Games 2014-2015 and 2016.

While her country was unravelling, Arifa was hidden. Her next bid to escape began before 2am on November 13, a Saturday. Two men escorted her along the Nangarhar Highway to the Torkham international border point. They arrived about 6.45am, and a long wait began.

Arifa and her escorts stood outside all day, without food, unable to enter the immigration building because of the crowds. Taliban guards circled with guns, and would slap people with impunity. When night fell, her fear rose.

“Every moment I was just thinking I will not go from here alive.”

Several hours after the immigration office reopened on Sunday, Arifa made it to the front of the queue, only to be told her visa was not valid for a land border. Her escorts made it through to Pakistan but she was stranded.

A Taliban fighter stands guard on Afghan side of the border at Torkham last year. Credit:AP

Bis again raised the alarm with Carr, and Arifa’s Australian army swung into action. Carr credits the High Commissioner to Pakistan, Geoffrey Shaw, for moving quickly to correct the mistake. By the time Arifa was through, the Australian government had a car waiting to take her to Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.

“When I sat in the car and I looked around, I was so happy that now I am going to be safe.”

After a COVID test, Arifa and her escorts had their first meal in at least 36 hours. She felt shaky. A few days later she was in the air, bound for Darwin.

Arifa reunited with Bis in Melbourne, and this month they travelled to Sydney to visit Carr and others involved in the rescue. She is embarking on a double degree at Deakin, keen to resume taekwondo and wants to work part-time to help put the bad memories behind her.

Keneally says her heart lifted at seeing a photo of them in Sydney.

“She’s the hero of her own story, and the people who assisted her showed such bravery,” Keneally says. “I really feel that we did the easiest part. It was crucial she had that paper in her hand, but Arifa did the really heroic work to get herself out.”

Keneally lost sleep and MPs and their staff across the country put in long hours as they received real-time updates about the situation in Kabul.

“The real emotions come afterward, both in terms of those you’ve been successful in helping and those who were left behind,” she says. “One of my singular regrets is that there’s an orphanage full of mainly girls that we were trying very hard to get out and at the end of the day we weren’t successful. Those girls are with me every day. They’re in an orphanage, it’s an Australian-supported orphanage, and I don’t know what the future holds for them but I would like to hope there will come a point when the borders are open in Afghanistan … and we will be able to get those girls out.”

She adds: “Now that the immediate crisis of the taking of Kabul has passed, we’re confronted with a different Afghanistan. My hope is that nobody in government or the Australian community forgets that there are Australians who have family and friends still in the country.”

Arifa Hakimi with her brother Bis Hakimi is shown around Sydney by former foreign minister and NSW premier Bob Carr, whose advocacy was instrumental in rescuing Arifa from Afghanistan.Credit:Janie Barrett

Hawke announced in January an extra 15,000 places would be provided to Afghan nationals over four years through humanitarian and family visa programs. “This is a significant contribution to the international response to the ongoing humanitarian situation in Afghanistan and provides certainty on Australia’s ongoing commitment to resettling the most vulnerable Afghans,” a departmental spokesperson says.

Carr is delighted by the outcome, but is conscious they are difficult experiences for Arifa to speak of. “We’re so proud of you,” Carr tells her.

Arifa tells her story softly, at times through tears, as if amazed at the help she has received. “They took the hand of the people, they want to help the people. I was not expecting this because there the condition is no one is helping each other, everyone is just thinking about him or herself. I think it is very important that we should be helping each other. This is called life.”

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