A year after the Taliban came to power, the lives of Afghan refugees in France

Before the capture of Kabul by the Taliban on August 15, 2021, the desire to leave Afghanistan haunted all of Tasnim Hakim’s friends. The 25-year-old young woman wanted to stay there, even if it was in this country that the attacks took away some of her friends. End of 2020, when the attack claimed by the Islamic State organization in Kabul University killed around 30 people, Tasnim, a Chinese language and literature teacher, was present. ” Before [le retour des talibans au pouvoir], I didn’t even want to travelslips the Afghan with short hair and light brown eyes, sitting in a café on 7^e district of Paris, not far from the school of the Pierre Claver refugee aid association, where she took French lessons. I’m not saying Afghanistan was a great country, but it is my home. It belongs to me. I also saw that things were going in the right direction for freedom and women’s rights. Now all is lost. »

On the day Kabul fell, August 15, her fiancé, the poet Ramin Mazhar, known for his poems against Islamist extremists, called her. “We are going to France! »he threw at him. By friends and acquaintances with ties to France, the couple’s name was put on the list for the evacuation operation “Apagan” – the double airlift organized between Kabul, Abu Dhabi and Paris, at the summer 2021.

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A week later, after several unsuccessful attempts to reach Kabul airport, the country’s only exit door and zone of chaos, the couple finally managed to leave the country on a military flight to France. Tasnim Hakim and her now husband are housed, with 200 other Afghans, in a hotel in Bercy, Paris. Three weeks later, both settle in the Creuse, where Ramin obtained a literary residence. The couple first spend money they brought from Kabul and quickly obtain a bank card on which the French government pays each month some 200 euros per person. “In the Creuse, we didn’t have a lot of expenses. Our neighbors were very nicerecalls Tasnim. They constantly offered us eggplants and cucumbers that they grew in the fields and drove us to do our shopping. » In February, Ramin began working for an Afghan media in exile. The couple arrives in Paris in May. In July, they finally find an apartment, in Bois-Colombes, in the Hauts-de-Seine.

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