'Carrying dead soul': Afghan filmmaker pens heartbreaking note on leaving Afghanistan

Evacuation flights resumed with renewed urgency on Friday, 27 August 2021, after twin blasts killed over 100 people, including 13 US troops in Kabul. While the Taliban continues to impose its ultra-austere dictate on Afghanistan, film-maker and photographer Roya Heydari has opened up about her plight and desperation to escape from her “motherland”. In an emotional Twitter post, the 27-year-old penned down how it felt to start from zero again. According to OHCHR, more than 2.5 lakh Afghans have been internally displaced since May. 

“I left my whole life, my home in order to continue to have a voice. Once again, I am running from my motherland,” she wrote. Asserting that she would have to start all over again in a new country, the young filmmaker bid a tearful goodbye to her motherland. Hedari, who reportedly landed in France five days ago, also wrote that she only carried her cameras and her “dead soul” across the ocean. 

The Taliban’s previous regime marked the darkest time for Afghan women. During their rule, the Islamist group forbade women from getting any kind of education and blatantly denied their right to work. They also stopped women from travelling outside their homes without a male relative to accompany them. More gruesome acts included public executions. The Taliban chopped off the hands of thieves and stoned women accused of adultery. Several reports of Taliban hunting women and girls as young as 15 years for marriage and alleged "sex trade" have surfaced in recent weeks. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Sunni Pashtun group said that women should not go out to work for their own safety. 

Evacuations continue

Meanwhile, the US on Thursday said more than 100,000 people have been safely evacuated from Kabul, as many as 1,000 Americans and tens of thousands more Afghans are struggling to leave in one of history’s largest airlifts. Additionally, France announced that it would end its evacuation operations on the midnight of Friday, August 27. Many countries, including Denmark and the Netherlands, have already ended their repatriation processes while the US, UK and a dozen other NATO countries have announced that they will stick to the scheduled August 31 deadline.  

Image: Roya Heydari /Twitter