I called Huma constantly for updates. She had little good news. Desperate Afghans were scaling the airport walls with ropes, climbing over airport fences, running onto the tarmac, rushing onto unguarded planes, and huddling beside the runway hoping to get on a plane to anywhere. The U.S. forces did an amazing job under impossible circumstances, but there were too few of them, and the situation spiraled out of control—all of it captured on live television. When the first military planes took off, Afghans clung to the wings and wheels. Panic superseded logic. A young Afghan dentist fell to his death from the wing of a plane, and his body was found on a rooftop four miles away. I watched in horror alongside millions of people around the world as news footage of the chaos showed another young man, a teenage soccer player, plummeting to his death on the tarmac. In an effort to prevent any more of these appalling tragedies, the airport grounded all flights until the runway could be cleared. U.S. troops worked with soldiers from Turkey and other partner nations to secure the airfield.
Our group of Afghan women, who we called “The White Scarves,” were still stuck outside the gates. With crowds clogging the streets, they abandoned the grocery trucks and tried pushing their way to the airport on foot. In the 24/7 Zoom room, our team listened on speakerphone as one of the women reported there was no way to access the airport. The crowds were too massive. Then gunshots rang out and the call went quiet. Everyone in the Zoom room held their breath. Had we lost her? What was happening on the other end of the line? Finally, the woman’s voice returned. Someone had shot into the air to try to control the crowd. It hadn’t worked.
A group of White Scarves made it to the airport’s Abbey Gate and showed their white scarves to the marines stationed at the entrance. The women said they were on “Hillary’s list” and that a plane was waiting for them. The marines said they hadn’t heard of the list. They wouldn’t let the women pass.
Frantic, a member of our team called a contact at the Department of Defense to plead for help. The contact said the women should go to the east gate. Our team member relayed the message to the White Scarves, hoping they could make it there before sundown. The Taliban had imposed a curfew, and nobody knew what they would do with the hundreds of people still trying to get into the airport. Would they round people up? Start shooting? As light began to fade, the shared sense of panic deepened. By this point, the White Scarves and their families had been on their feet for fifteen hours without food, water, or access to a bathroom. One member of the group had broken an ankle. A pregnant woman fell ill. Kids were trampled. It was getting dark. Nobody knew what abuse awaited these women, and they had nowhere else to go.
Melanne called the White House Situation Room. Jess and Allie called the Department of Defense and congressional offices to ask for immediate help getting our list of names to General Frank McKenzie, commander of all U.S. forces in the region. I called former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan John Bass, who had worked closely with me at the State Department and now was President Biden’s point person on the ground overseeing the evacuation. Among prominent Afghan women leaders, our list had become the only hope for evacuation. Yet despite the mounting stakes, lines of communication within the airport were breaking down. It was difficult to get word all the way to the troops guarding the airport gates. I called Robby Mook, the manager of my 2016 presidential campaign, who was now a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve and assisting with the evacuation at Kabul Airport. He also directed our group to the east gate. We urged the women to stay together as they made their way—and to make their white scarves visible to U.S. soldiers.
By 10:30 p.m. local time in Kabul, most of our women and their families had made it inside the airport, but sixteen women and their families remained stuck behind a Taliban checkpoint. One of the women had been at the airport gate with her children for over twenty-four hours. She texted the group to say her kids had fainted several times. The crowds were too much. “My legs cannot hold me anymore,” she wrote. Women were beginning to lose hope. Some retreated to safe houses that our team had found; others stood through the long night hoping to press forward through the crowds.
As the sun rose the following day, large crowds gathered around the airport to protest the Taliban’s takeover. The roads were impassable. Inside the airport, we finally had a breakthrough. Our team secured fifty-eight seats on a military plane. There was still a thirty-six-hour wait before the plane would take off and conflicting information about where its final destination would be. The women and families huddled inside the terminal anxious to leave and desperate for food, water, and freedom. Finally, they boarded a U.S. military plane. We thought it was bound for Doha, but the women ultimately touched down in Bahrain, en route to Kuwait. But that hardly seemed to matter now. The team received a text from one of the women on board: “Give our love to all those who worked day and night to save our lives and get us out.” It was the first successful evacuation of the White Scarves.
Huma called to tell me the good news. I was so proud of our small team for pulling off what just days ago had seemed impossible. For a moment we both breathed a sigh of relief. But with the list now at more than 1,500 names, we still had many, many more to go. And the stakes were only getting higher as the date of the final U.S. withdrawal approached. After a few moments of relief and celebration over Zoom, the team quickly got back to work organizing the next evacuation plan.
Back home in Chappaqua, I was on the phone with Qatar’s defense minister, asking him to help us execute our next plan: transporting three buses of high-profile Afghan women and their families from the Kabul Serena Hotel to the airport. This would require passing through several Taliban checkpoints, an impossibility without protection from someone the Taliban trusted. Someone like the Qataris. The minister agreed. Huma was also working with her contacts in the Qatari and Emirati governments to arrange humanitarian aid and resources when the women eventually reached Doha. Meanwhile, Belquis and Horia were securing hotel rooms and safe houses for the women. That’s when we ran into a new problem: ATMs were down, banks across Kabul had closed, and the hotel would accept only U.S. dollars. Without cash, the women couldn’t check into their rooms, and it was too dangerous for them to turn back. So Belquis started calling friends around Kabul who might be able to help. Soon enough, someone arrived at the Kabul Serena Hotel with enough cash to pay for the rooms. It was an incredibly brave act of kindness.
The next morning, on August 26, a large group of women and their families, including two pregnant women, emerged from their hotel rooms and safe houses around Kabul and quietly made their way to the Kabul Serena Hotel parking lot. They boarded three buses that the Qataris promised to safely escort to the airport.
Then disaster struck. A suicide bomber from the Islamic State–Khorasan, or ISIS–K, detonated near the airport’s Abbey Gate. Thirteen marines and 170 Afghans were killed. As I watched the breaking news on TV, I was horrified by the senseless loss of lives and the deaths of the young marines. Fearing the airport would be closed, Melanne began exploring land routes through Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. But with the Taliban’s tight grip on most of the border crossings, it seemed too treacherous.
The buses sat for fifteen long hours in the Kabul Serena Hotel parking lot while the Qataris negotiated with the Taliban. A designated point of contact remained on the phone with Belquis and Horia, who were dialed into the 24/7 Zoom room so that our team could hear what was going on. Finally, an agreement was reached, and the buses began to move. We tracked the buses using GPS from the women’s phones.
Huma frequently sent me reports, screenshots, and videos of what the women on board were experiencing. Traffic wasn’t moving. Taliban checkpoints were everywhere. Panic again set in. Then a Taliban fighter boarded one of the buses. He demanded to see passports and told the women to remove their face coverings so he could check their faces. The women were horrified; this was against the religious beliefs the Taliban purported to uphold. Then the rules changed again. The bus couldn’t continue until every passenger on board showed proof of a visa. There were no visas. A quick-thinking friend of Vital Voices in Albania got word of what was happening and looked around for a solution. He snapped a photo of the QR code on a bag of potatoes in a grocery store and doctored an “official e-visa” to enter Albania. Mercifully, it worked.
Meanwhile, one of the pregnant women started bleeding. Her husband, who had been on President Ghani’s foreign policy team, demanded that they be let off the bus to find a hospital. Our team begged them to stay, promising that U.S. medics would assist them inside the airport. It was an impossible situation. They left the bus. I’d later learn that the woman miscarried and paid an enormous amount of money to be smuggled out of the country with her husband.
Before letting the buses leave, a Taliban fighter came on board each bus and called every passenger’s name as he checked the e-visas against the passenger manifest. This was new. Even as he spoke in Pashto, it was clear to everyone half a world away listening in the Zoom room via an open line, muted on our end, what his message was: The Taliban knows your name and that you’re attempting to flee with American support. If you fail to make it out of Afghanistan, you and your family will be punished.
Finally, the Taliban finished, and the three buses lurched forward. We watched breathlessly as, inch by inch, the red GPS dots indicated that the buses had rolled through the airport gate. The journey from the hotel to the airport was less than five miles but took over seventy-two agonizing hours.
And then the plane wasn’t there. It had taken off without them. I was devastated but not ready to give up. After more phone calls and strings pulled with well-placed officials in the U.S. government, the women were able to board a C-17 plane bound for Fort McCoy, Wisconsin.
Everything about our rescue operation was a scramble that changed day by day, hour by hour. One day the cost of chartering a plane was $150,000, the next it was $750,000. One hour the east gate was open for passengers to enter, the next it was closed indefinitely. One minute three buses full of high-profile women and their families made it to the airport, the next minute there was no plane. Here is what I know from a long career in politics and diplomacy: The best-laid plans fall apart. It takes a lot of careful planning, courage, and creativity to make things happen.
Zarifa Ghafari was one of the few female mayors in Afghan history and one of the youngest. On her first day in the role, at just twenty-six years old, her office was mobbed by men refusing to be governed by a woman. Undeterred, she showed up day after day—even after the Taliban murdered her father, a former military officer, and tried to assassinate her three times. But the immense loss and feeling of guilt only spurred her on in her work on behalf of Afghan women and the poor. In 2021, she had a budding political career, a fiancé, and plans to start a family in her new Kabul apartment. All that changed when Kabul fell to the Taliban.
Like so many other Afghans, Zarifa was reluctant to leave her country. She loved her homeland and wanted to do whatever she could to help keep it safe. But as she considered the future of her young sisters under Taliban rule, she decided it was time to leave. One night in late August, as she considered her escape, she called Huma and said she was worried that the Taliban was outside her apartment. Her siblings were hiding in a closet, terrified. She had to leave immediately.
Zarifa got into a taxi with her family and headed for the airport. She called Huma again and said that the crowds were impassable, but she recognized the Turkish deputy ambassador’s car. Zarifa flagged him down and explained the situation: Hillary Clinton will vouch for us, please help us get into the airport. Zarifa handed her phone to the official, and Huma explained that Zarifa was on our list and it was important to get her out of Kabul. The deputy ambassador pulled Zarifa and her entire family—mother, siblings, and her fiancé—into his car and ushered them safely into the airport. There was a C-130 leaving in thirty minutes, and the ambassador saw to it that the Turkish military would take Zarifa and her family with them.
Zarifa was in tears. She and her family had just escaped the Taliban and were buckled into a military plane taxiing down the runway to safety (where exactly that was, they weren’t sure). But suddenly Zarifa didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to let the Taliban win or leave her countrywomen behind to a dangerous, uncertain future. She called Huma, her voice quivering, and said we had to stop the plane. But the plane was moving. The line went dead as Zarifa and her family were carried over the Hindu Kush mountains.
Other women took similar risks to get out on their own. Shabana Basij-Rasikh was one of the first women to reach out to me for help when the United States announced its withdrawal. Since 2016, Shabana had been running the first and only all-girls boarding school in Afghanistan. By 2021, her school, which particularly focused on enrolling girls around the age of puberty when they would typically drop out, had nearly one hundred girls enrolled from twenty-eight of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces. It was all but guaranteed that the Taliban would not only outlaw the school but target its students and staff.
Shabana was one of the names on our team’s list, but she understandably grew impatient with how long it was taking for plans to come together. She took matters into her own hands. She had already been preparing to take her students abroad for a semester to wait out the insecurity in Afghanistan. When Kabul fell, her plans moved up. They had to pack, evacuate, and get on a flight quickly. She knew the girls would be recognized as a school group and turned away if they arrived at the airport together, so she divided her students into pairs and trios, with some of them pretending to be children of staff members.
Most made it through the chaos into the airport, including Shabana. Because she was on the list of likely Taliban targets, she was approved to fly out, but she refused to leave any of her students behind. She spent that night and the next in the airport. On the third day, with fifty or so students still left outside the airport gates, she refused to wait any longer. She found a U.S. Marine captain, explained what was going on, and asked him to take her back outside the gate to find her students. Along with two other marines, they left the relative safety of the airport and managed to find the remaining students and extract them from the crowds. Finally Shabana and her students, staff, and graduates—all 256 of them—made it onto a plane bound for Rwanda. Four days later, they resumed classes. Before she left Afghanistan, Shabana burned the school’s records to protect her alumni, students, and their families. As feared, the Taliban has not allowed girls older than ten to return to school since 2021.
Shabana’s school continues to teach its students in Rwanda. She launched an online curriculum for girls still in Afghanistan to continue their education if they’re able to access the internet. Unfortunately, very few do, but Shabana refuses to give up on the generation left behind.
These stories were bursts of hope in otherwise heartbreaking, difficult days. Our team was working around the clock. No one was sleeping. Nerves were frayed. It was impossible to think of anything but what was happening in Kabul. Every time I talked with my grandkids over FaceTime I felt a deep ache for the terror that other moms and grandmas were experiencing half a world away. We were all doing our best to help them, but time was running out and our list kept growing bigger. Once word spread that we were successfully evacuating people, requests came flooding in. We were asked to help evacuate American and Afghan journalists from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, which somehow we were able to do. A. G. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, called because he had learned I was helping evacuate Afghans. He said he needed eight seats on a plane for his reporters and their family members. I told him I had five seats left on the plane we were using, but he didn’t want to leave anyone behind. I offered to connect him to the White House, and they were able to put all eight people on a U.S. military plane. Malala Yousafzai, who survived being shot in the head by the Taliban on her way home from school in Pakistan as a young girl, called and said her team of education advocates in Afghanistan were receiving threats. We were able to put them in touch with our Qatari contacts, who got Malala’s team on planes bound for Canada. We were also asked to keep adding women from across Afghanistan to our list. We knew we couldn’t rescue them all, which devastated everyone involved, but we would help as many as possible.
In the end, we managed to evacuate roughly one thousand Afghan women and their family members. From Kabul they flew to Albania, Bahrain, Canada, Germany, Greece, Kuwait, Qatar, Pakistan, Rwanda, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. Some were stopovers; others were for the long haul.
The Biden administration, for its part, managed to evacuate an astounding 122,000 people. It was the largest civilian airlift in U.S. history (more than double the forty-five-thousand-person airlift from Saigon in the Vietnam War). More than eight hundred planes were cobbled together from thirty countries to transport the thousands of people from all over the world who needed to leave. Three babies were even delivered midflight during evacuation, one on a U.S. military C-17 plane. However, many people were never able to make it through the airport crowds and onto a promised evacuation flight. An estimated one to two hundred Americans and thousands more Afghans who worked on U.S. or NATO-funded initiatives remain in Afghanistan.
Evacuation was only the first step. When the planes touched down in faraway places like Albania, the White Scarves faced new challenges. The network of individuals and organizations we’d pulled together to help get women out of Afghanistan pivoted to supporting resettlement. Vital Voices played a crucial role in the months that followed, and I was once again enormously proud of the organization that Madeleine, Melanne, Swanee, and I started all those years ago.
As our evacuees started building new lives in Albania, they welcomed twenty-three babies into the world. Mothers and newborns received top-quality obstetrics and neonatal care. More than three hundred children and adolescents participated in educational courses and English classes. There was also mental health and trauma support, as well as case management, educational support, and legal aid to help families plan for resettlement. Alyse and her team at Vital Voices raised funds to provide cash stipends for the families, so they could buy new clothes and gifts for the kids, as well as have funds to observe Ramadan and celebrate Eid according to their traditions at home in Afghanistan. Vital Voices continues to support resettled Afghan women in the United States and around the world, and it recently launched a fellowship program called Aghaaz, meaning “rebirth” in Dari, to connect evacuees with universities, civil society organizations, and think tanks in Washington, D.C.
Several key members of our team, including Alyse, Belquis, Horia, and Jess and Allie from the Georgetown Institute, traveled to Albania to personally thank Prime Minister Rama for his government’s support and to meet with evacuees. What they found was a community glad to be alive but also in deep grief for what they’d lost. The White Scarves had been at the tops of their fields and careers. They’d made impossible choices to get themselves to safety. One woman, a former member of Afghanistan’s parliament, was inconsolable over having to leave her children behind in Afghanistan. She was sick with worry that the Taliban would harm them before they could be reunited. Other women shared stories of family members being harassed by the Taliban and forced to move homes and feeling trapped inside their homes for fear of retribution. Nearly all wanted to return and help lead a free, democratic Afghanistan someday. In the meantime, they were organizing and leading in other ways.
Some of the women already had experience running refugee camps or humanitarian operations. The Taliban had internally displaced thousands of people during their previous rule, and millions more Afghans struggled with poverty, hunger, and homelessness for years afterward. The women in Albania put their experience managing those crises to work, no guidance needed. They divided the families into twelve clusters and democratically elected a leader to represent each cluster. They set up time-bound leadership terms and processes for holding cluster elections. Leaders were responsible for coordinating with Vital Voices and the Albanian government on behalf of their groups’ needs—including managing visa applications, flagging medical needs, landing local jobs (at nearby restaurants and hotels) for people who could work, and visiting pregnant women in the hospital as they gave birth. One elected cohort leader was a fourteen-year-old girl who had been evacuated because of her role as a youth representative for the World Food Programme. Allie and Jess smiled every time they saw her running around the compound, answering phone calls, and going door-to-door to check on her cohort members.
With the support of Vital Voices and Melanne’s Georgetown Institute, the women wrote a policy paper advocating for the U.S. Afghan Adjustment Act, which would allow those waiting for visas to begin working, earning, and establishing a permanent home in the United States. Without it, many Afghan refugees in America and in other countries like Albania risked deportation back to Afghanistan when their temporary visas expired after two years. The proposed legislation was introduced as a bipartisan bill in August 2022 and reintroduced in 2023 (and the White Scarves again came together to advocate for the legislation), but it has yet to pass in our divided Congress. To fill the gap, President Biden negotiated an increase of twelve thousand more Special Immigration Visas and an extension of current Afghan humanitarian visas to 2026. However, with eighty thousand Afghans like the White Scarves currently waiting for U.S. visas, there is still much to be done.
The women also continued their advocacy for human rights back in Afghanistan. The Georgetown Institute launched the Onward for Afghan Women initiative, and other women created the Women’s Forum on Afghanistan, the Afghan Women’s Policy Collective, and other groups to leverage their expertise advancing inclusive peace to ensure their voices are at the center of global policy debates. They have offered guidance to the U.S. government and the United Nations on responding to Afghanistan’s ongoing hunger crisis, engaging Afghan women in development efforts, and classifying gender apartheid as a crime against humanity to apply pressure to the Taliban.
One very brave woman has even made a dangerous trip back to Afghanistan to continue advocating for the women left behind. Soon after Zarifa Ghafari, the young mayor who fled with her family by flagging down the Turkish delegation, resettled in Germany, she began making plans to return. In 2022, she worked through the German foreign ministry to coordinate with the Taliban for safe passage for herself and a small documentary crew from HiddenLight (the production company that Chelsea and I started together with Sam Branson). The Taliban saw Zarifa’s trip as a tactical move. They desperately needed international aid to resume and hoped that publicly allowing an advocate for democracy and women’s rights to travel through the country safely would make for good PR. She took a lot of heat online for her willingness to negotiate her trip with the Taliban. But she was undeterred: “I am prepared to speak with those I dislike and distrust, or whose ideas differ from mine, if it means that I carry on with my work. Better that than to shout from afar.”
In Kabul, Zarifa took the camera crew to document displaced families living on the streets and struggling to survive. With the Taliban in control and the country’s central bank reserves frozen, there is no longer any public aid available to help them. Zarifa distributed supplies of rice, flour, and oil. She asked women about their hardships and argued with men who harassed her for being an educated working woman. Zarifa also gave an interview to Afghanistan’s largest private TV network. She called on the Taliban to release its female prisoners: “Those who have fought for women’s rights, in the service of a better Afghanistan for everyone, should not be in a prison cell.” The interview aired once Zarifa’s plane had safely departed. Like so many of the evacuated women, she hopes to someday return for good to a democratic Afghanistan. You can see Zarifa’s story on Netflix in the Emmy Award–winning documentary HiddenLight produced about her called In Her Hands.
As of May 2024, all but nine of the women we helped evacuate have been permanently resettled. This is an incredible success rate. Many are now living in the United States and Canada, and some are spread across Germany, Pakistan, Qatar, Rwanda, Turkey, the UAE, and Ukraine. The team continues to support those nine women still waiting for permanent resettlement. Vital Voices continues to support hundreds of women still inside Afghanistan and those who have fled to Pakistan through grants to women’s NGOs and safe houses in both countries.
In the fall of 2021, when Chelsea and I were filming our TV show Gutsy, we traveled to Fayetteville, Arkansas (where Bill and I were married and taught at the nearby university), to meet with another women-led group resettling Afghan families. Canopy Northwest Arkansas assists newly arrived evacuees during their initial resettlement, including setting up their homes, providing food, and helping them enroll in school, find jobs, apply for benefits, learn English, and access health care. Chelsea and I jumped right in assembling furniture for a soon-to-arrive family of five that had fled Kabul.
Afterward, we had tea with Aqela Faizy and her sister-in-law, Basira, in their new home in another town, and they told us of their dangerous escape months before. Basira was in her last year studying for a medical degree at Kabul University and was learning how to drive when U.S. forces left Afghanistan. Aqela’s husband, a Fulbright Scholar who earned his master’s degree from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and worked for President Ghani’s government, called one morning and said everyone needed to immediately come home. “We thought it would take months for the Taliban to reach the capital, but it happened so quickly,” she told us. Just after midnight on August 24, all fifteen members of the Faizy family made their way through the chaos to the airport. They boarded a transport plane bound for Virginia, where they spent weeks in a refugee camp before moving to Fayetteville with Canopy’s help. Now, Basira is studying to become a dental hygienist and works for Catholic Charities, where she helps other refugee women and families from around the world resettle in America. She worries for her friends still in Afghanistan who have been abused by and forced to marry members of the Taliban.
