When the Taliban Took Kabul, She Fled, and Made a New Life in New York

The night Kabul fell to the Taliban, a young lawyer named Nargis Baran was holed up in her apartment there, scrolling through news reports in disbelief. Then her boss called.

It was Aug. 15, 2021, and the U.S.-backed president of Afghanistan had fled the country as militants closed in on Kabul, the capital. Their swift advance shocked Western officials and the world, bringing the Taliban back to power after nearly 20 years of war with the United States and allied forces. Thousands of people surged toward the airport, desperate to board the last flights out as the city descended into chaos.

Ms. Baran, then 26, was an unmarried woman living with her widowed mother, and now they were afraid to walk outside. Her boss had not called to reassure her. He warned her that people like her — Afghanistan’s rising stars — had suddenly become targets.

“He said, ‘You know the time we spent on our education, on our self-development and self-growth, now doesn’t matter at all,’” she recalled.

Now, almost three years later, she has been able to build a new life in New York City because of an audacious escape plan hatched by law professors thousands of miles from Afghanistan. Her story is one of liberation — from the Taliban, who were notorious for oppressing women — but also of loss for what she and other promising young people could have done for their home country had they not felt their lives were in danger.

Ms. Baran, a law specialist for the country’s largest bank, was part of a generation of idealistic, Western-educated Afghans who had pledged to rebuild their country as it emerged from years of conflict. The Taliban, ousted from power in 2001 when Ms. Baran was just a child, were also known to treat minority groups harshly. Her background as a religious and ethnic minority — she is Ismaili, a minority sect in Islam, and from the Pamiri ethnic group — intensified her fears about what might happen to her if she could not flee.