Teen details her escape from Afghanistan for educational freedom

Zahra Shahnoory was 16 years old when the principal announced over her high school’s loudspeaker that the Taliban had entered Kabul, Afghanistan.

Everybody started to scatter and, unable to find transportation home, Shahnoory left school on foot, hiding her textbooks in her hijab out of fear that the militant group, which prohibits girls from studying beyond the eighth grade, would kill her.

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So began her and her family’s over a yearlong journey from the capital of Afghanistan to New York City in pursuit of the freedom to be educated.

“I feel that I’m not afraid of dying,” Shahnoory said recently. “I’m afraid of being illiterate.”

The pursuit would take Shahnoory, her parents, her five younger siblings and their grandmother to Iran, Brazil, Central America, Mexico and finally the U.S. border, where they requested asylum from political and ethnic persecution. 

Shahnoory, now 20, and her family are among the 3,600 Afghans who have crossed the southern border since the start of 2022. Like migrants from other nations around the world where gangs, cartels and totalitarian governments rule with brutality, the Shahnoorys fled for their lives.

“The Taliban wanted me dead. They wanted my family dead. They wanted my gender dead,” Shahnoory said during class speaker remarks at her New York City graduation last month. “The journey to safety took us many places, but it was America that offered us hope.”

Her graduation fulfilled a lifelong dream for her mother, Fatima Shahnoory, whose own education was cut short in 1996 when the Taliban first took control of Afghanistan.

“We didn’t have the opportunities — me, my siblings, my sisters — to continue our education or pursue our dreams,” Fatima Shahnoory said in Farsi through an interpreter. “Now it is important for my kids, for my children, to continue their education.”

The Shahnoorys decided to leave Kabul out of fear the Taliban would kill them because they are Hazara, one of the most persecuted ethnic groups in Afghanistan, according to human rights organizations.

They first went to Iran, where they stayed for seven months before flying to Brazil.

“Brazil was not safe for my family — the security, the language barrier, everything,” Shahnoory said. “We made a decision to come to the United States.”

From Brazil, they traversed South and Central America, mostly by foot. They crossed the infamous Darien Gap, a deadly stretch of rainforest that straddles Colombia and Panama.

Just off the coast of Panama, the boat they were riding in capsized, leaving the nine of them stranded in the Atlantic Ocean for four hours. As they hung on to what was left of the boat, Shahnoory’s thoughts focused on a single subject. 

“My main intention was if I were in Afghanistan, I couldn’t continue my education,” she said, recalling the ordeal, “so it doesn’t matter if I die in this water.”

They crossed into the U.S. 25 days later, taking their place among the nearly 2.5 million migrants who entered the country through the southern border last year, Like everyone else, they were sent to a detention center for processing.

Since Shahnoory was not a minor, she was held separately from the rest of her family until they were allowed to move to New York under temporary protected status that was extended to Afghan refugees in March 2022. The designation protects them from deportation and allows them to work in the U.S. 

The Shahnoorys are living in a shelter in New York City while they wait for their asylum claim to be adjudicated. Their immigration attorney, Andrew Heinrich, said that if they had been sent back to Afghanistan, he has no doubt about what would have happened to them. 

“They would die the day they arrived,” said Heinrich, executive director of Project Rousseau, a nonprofit that supports asylum-seekers in New York. “We receive constant messages from family members of some of our clients in Afghanistan — and others who just learn about us — about the peril.”

“The most tragic and harrowing point is anytime someone has said, ‘If I don’t get out of here very soon, the Taliban will kill me,’ tragically, they’ve been right.”

Shahnoory soon enrolled in Pathways to Graduation, a New York-based program that helps students with untraditional backgrounds graduate high school. UNESCO recently reported that an estimated 2.5 million girls in Afghanistan have been banned from attending high school since September 2021.

Roughly 80% of school-age girls in the country were not in school, according to the report, and women are banned from attending universities. 

Heinrich said the situation is getting worse for women in Afghanistan, where the government recently reintroduced so-called “death by stoning,” a punishment for adultery.

After her graduation ceremony, Shahnoory FaceTimed her 15-year-old cousin, who is not allowed to attend school, in Kabul. Her cousin, whose name was withheld for security reasons, smiled and beamed at Shahnoory’s achievement.

“I am so proud of you,” the teenager said. 

Shahnoory said she hopes to enroll in college in the fall with the goal of one day helping girls like her cousin, who are barred from getting an education and enjoying the empowerment that comes with it.

“When I see the situation of Afghanistan, it gives me a lot of confidence to continue my education and to do so many good things for girls and women in Afghanistan,” she said.