This Afghan reporter stuck by his country for 20 years. Then the Taliban came knocking

Read Story Transcript

Bilal Sarwary never thought he'd leave Afghanistan.

In his 20 years of reporting from his home country, the veteran journalist has covered tragedy after tragedy — pristine valleys reduced to war-torn rubble, innocent civilians killed by suicide bombers or botched U.S. airstrikes and drone attacks.

But through it all, he's maintained a sense of hope and patriotism. When his baby girl was born, he called her Sola, which means peace. He saw her as a symbol of his country's brighter future. 

Then the Taliban came knocking at his office door. 

"At that moment I realized that, OK, these are not only risks to myself, but also to my young daughter and to my family," Sarwary told As It Happens host Carol Off. 

"I felt like nowhere in Kabul was safe. This wasn't the city that I called home. This wasn't the city that I was so accustomed to."

Sarwary is now safe in Canada, quarantined in a Toronto hotel with his wife, daughter and parents. He was among the thousands of Afghans who were evacuated from the country over the last few weeks after the Taliban, an extremist militant organization, seized control.

"I felt like a knife had basically been inside my heart, you know, like I was so broken from within," he said of his choice to leave. 

"No matter what had happened over the 20 years that we were there, through the thick and thin, Kabul had given us the strength required to survive amidst heartbreaks, amid losing your friends, losing actually hope for a peace process, losing hope for a country. But no matter what, no matter where I went in the world, I always came back to it."

While Sarwary was waiting in line to escape at the Kabul International Airport on Aug. 22, he ran into his longtime colleague and friend Lyse Doucet, a correspondent for the BBC. 

She was stunned to see him. 

"He was the most patriotic Afghan journalist that I know," Doucet told As It Happens at the time. "I didn't expect him."

Sarwary broke down, delivering an emotional interview to his old friend. 

"That was the day that I could simply not control my emotions," he said. "I didn't expect that I would bump into Lyse or any other media crew. But it was also the day that we buried our dreams and aspirations and futures."

Doucet knew Sarwary since he was in his early 20s, when he worked as an antiques salesman at a hotel in Pakistan. He'd fled Afghanistan with his family as a child, escaping the U.S. proxy war against the Soviet Union.

Then, on Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda militants hijacked commercial jets and crashed them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre towers in New York City. 

Suddenly, Pakistan was flooded with foreign media, and Sarwary found his ticket home. 

"My world literally changed overnight. I was offered a job with Abu Dhabi TV. I remember crossing into Afghanistan, barely literally remembering my own country that I had been forced to leave as a kid," he said.

"Everything was destroyed. In coming to Kabul, the city that had been my home as a child, there was a harsh winter cold. There was no electricity. There was extreme levels of poverty."

But over time, he watched his country rebuild itself. 

The Taliban, which once ruled with an iron fist — oppressing women and LGBTQ people, silencing the media and violently crushing all dissent — fell to the U.S.-led coalition in late 2001. 

A new generation of Afghans grew up in the country unlike the one Sarwary had fled. Women and girls pursued education and became active in the political sphere. Widespread internet access bolstered citizen journalism and free speech.

It is my hope that someday we would be able to go back to a different Afghanistan, to an Afghanistan where everyone could contribute.​- Bilal Sarwary, Afghan journalist

But throughout it all, the violence continued. Al-Qaeda, ISIS and other militant groups launched attacks against civilians. The U.S. and its allies launched airstrikes and drone assaults that targeted the militants, but frequently killed civilians. 

"I think it alienated a very big number of the Afghan population and rural areas who continue to see the sky as a source of fear," he said.

"These drones and fighter jets and B52s, you name it, they were terrorizing children and women. Just like airstrikes turned weddings into funerals, and funerals into more funerals, this was also the reality with suicide attacks, with roadside bombs," he said.

He says the U.S. strikes were counterproductive to the kind of civil society they said they wanted to help build in Afghanistan.  

"That did not stop the Taliban. That really did not prevent the Taliban from becoming stronger. And every time there was an airstrike, every time there were like 50 civilians killed, the Taliban were actually able, in some cases, to recruit 500 from those communities," he said. 

What's more, he says Afghanistan's government was rife with corruption, leaving it weak and unable to stand on its own once the U.S. began withdrawing its troops this year. 

"At the top of those governments were officials who were simply disconnected from the pain. They could never visit their own villages, their own ancestral homes. They could never attend funerals and weddings, as is very important in Afghan traditions," he said.

"But they insisted on airstrikes, and airstrikes that were often led by false intelligence, over the last 20 years."

Even when the capital city of Kabul fell to the Taliban last month, Sarwary wasn't ready to give up. 

The militant group vowed to the world that this time would be different. It issued public statements vowing to treat women with respect and grant amnesty to all of those who had worked alongside Western governments in Afghanistan. 

But when Taliban commandos started showing up at Sarwary's office door to check up on him, he knew he had no choice but to get out. 

He fled first to Qatar, and then Canada, through a special visa program for vulnerable Afghans.

He's far from the only person forced to make that difficult decision. Thousands have fled the country in recent weeks, airlifted in chaotic emergency evacuations by Western countries. 

Many of those who fled are journalists, activists and civil servants — exactly the kind of people Afghanistan needs the most, Sarwary said. 

Fawzia Koofi, a former Afghan MP and peace negotiator, stuck by her country through multiple assassination attempts as she fought for women's rights, only be driven out when the Taliban took over. 

When she spoke to As It Happens on Aug. 12 from Kabul, just days before the Taliban reached the city, she vowed to remain in Afghanistan as long as she could.

Sarwary ran into Koofi in Qatar while awaiting evacuation. 

"She was very prominent and she was a hope, a source of hope for Afghan girls across the country because she was so known and she always took a strong stance," he said.

Despite everything, Sarwary still has hope. 

"It is my hope that someday we would be able to go back to a different Afghanistan, to an Afghanistan where everyone could contribute, to an Afghanistan where girls could go back to school, to an Afghanistan where we could have a freedom of speech — something that we sacrificed a lot for over the last 20 years," he said.

"But until that happens, we must also remember that people in Afghanistan will rely on us, because of the exodus. Because of the mass migration of the Afghan media family, we have to make sure that Afghan journalism stays alive."

Written by Sheena Goodyear. Interview produced by Kate Swoger.