The Secret Gate: a true story of courage and sacrifice during the collapse of Afghanistan

THE SECRET GATE

MITCHELL ZUCKOFF is the author of eight previous works of nonfiction, including the #1 New York Times bestseller 13 Hours, as well as Frozen in Time and Lost in Shangri-La. As a member of the Boston Globe Spotlight Team, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting. Zuckoff’s honours include the Livingston Award for International Reporting, the Winship/PEN New England Award for Nonfiction, and the Heywood Broun Memorial Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and numerous other publications.

Scribe Publications

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

This edition published by arrangement with Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

Published by Scribe 2023

Copyright © Mitchell Zuckoff 2023

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Map based on satellite image of Kabul International Airport © 2021 Maxar Technologies

Scribe acknowledges Australia’s First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this country, and we pay our respects to their elders, past and present.

978 1 761380 27 3 (Australian edition)

978 1 915590 25 1 (UK edition)

978 1 761385 07 0 (ebook)

Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

scribepublications.com.au

scribepublications.co.uk

For Suzanne

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Map

1. Homeira

2. Sam

3. Kabul

4. Volunteer

5. Taliban

6. Asad

7. White Scarves

8. Glory Gate

9. Wolves

10. Abbey Gate

11. Last Chance

12. Final Sprint

13. Run, Homeira!

Epilogue: After Glory

Acknowledgments

Notes on Sources and Methods

Notes

AUTHOR’S NOTE

At a dangerous time, in a dangerous place,

two strangers took the most dangerous leap of all.

They trusted each other.

This is a true story.

1

HOMEIRA

ONE BRIGHT SUMMER morning in 2021, Homeira Qaderi hurried her eight-year-old son, Siawash, out the door of their Kabul apartment. To speed their exit, she made him a promise that set his heart racing: tonight, after school, we’ll fight the Taliban.

The electricity was out again in the middle-class Fourth District near Kabul University, so Homeira ignored the elevator and followed Siawash down ten flights of stairs.

The temperature hovered around eighty degrees Fahrenheit when they stepped outside at 7 A.M. that Tuesday, August 3. Mother and son turned a corner into a cobblestone alley where a van waited to take him to a private international school that taught classes in English. As Siawash scrambled inside, Homeira heard him boast to his friends about her daring battle plan.

Homeira watched the van drive off, praying as always that a suicide attack wouldn’t kill him.

She returned to the apartment building where she’d remade her life. Where she regained her balance after Siawash’s father divorced her for challenging his decision to take a second wife. Where, after a forced separation, she was raising Siawash to be an enlightened Afghan man. Where she earned fame, fans, and deadly enemies as an author and activist. And where she intended to spend the rest of her days writing more books and campaigning for women’s equality in a city she loved for its beauty and its possibilities, despite its dangers and its flaws.

Kabul-jan, she called it, using the Farsi term of endearment for my dear Kabul.

Homeira breathed heavily as she scaled the last of more than a hundred steps in her headscarf and long-sleeved blouse. Inside her apartment, she moved with a dancer’s grace, unwrapping her shawl to reveal a cascade of thick brown hair that fell to her waist. Homeira was thirty-eight but looked younger, with high cheekbones, full lips, and large brown eyes that expressed her every volcanic emotion. A shade taller than five feet, she typically wore three-inch heels, which she removed to climb the stairs. She remained barefoot inside her four-bedroom sanctuary.

The sunny apartment reflected a life that would have been unimaginable for a single mother in Afghanistan even a few years earlier. She purchased it with earnings from her first book published in English, an acclaimed memoir of her girlhood during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s and under the Taliban’s vicious rule in the 1990s. The book doubled as a love letter to Siawash during their three painful years apart. The title alone made her a heroine to progressives and an infidel to extremists: Dancing in the Mosque.

Every detail of Homeira’s home delighted her: shiny wood floors with hand-knotted rugs; a tufted white couch where Siawash did his homework while she read; a high-ceilinged office with a desk fit for a prime minister; an old-fashioned gramophone to play dance music when no men were nearby; an exercise room that served as home to Siawash’s pet turtle; shelves brimming with books, honors, and diplomas; a plant-filled balcony; and windows that faced north to the blue domes of a Shiite shrine and, four miles beyond, to Kabul International Airport.

Homeira went to the kitchen for a handful of grapes and a large cup of sheer chai, tea with boiled milk, to kick-start her day. As she poured the pink tea, the room filled with scents of rosemary and eucalyptus. She carried the steaming cup to her office, where a silver MacBook laptop on her desk connected her to a world spinning out of control.

The previous night, Homeira spoke by phone with her father, Wakil Ahmad. They were ethnically Pashtun, the same tribe that spawned the Taliban, but the family scorned the fundamentalist insurgents and their repressive, misogynistic interpretation of Islam. Wakil Ahmad was his celebrity daughter’s biggest supporter. He lived with his wife, Homeira’s mother Ansari, and four of Homeira’s five younger siblings in Herat, an oasis city near the border with Iran, five hundred miles west of Kabul. During the war with the Russians that consumed much of Homeira’s childhood, her father and several uncles fought among the militants known as mujahideen. Since then, Wakil Ahmad made a threadbare living teaching literature, with a special fondness for Russian novels.

Internet phone service was spotty in Herat, so Wakil Ahmad had climbed to his roof to speak with Homeira. The call broke up repeatedly, but each time they connected Homeira heard gunshots from nearby clashes between the Afghan Army and the Taliban. Unconfirmed reports circulated that the Taliban had laid siege to Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city, as its fighters sought to expand recent gains in rural areas, with an eye toward provincial capitals and Kabul.

The call with her father confirmed Homeira’s fears: the suicide bombers, as she called them, were approaching her family’s door.

HOMEIRA’S WORRIES ABOUT her family and her country were rooted in a tortured history that long predated the chaotic summer of 2021.

An abbreviated account begins in late 2001, when American troops invaded Afghanistan to destroy the al-Qaeda terrorists who planned the 9/11 attacks and to topple the Taliban government that sheltered them. Within weeks the Taliban fled Kabul. Al-Qaeda leaders were killed or forced into hiding. But that was just the start. For nearly two decades, the United States and its close allies remained in Afghanistan to prevent the return of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, while working to create democracy, build the economy, combat endemic corruption, and champion women’s rights. The Taliban, meanwhile, returned to its guerrilla origins to battle Afghan, U.S., and NATO troops.

As years passed, Americans’ support for the war faded. So did hope for a stable, prosperous, modern Afghanistan. One U.S. president after another struggled to find a path to victory or a dignified exit. In February 2020, President Donald J. Trump approved a deal with the Taliban to withdraw the last U.S. forces. In exchange, the Taliban promised to prevent the use of Afghan soil by terrorists. In April 2021, President Joe Biden agreed to follow through on that bargain, but delayed the departure date by four months, to the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. The Taliban treated the impending American withdrawal as an invitation to try to overthrow the democratically elected Afghan government and seize power.

Initially, Homeira felt confident that the Afghan Army, some three hundred thousand soldiers strong, trained and equipped by the United States and NATO, would crush the ragtag Taliban militia, which had perhaps a quarter as many men. She dreaded the deaths of Afghan troops and the collateral killings of civilians, and she even regretted the loss of individual Talib lives. But she hoped the post-American war between the Taliban and the Afghan military would be like a monsoon, passing quickly and leaving her country’s new democratic foundations intact.

Lately, though, as the withdrawal deadline approached and the Taliban steadily gained ground, doubts crept in. After the phone call with her father, Homeira posted on social media, where she had more than a half-million followers across several platforms: What is going on in Herat?

Within minutes, two high-ranking government officials sent her similar messages. Both claimed reports of Taliban forces sweeping into Herat and other provincial capitals—including Lashkar Gah and Kandahar in the south—were false rumors spread by troublemakers. The officials’ messages alarmed Homeira more. They were either lying or oblivious.

AT HER DESK in the morning light, with the electricity restored and her internet connection strong, Homeira scrolled through news and social media sites. She recoiled at photos of women and children fleeing Herat ahead of oncoming Taliban fighters. Homeira understood the impulse: the long, hard memories of Afghan women had again set them in motion.

While ruling Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban had cruelly imposed its interpretation of seventh-century Islamic sharia law. Among other harsh decrees, women and girls were excluded from workplaces and schools, stripped of civil and legal rights, and banished from public life unless shrouded by burqas and escorted by male relatives. Punishments were swift, without limit or appeal. Stonings, public executions, and amputations were Taliban specialties.

Homeira’s tea grew cold as she stared at the images from Herat. She realized her family’s neighbors, some of whom she likely knew, had already been transformed into refugees of war. A shiver passed through her, though she resolved not to show or express fear publicly.

Homeira spent the lonely hours of Siawash’s school day fretting about her family and her country. She struggled to concentrate, unable to add a single sentence to the short story she was writing. She fretted about her finances, which had dwindled as she went without a full-time job while working on her next book. Her savings had eroded further from countless days in court trying to force her ex-husband to provide financial support, a colossal long shot. Even in the new, more moderate Afghan republic, divorced women were shunned, stigmatized as unclean, and ignored by judges. A disturbing number considered suicide by self-immolation to be a viable alternative to the dishonor of divorce.

Homeira checked the clock as she awaited Siawash’s return. He disliked the food at school, so she returned to the kitchen to cook a family favorite: kitchiri, a mixture of basmati rice, mung beans, spices, and onions she stirred on the stove until it turned golden brown. Soon her urban apartment smelled like the adobe Herat kitchen of Nanah-jan, her beloved grandmother.

Shortly before 4 P.M., Siawash burst through the door too excited to eat, having spent all day anticipating their promised clash with the Taliban. The sight of her precocious son lifted Homeira’s spirits. He had apple cheeks and his mother’s soulful eyes. A lock of dark hair draped onto his forehead. His round glasses made him look at once studious and impish, a comic scholar.

Homeira insisted that Siawash try a few bites of kitchiri. As he ate, they resumed a conversation they’d begun that morning. Homeira tried to explain Afghan politics, religious zealotry, and sectarian war in a comprehensible way for an eight-year-old boy. It helped that Siawash had already absorbed Homeira’s revulsion for the Taliban. A video on her phone from two years earlier showed Siawash strumming a guitar and singing, You damned Talibs. One day you will burn this country to the ground.

Still, she worried about how much space the barbarians occupied in his mind. He knew details of beheadings. He kept track of death tolls. He knew why supposed infidels were flogged, stoned, or burned. His knowledge came from Homeira and also from television, his friends, and social media. Homeira sometimes regretted allowing him to use Facebook, where he saw all manner of horrors. But more powerful than her worry about Siawash being traumatized was her desire that he understand and reject the twisted medieval forces around them.

As daylight ebbed, Homeira explained that Siawash’s most advanced lesson in battling the enemies of modernity would come that night. To a westerner, Homeira’s activism might seem benign, but in Kabul her plan constituted a radical act of courage.

At nine P.M., Homeira told him, "you have to come on the balcony and we’ll shout Allahu Akbar! She said the strategy of demonstrators yelling God is great!" from balconies, rooftops, and streets had originated in Herat and spread nationwide.

Siawash was confused.

He knew that Taliban fighters screamed Allahu Akbar! when they sawed off someone’s head, or detonated a suicide bomb, or horsewhipped a woman for meeting a boyfriend. It was their signature cry when they committed hideous acts in the name of purifying the country. Screaming their slogan seemed to Siawash like a vote of support.

"Why are we shouting Allahu Akbar? he asked. What’s going to happen?"

To fight the fanatics, Homeira told him, we must reclaim that phrase as a celebration of life instead of a shriek of death.

We, the people of Kabul, all the people of Afghanistan, are going to speak out against the Taliban and say, ‘We are Muslims. We are more Muslim than they are. We have principles, we are valuable, we are against killing people.’ Their protest would rally all good people in Afghanistan, she said, raising morale to finally defeat the Taliban.

The thought of participating in such important business thrilled Siawash.

Homeira didn’t tell him that she expected the demonstration to be symbolic at best, futile at worst. She also didn’t scare her son by admitting that her participation would enrage her critics and multiply the death threats against her. In recent months, the Taliban had targeted numerous female judges, journalists, intellectuals, and activists for assassination, many of whom Homeira knew personally or by reputation.

As nighttime approached, Homeira and Siawash were joined by the three young sons of Homeira’s uncle Abo Ismael, one of her mother’s brothers. A dozen years older than Homeira, Abo Ismael was a doctor who lived with his wife, Samrina, and their children on the building’s fourth floor. The boys ran into the apartment to play with Siawash and eat Homeira’s kitchiri. Close in age with Siawash, they called Homeira auntie despite being her cousins.

"We’re going to go on the balcony and shout Allahu Akbar!" Siawash announced.

Shocked, the oldest turned to Homeira. "Auntie, can women shout Allahu Akbar? Can they scream on the balcony?"

Why not, jan? she said. If the Talibs get here, women are the first ones who’ll be treated awfully. I have to stand up to them. If they get here, they’ll flog us. They won’t let me talk about my books. If they see me on the street they’ll make me wear a burqa.

The boys burst out laughing at the thought of fashionable, colorful Homeira in a shapeless black shroud, her face hidden behind a mesh veil.

You won’t be able to see anything! one of the boys said. You’ll trip and fall ten times with every step!

After a noisy game of darts her uncle’s sons returned home. Siawash went to work. He charged a wireless microphone. He combed his hair and traded his Western clothes for a long white shirt and loose white pants, a traditional outfit called a shalwar kameez, to be sure he’d stand out in the darkness. Homeira chose a dark dress with beaded cuffs. She covered her hair with a blue silk scarf, pinning it securely so it wouldn’t slip off and fuel the insults of those who already condemned her as immodest.

As his excitement intensified, Siawash asked, Why do Talibs kill people?

The question caught Homeira off guard. She blurted out her first thought: Because Talibs didn’t go to school and have no education. They don’t know killing people is bad.

So why didn’t their parents send them to school? he persisted.

Because their parents didn’t go to school.

Siawash considered this.

So, he said, the parents of the parents of their parents didn’t go to school either?

Yes, Homeira said, because there weren’t many schools back then.

Siawash brightened. With a child’s innocence, he proposed a solution. There are schools now. They can come to my school and learn English. We also have music and dance.

Siawash-jan, Homeira said, Talibs behead anyone who dances or plays music.

She instantly regretted saying it. Siawash looked like he’d been slapped.

So they’ll behead us because of music and dance if they come to our school?

Don’t say that, she said. First, Talibs are not coming. Second, if they do come, your school will no longer have dance and music classes.

What about our music teacher?

He’ll be teaching other lessons.

Drained, Homeira persuaded Siawash to watch a movie while they waited for 9 P.M. He tried, but couldn’t relax. He went to the guest room to practice shouting at the top of his lungs, telling Homeira he wanted to be heard beyond the mountains that ringed Kabul.

They need to hear that this is Siawash’s voice, he said, so when Talibs hear it they know it’s Siawash and they’ll get scared. She took pleasure in his excitement, even as she wished his biggest concerns were school, friends, toys, and his turtle.

When the appointed hour approached, Homeira led Siawash next door to a smaller, sparsely furnished apartment owned by one of her younger brothers, Jaber, who worked at the presidential palace as an aide to President Ashraf Ghani. Homeira knew that Jaber, who was twenty-nine, would be working late or joining the Allahu Akbar protesters in the streets.

One appeal of Jaber’s balcony was an unobstructed view of the blue-domed Sakhi Shrine and the sprawling cemetery surrounding it, which would allow their voices to carry. But Homeira had another motive she didn’t tell Siawash: her bravery had limits. Her immediate concern wasn’t the Taliban. Despite the events in Herat, she still doubted the turbaned killers with Kalashnikov rifles would ever reach Kabul. Instead, she felt anxious about her neighbors. Homeira’s own balcony faced a building directly across the alley, and she didn’t want to endure scorn from traditional men who thought a woman had no right to raise her voice.

Homeira behaved much bolder when it came to social media, which she used as an outlet for her feelings and a megaphone for her causes. With help from a female neighbor, Homeira and Siawash prepared to share a video of their protest live on Facebook.

At the stroke of 9 P.M., they stepped to the railing of Jaber’s balcony. Dots of white light twinkled in the distance from homes and cellphones, illuminating a mile-high mountain known as TV Hill for its forest of broadcast towers. The Facebook video captured them yelling Allahu Akbar! dozens of times into the night sky. Siawash’s voice boomed through the wireless microphone as Homeira draped an arm around his shoulders. When they heard the voices of other protesters, Homeira and Siawash punched their fists into the air with each shout.

Comments flooded Homeira’s Facebook page. Her father’s note affected her the most.

My child, he wrote, "I, too, said Allahu Akbar and I cried."

An Afghan man acknowledging tears was rare, but Homeira understood. He had been in war, she’d say, and now he was seeing his daughter and grandson were still doing the same thing, and nothing had changed. Later, Wakil Ahmad called Homeira to express his pride. She wept with joy.

A journalist from Reuters contacted Homeira for permission to share the video globally. She agreed despite the risks, but asked that Siawash’s face be blurred.

When the shouting was over, Homeira and Siawash returned to their apartment triumphant. After more dinner, she tried to settle him to sleep. As Homeira tucked him in, Siawash begged to see the recording. He watched it repeatedly, until she took away the phone.

"Do you think Talibs feared our Allahu Akbar tonight? he asked. Do you think they heard me?"

She kissed and hugged him. "I promise they heard you and they saw you shouting Allahu Akbar," she said.

Siawash closed his eyes and said good night. Before Homeira could leave, his eyes flew open. He asked a question that gutted her.

Mom, what if Talibs come to my school tomorrow and kill me?

IN SIAWASH’S QUESTION, Homeira heard an echo of her own early life.

On the morning of her birth, her mother told her, men filled the streets of Kabul shouting Allahu Akbar! to rally resistance to the Soviet invasion. During the nearly four decades that followed, Homeira’s entire lifetime, the country experienced little respite from war.

Homeira’s family left Kabul for Herat when she was an infant. One of her earliest memories was of her grandmother, her nanah-jan, tightening her hijab during a Soviet air raid, so she wouldn’t risk going to hell by dying with her head uncovered. Afterward, Homeira made a game of searching for bullet holes on the outer walls of the house where she lived with her parents, four aunts, her father’s parents, and each newly arrived sibling. One Soviet bullet never reached the house. It killed her teenage Aunt Zahra as she led Homeira through their yard toward the safety of their basement. Homeira’s younger sister Zahra was named in tribute.

As a small child, Homeira laughed when she saw a Russian soldier’s bare bottom as he pressed his hand against a neighbor girl’s mouth. She told the story to her family, expecting to amuse them, too. One of her mujahideen uncles punched a wall. Her grandfather wiped away tears.

In this land, her grandmother explained, it is better to be a stone than to be a girl.

Nanah-jan also told her: A girl should have fear in her eyes. Homeira stood before a mirror and turned her eyelids inside out, but couldn’t find any. That troubled her mother, who called Homeira osiyangar, a rebel.

To escape the war, the family fled to Iran when Homeira was four. One of her most haunting memories was her father’s shouted command—Run, Homeira!—as smugglers led them toward the Iranian border at night. He ran alongside her, carrying her baby brother Mushtaq and a bundle of their clothes. She fell and bruised her face, but got back on her feet with her father’s help. When they reached a refugee camp, her mother tried to explain the cost of leaving one’s homeland: It means becoming a stranger in a foreign country. It means dying alone.

Two hungry years later, they returned to Herat, after the defeated Soviets learned why Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires. Although the Soviets lost, Afghans filled most of the actual graves. More than a million civilians died and many more were wounded. Millions became refugees. Cities were leveled and the economy barely functioned.

Homeira’s house somehow survived amid a moonscape of bomb craters. Two captured uncles returned home, one missing a kidney, the other missing fingernails. During the next two years of relative quiet, Homeira played with friends, earned a reputation for mischief, and tested the patience of her mother and grandmother. Her father quietly tolerated Homeira’s antics, encouraging her to explore her intellect beyond sewing and raising children. When schools reopened, Homeira discovered a love of reading and storytelling. Her mother nicknamed her Scheherazade, after the Sultan’s wife who narrates One Thousand and One Nights.

At twelve, she caught the predatory eye of a religious leader at their mosque, who exposed himself as Homeira collected water from a river. Later she caught him molesting a child and told her father, who rallied neighbors to expel him from their community.

Meanwhile, fighting returned to Afghanistan, this time a civil war among a half dozen mujahideen armies divided among ethnic and tribal lines. As she listened to the BBC with her father, Homeira first heard the word Taliban. She tracked the extremists’ rise to power via news reports and local whispers. Homeira expected its fighters to resemble the beefy Russian soldiers with their crisp uniforms and high boots. When Talibs arrived in Herat in 1995 she saw they were skinny men with long beards, their clothing rags, their eyes ringed with black kohl.

The Taliban’s victory forced women and teenage girls into the shadows, forced to wear burqas when they ventured outside their homes. At thirteen, banned from attending school, Homeira followed her mother’s suggestion and turned their kitchen into a clandestine classroom to teach younger girls to read and write. Her father provided a blackboard he borrowed from the boys’ school where he taught. Less helpful was her brother Mushtaq, who interrupted Homeira’s lessons by shouting, The Taliban are here! Frightened girls hid notebooks inside Qurans until they heard Mushtaq laughing at his prank.

Over the next year of war, drought, and famine, thousands of displaced rural Afghans streamed into Herat. Many settled in tents on a bombed-out, scorpion-infested wasteland across the Injil River from Homeira’s house. Refugee girls befriended the girls from Homeira’s kitchen school, and soon they begged to learn, too. The kitchen was too small, but Homeira had an idea: she could teach them in a large tent the refugees used as a mosque. After the refugee girls’ parents promised to keep it a secret, Homeira’s father carried the blackboard back and forth daily between their home and the mosque tent. If anyone asked, Homeira’s lessons consisted only of Quran readings.

Homeira blossomed inside the secret school. In the sweltering heat, shielded by thick canvas walls, she shed her burqa. Refugee boys joined the lessons, addressing Homeira as Moalem Sahiba, Madam Teacher.

One summer day, Homeira’s students told her of a wedding the night before where celebrants had secretly defied the Taliban’s prohibition on dancing. With promises of silence from all the students,