Abdul buried his face into his hands, overwhelmed with fear.
Abdul's wife and children are trapped in Kabul.
The wife, two daughters, (ages 20 and 14) and son (12), had left Buffalo for Kabul in early July for what should have been a joyous occasion – an engagement party for his 20-year-old daughter – and they were supposed to fly back to Western New York on Aug. 26. They were aware that the end of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan was coming, but they never thought the Taliban would sweep through the country so fast.
As Kabul fell to the Taliban, the family tried to get to the airport, but could not. They were told by the State Department to stay in place and file form after form to get on lists to be evacuated.
Back in the United States, Abdul and friends here, including Annie McCune, an Orchard Park woman involved in humanitarian efforts, have been making desperate calls to leaders in Congress trying to find a way to get Abdul's family to safety.
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Then on Tuesday, after two frantic weeks of evacuations, the last U.S. military troops left Kabul.
The State Department said it got 123,000 people out of Afghanistan. But Abdul's wife and three children, as well as Abdul's two older adult sons, were not among them. They are now in hiding.
"My message to all Americans who are in power – they could do something to save the lives of many Americans in Afghanistan," said Abdul. "If you want to do something, do it as soon as possible, because I know that Biden and his administration trust the Taliban, but we don't.
"We know them. We have experienced ... when they were in power for many years in Kabul in Afghanistan. So we don't trust them. I know that if they came to the U.S., and they are in this house .. Believe me, they will go to whoever and would kill all," he said, before breaking down in tears.
Abdul is trying to get his wife and two of his children, who were in Afghanistan for a family event, back home.
Abdul told his story to The Buffalo News on a couch in his new home in Amherst. With its big backyard and light, airy rooms, the two-story house was supposed to mark another step toward accomplishing the American dream.
Instead, Abdul nervously waits for calls and texts from nearly 7,000 miles away in the barely furnished house. Boxes and blue totes are stacked throughout the house, waiting to be unpacked.
Abdul shared his story on the condition that The News use only his first name and that his family's names were not published because he is fearful for their lives while they remain in Afghanistan.
Abdul brought his family to Buffalo in October 2019 after his Special Immigrant Visa was approved. He qualified after decades of work with various U.S. agencies, the most recent with U.S. Agency for International Development.
They were sponsored by the International Institute of Buffalo, which helped get them set up in their first home on the West Side.
"They like it very much," Abdul said. Abdul and his wife and younger children have green cards, which make them legal, permanent residents of the United States. He was not able to bring his older sons to the U.S. because they were already adults. Abdul also has another adult daughter who lives in Toronto.
A few months after arriving in the U.S. and just as the family was starting to find their footing, the pandemic hit. Like everyone else, they were locked down at home – a difficult start to their new lives.
The younger children did their best at remote learning. After Abdul was able to buy a car, he began working for Door Dash and Uber. His wife, a seamstress, began sewing masks. She began working with Stitch Buffalo, a Niagara Street organization that describes itself as "an inclusive space for Refugee and Immigrant women to create handcrafted goods and find economic empowerment."
Abdul estimated his wife sewed at least 3,000 masks over the last year and a half, many provided to Jericho Road Community Health Center to be donated to patients and the community.
Abdul shows a mask that his seamstress wife created for health care workers during the peak of the Covid-19.
The 20-year-old daughter got a job at a Tim Hortons.
As Abdul saved money to move to a bigger house in Amherst, his wife and children made plans for a trip home to Afghanistan. They packed everything up before they left for Kabul.
As the Taliban grew closer, the family thought they would be safe because they already had plane tickets home. That all changed as the Taliban took over Kabul.
The whole world has seen the chaotic images in and around the airport, as tens of thousands of people, many of them Afghans who had worked with U.S. forces and other U.S. agencies who had been waiting for years for their visas to be processed, tried to find safe passage to America.
Worried about his wife and children, Abdul, who left Afghanistan with his family to live in America, sits at home alone in Amherst waiting on word and updates on his family that are now trapped in Kabul after making several unsuccessful trips to the airport to return home to the U.S.
Abdul said his wife and children made several attempts to get to the airport. The first time they got stuck in a stampede and were nearly trampled. "My daughter fell," he said of the 14-year-old. "She lost her shoe."
On another attempt, Taliban fighters began firing machine guns into the air. The 12-year-old boy was struck in the head by shrapnel, Abdul said.
"I told them to go home," Abdul said. He has been working closely with his friend, McCune, who has helped him fill out form after form and has been on the phone for hours with the State Department and others to try to find a way out.
"We weren't getting information from the State Department, but we would go on website and then they'd say, 'Well, there's intel that there might be trouble. Just stay home until we give you more information.' And we kept waiting," McCune said.
As they waited, other family members tried to get to the airport. Abdul said one of his in-laws was killed in the suicide bombing last week and that the man's wife was hospitalized in the blast.
Now that the evacuations have officially ended, they are looking for other options. McCune said Rep. Chris Jacobs has been working with the family. Jacobs and Rep. Brian Higgins say they are helping at least 145 people with Buffalo ties who are stuck in Afghanistan.
It is unclear whether it is even possible for any of those people to escape Afghanistan now, given that the U.S. announced that it ended its military mission in the country on Monday.
"People will say, 'I know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody' and we've followed up on a number of these efforts," McCune said. The latest possibility involved a group that said it could get the family out to Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan or Georgia (the country) but couldn't say which one until it happened. The cost started out as $6,000 per person. By Thursday it was up to $12,500 per person."
Abdul decided against trying that.
Abdul and McCune are continuing to make calls and to do whatever they can, but they don't know what the future holds.
"Help us," Abdul pleaded. "Please help me."
