Afghan women’s rights lawyer arrives in North Texas to family embraces and freedom

Latifa Sharifi embraced her youthful sister Atefa Tuesday once more and once more at DFW International Airport in a long-awaited reunion after a harrowing escape from Afghanistan.

But then, Latifa Sharifi has lengthy embraced sisters.

She’s a human rights lawyer, defending abused ladies and women in her native Afghanistan, a rustic of 40 million now below Taliban rule. Sharifi had already obtained dying threats for her work when her homeland fell in August 2021 to the Taliban and its inflexible fundamentalism. Fear shortly unfold that ladies and women would face draconian repression of their aspirations for schooling and work.

At the worldwide gates of Terminal D, below vivid fluorescent lights, there was solely pleasure and reduction.

Afghan cousins met Texas cousins for the primary time. Latifa Sharifi, the star of the family, made certain to embrace every little one, even sweeping up two small nieces into her arms and planting kisses on their cheeks. For her sister Atefa, there have been a number of tearful hugs.

The sisters’ youngsters beamed. Little Mohammad, a four-year-old carrying a crimson T-shirt with cartoon characters, fortunately jumped up and down, displaying off his strikes to a Texas cousin he’d simply met. Cousins as younger as eight months and one as previous as 16 years smiled and laughed with one another.

“I am so glad you are here,” Atefa instructed her sister, each English audio system.

“I am so happy to be here and have my freedom,” Latifa stated.

Then, as Latifa Sharifi stood with a bouquet of crimson and yellow roses, she instructed a small group of journalists, in English and Dari, that she was additionally unhappy for these Afghan ladies and women left behind: “I want this freedom and this safety for all the Afghan women that they will also be like me, safe.”

On August 15, 2021, Sharifi tried to escape in the course of the chaos amongst 1000’s on the Kabul airport along with her three younger sons, however her then-three-year-old Mohammed was practically trampled. She couldn’t make what appeared just like the final airplane out from the capital metropolis.

Other attorneys and humanitarians across the globe, and in Dallas, listening to of Sharifi’s braveness, tried to get her protected passage out of Afghanistan and humanitarian entry into the U.S. By late October 2021, she made it out of Afghanistan to a protected home in Europe.

This October, a 12 months later, the 45-year-old lawyer had documentation in order for the reunion along with her 37-year-old sister, Atefa.

Praise flowed from Latifa Sharifi for all who helped her escape Afghanistan as Taliban forces seized maintain of life there once more.

Attorney Christopher Carlston of the Dallas agency McGregor & Oblad secured the coveted humanitarian parole that offered Sharifi authorized entry into the U.S. But it was a tense one-year course of documenting the threats to her life, Carlston stated. During that point, the Taliban entered a women’s shelter and searched computer systems, the Dallas lawyer added. Sen. John Cornyn wrote a letter of assist, his workplace confirmed.

Threats to the family

The threats to Sharifi had been direct. “You are Kaffir (non-Muslim) and misguiding Muslim women. Nonbelievers (non-Muslim) will be punished and set as an example for other nonbelievers,” she recalled in paperwork ready by her family.

Among the worst threats: “Children of non-Muslims don’t deserve to live”.

Once the family in Kabul obtained a letter at their door that learn: “Next letter will be written in the ink of your son’s blood.”

Sharifi labored for an NGO that fought for kids’s and women’s rights, together with aiding abused ladies get hold of divorces. The Taliban compelled her to quit her Afghan legislation license earlier than she fled due to her work on behalf of ladies and women. As a counterpoint, Sharifi’s work was honored by the Paris-based International Association of Lawyers in late 2021 in Madrid.

Atefa Sharifi arrived in the U.S. in 2013 on a Special Immigrant Visa, typically reserved for individuals who have labored for the U.S. authorities. She labored on the U.S. embassy in Kabul from 2007 to 2013. The sisters’ father had been a choose in Afghanistan. Many members of the family have been focused, the family stated.

Latifa Sharifi’s family members wished to publicize her story a 12 months in the past to elevate her profile and safe her launch, regardless of the hazard of being thrown in jail.

Reports of abuses

Since the Taliban’s energy seize in 2021, the United Nations mission in Afghanistan has documented many human rights violations. Girls and ladies should not allowed to absolutely take part in schooling and the office, the U.N. agency said in a report this summer time.

“The decision not to allow girls to return to secondary school means that a generation of girls will not complete their full 12 years of basic education,” the report learn. “At the same time, access to justice for victims of gender-based violence has been limited by the dissolution of dedicated reporting pathways, justice mechanisms and shelters.”

Amnesty International experiences that compelled little one marriages have surged as properly.

Afghanistan has identified a long time of turmoil and invasions, a lot in order that it was often called the graveyard of empires. The U.S. chapter there got here to a humiliating finish in late 2021. It was America’s longest conflict.

Marc Andersen, a D.C.-based senior associate with Ernst & Young consulting and auditing agency, was essential in the community of these attempting to help Sharifi in her exodus.

Through Andersen’s community of contacts, attorneys, army veterans, intelligence professionals and nonprofits, Sharifi was smuggled by land and then by air to a second nation and then one other, Andersen stated. Getting humanitarian parole by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was one of many ultimate steps, and an arduous one.

“We followed the law and the process but didn’t give up,” Andersen stated by telephone. “When someone said there is nothing else we can do, that was a call to action.”

“People had different expertise but they really had a shared heart for this. At this time of division in our country, we can really agree on the importance of coming together and making a difference for someone else.”

Tuesday afternoon, Sharifi was keen to go to the Frisco dwelling of her sister and brother-in-law and the nephew and niece who referred to as her ama, Dari for aunt. The family deliberate to drink scorching cardamom-spiced tea and nibble on almonds, cashews and dried fruit — and bathe Sharifi and her three sons with affection.

“I am so happy,” bubbled her center son, 11-year-old Emran, who wore a T-shirt with the English slogan “Reach the New Limits.”

Nearby, little Mohammad took the hand of his three-year-old cousin Samaa, and started strolling towards the airport exit into the crisp October air. The moms, the sisters, had been prepared to chase after them.