The Silent Screams Continued
My Sister's Life is In Danger
Editor’s Note: Hello, Zmoong Andiwallan (Our People). Below is a heartbreaking story from an Afghan friend whose sister & The Afghan American Veterans Alliance are trying to rescue them. There are options to contribute below. This is a tough case that will take years. We could use all the help we can get.
Two months ago, my sister was found in a hospital in Kabul, barely breathing, her silence echoing the same pain I had witnessed once before. It feels like the continuation of a nightmare—one that began the day I placed her in that so-called safe house, ignoring my friend Will's warning. At that moment, the helplessness comes rushing back as though history is folding in on itself. I received a call in the dead of night from an unknown number. The voice on the other end babbled, telling me my sister had been admitted, unconscious and in critical condition. She had given him my number before collapsing. That’s all he knew.
By the time I spoke with her, she was out of surgery. They had removed her appendix, which had ruptured, and she lay motionless on the hospital bed. Bruises covered her body. “Twenty, maybe more,” the doctor told me. Some were raw and swollen like angry welts, others fading into sick shades of yellow and purple. They look like a map of violence, tracing every place she had been struck, held down, or thrown. Her body speaks the truth of what has been done to her, even when her lips cannot. When I Facetimed her, her face was hollow, her lips cracked and pale. I could barely recognize her.
The weight of what happened presses on me again, pulling me back to the moment I had chosen that house. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I remember the desperation I felt, how Will had told me, “This isn’t safe—not with those connections.” I didn’t listen. I trusted strangers who promised security, people I later suspected of collaborating with the Taliban or ISIS to kidnap her, their allegiances a shadow I couldn’t see clearly. That decision haunts me now, a bitter reminder that I failed her when she needed me most.
It feels unreal to speak to her over the phone. My mother blames herself between sobs, asking what kind of world has made her daughter a ghost. My uncle swears vengeance on anyone responsible, his voice shaking with rage. Others in the family whisper dark theories—that she has run away and may have chosen this fate to escape her torment. Some relatives suspected she had committed suicide. The latter felt real because she had attempted to kill herself by eating several sleep tablets at a time or swallowing mouse-killing poison. But none of them knew what I knew—that I sent her to that place. Each voice, each accusation, cut me more deeply as I sat helplessly, oceans away in the US, knowing precisely what had happened. The ISIS or the Taliban, maybe the same people who assaulted her in the first place, had taken her from me.
Every time I speak to her via phone, a cold thread barely connects me to her suffering. I feel ashamed that I have failed her. Plus, I’m not there—I’m thousands of miles away, here in the U.S., surrounded by the quiet normalcy of a world that doesn’t know her pain. The distance feels like a prison, each mile between us amplifying my guilt. I sit in a comfortable chair, staring at my phone, wishing I could bridge the gap with something more than my voice—a voice that she barely trusts anymore. What kind of brother am I, safe in another country while she endures this horror alone? My voice reaches her through fragile connections punctuated by silence and static. Sometimes, we don’t have words for each other. There will be a resounding silence when we speak. Perhaps we are thinking about what happened so deeply that we forget we are on the phone. I am angry that I can’t see her. I can’t hold her hand.
She tells me about her escape and how she and five other girls stole the key from the night guard. How they crept through the gates, knowing that getting caught would mean their deaths. She tells me how they walked barefoot for hours, their feet torn and bleeding, their hearts pounding in the quiet of the desert night, 18 kilometers, one day and one entire night, in the middle of Hindu Kush’s brutal winter. She describes the moment they found the man with the Toyota Corolla—a stranger who didn’t ask questions and who took them to the hospital in Kabul without hesitation.
At the hospital, they were admitted into a room where a pregnant woman was being treated. This woman—a stranger, like the man—recognized their grief and pain without needing words. After a few days, when the girls could speak, she began calling their relatives. One by one, their families came to take them home.
But my sister didn’t go.
“I don’t trust you,” she told me when I called her. “I don’t trust any man.”
She stayed in that woman’s house. A safe place—for now. But her words shattered me. How could I blame her? How could she trust anyone after everything that was done to her? I think about the monsters who broke her, men who claim faith while inflicting the worst forms of cruelty. They are still out there. But my sister is safe now, or I hope she is safe. Will, Kate, and a brave young Afghan have teamed up with me to protect her from future danger.
The world turned upside down when they gang-raped my sister, and after the incident, no one stood behind her, including her cowardly husband, who left her with her child. And my two younger sisters… are innocent, laughing, and dreaming. But I know how quickly innocence is stolen.
Every day, I sit here in the U.S. and think of them. The Taliban are there. ISIS is there—waiting, lurking, taking. What if they come for my younger sisters? What if they are taken like my sister was? What can I do for them from here?
I don’t know. I don’t know how to save them.
But their faces haunt me, and their voices fill my silence. This fear consumes me. I failed my sister once—how can I let it happen again? I don’t have answers. I only have this weight, this helplessness that crushes me, and the stories that must be told. Because if I cannot save them, the least I can do is make the world hear them.
and the Afghan Americans Veterans Alliance (AAVA) are working tirelessly to save my sister—at least this one sister if we can save her for now. Her life and her safety may depend on it.
https://aaveteransalliance.org/
Gutting.