INDIANAPOLIS — Crawling around a two-bedroom apartment on the south side of Indianapolis, 14-month-old Suliaman Sherzad is too young to remember the chaos that was all around him one year ago today.
His mother, Halima, will never forget it.
“It was a black day for all Afghan people,” Halima said through a translator, sitting on a couch, Suliaman at her feet.
A year ago, Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul fell under the control of the Taliban.
“No one can forget those days,” Halima said.
Least of all the 25-year-old mother, who had just given birth four weeks earlier to Suliaman, her first child.
Suliaman had been born with heart issues, and Halima and her husband, Sohail, had a choice to make: Stay and have Halima give up any rights she had as a woman under the Taliban, or leave, saying goodbye to their families and the only home they’d ever known - and with only the clothes on their backs.
The couple chose the latter.
“They will not let us go to school or to work,” Halima said of the Taliban. “We can’t live now in Afghanistan, we have to go somewhere."
Reaching their destination safely, though, was not guaranteed, as the family fought to even get to the airport in Kabul that week. Halima says they were stopped and questioned several times by the Taliban.
“The Taliban, they pushed me, and they pushed Suliaman, and Suliaman was falling down, and I hold him from his feet,” Halima recalled, breaking into tears at the memory.
She also thinks about another moment she said she’ll never forget, and what she says a Taliban member said to her when she asked for water because she was thirsty.
“Womans are destroying the world,” Halima said he told her, before refusing to give her anything to drink.
That day, Halima said, it felt like the world where she had counted on raising her son was being destroyed before her eyes, and the only way out was on a crowded plane, then a refugee camp for several weeks in Qatar before finally making it to Indiana last September.
Nearly a year later, the infant from that journey is standing up, almost ready to walk on his own. Halima watches her son growing every day in his new home and wonders about her own parents, who she said are hiding from the Taliban.
“I’m trying to make good memories for Suliaman here, and I’m really worried about my family, my dad. I miss my mom,” she said.
This new mother knows, though, that this is home now, even if it doesn’t always feel like it.
“We have to accept it," she said. "We have to accept here is our home.”
Indiana is where her Suliaman will grow up, knowing of Afghanistan only from his parents’ stories.
“He has to know about his country,” Halima said, adding she wants her son to know this country, too.
“He should help people like the American people help us, so in this point, I want Suliaman to be as an American,” she said. “The future is here."
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