Afghan refugees settle in Saskatoon after Taliban takeover, look ahead to life in Canada
Global News
The world watched with horror as the Taliban swept across Afghanistan. One couple made it to Saskatoon and spoke about their new lives and what they left behind.
The Taliban, Farkhonda Tahery said, were always close in Afghanistan. “We could feel their presence everywhere,” she told Global News.
“We could see that they are everywhere because there were a lot of explosions.”
But she never thought they would overwhelm her home so quickly.
Tahery, 24, is adapting to her new life in Saskatoon but also coming to terms with the life and future she and husband Jawid Sarwary, 28, left behind in Afghanistan.
Sarwary said he knew they would have to leave when U.S. President Joe Biden announced in April that American troops were withdrawing completely from the country. Tahery thought the worst-case scenario would be if the Afghan government were to reach a power-sharing deal with the fundamentalist group.
But what coalition, and especially American, forces and efforts built in two decades fell to the Taliban in just 10 days. The Taliban conquered their first provincial capital on Aug. 6 and the country’s capital Kabul on Aug. 15.
Global News is not revealing where Tahery and Sarwary lived or how they escaped in order to protect their families, friends and anyone else who will try to take the same route.
They said they felt betrayed by the Afghan government for falling so quickly and not fighting like they believed the military could.