A Mission to Rescue 500 Afghans

ABUZAR ROYESH, FOUNDING MEMBER, THE THIRTY BIRDS FOUNDATION:  So that day, called up a few friends, people who had been — I knew were committed to the mission of educating girls in Afghanistan. And, together, this — we became the founding members of The Thirty Birds Foundation. So we got together to help my family get to safety. So Simin will tell a bit of that story later on. But once — over the next three to four days, without any sleep, all of us calling in from Colorado to U.K. to the East Coast in the U.S., we over 24 hour — throughout 24 hours, we got in touch with State, with DOD, with any contacts that we could pull across different governments and across different organizations to try my family to safety. But then, once, after three or four days, we managed successfully to get my family to safety, but then we were all asking, so now what? Do we leave behind the whole community that’s left there? What about especially the girls, who are extremely vulnerable? What do we do about them? When we asked ourselves that question, we knew that we had to stay involved. And to that end, we organized this next series of rounds of evacuation that, over the past two months, we have taken out more than 400 girls and their families, girls who are schoolgirls, martial artists, singers, out of the country. Some of these students have already made it to Canada. Some of them are still in Islamabad waiting for their flight to Ecuador. But, overall, this has been actually not just the story about our group coordinating it across time zones, but also a story of heroics, incredible stories by these girls themselves, who on the ground facilitated this evacuation. Overall, we — calling in from the West, there was only little that we could do. We could provide opportunities, but it was actually these girls who coordinated everything, self-organized, who made those life-or-death decisions to be able to organize an evacuation this massive scale, and to get everybody safely with that knowledge of the local context to — over border to Pakistan. And later, and now they’re in Canada and destined for Ecuador. There are a lot of stories that…

(CROSSTALK)

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Sorry, Abuzar. Let me ask Simin then, because she was one of those girls, your sister. She was in Afghanistan, and she could only join us by phone, because she’s at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia. And there is either no Wi-Fi or not usable Wi-Fi. So we have got you by phone, thank goodness. So tell me your side of the story, because you were on the other end of a phone trying — as your brother said, you had all these people right there, and they needed to be moved out. What did you do? How did you know what to do?

SIMIN ROYESH, AFGHAN EVACUEE: Thank you for asking this. Actually, it was a hard time, because I was going through a series of mixed emotions while I had to make really tough decisions.