When a woman reaches an extreme state-when Talibs have discovered a safe house, when a relative has been kidnapped or killed, when money has run out, when suicide seems imminent-Marshman, working with the undercover Afghan staff of two American humanitarian organizations, pays for passports, visas, and the overland journey across the border. The Taliban are looking for me and want to arrest me.” When the Taliban raided a woman’s house, Marshman stayed awake to advise her:
When Noori spent two weeks alone in a Kabul hospital waiting to give birth-because of her military background, it was too risky for her family to visit her-Marshman sent encouraging texts and then money for the C-section. And honestly, a lot of it is preventing suicide.” When one of the women runs out of food, Marshman sends cash from her own funds. “Who is in really bad shape, who cannot feed their children, whose child is going to die if they don’t get medicine, who is going to be executed if I don’t move them into a safe house in Afghanistan, who can be linked together. “I have to triage all the time who should get what amount of money based on need,” Marshman told me. The list now includes 206 people-90 principals, mostly former military or police women, and 116 dependents.
She gives priority to single women and mothers with young children, and her list keeps growing as other Afghans hear about her and send desperate WhatsApp texts. Jackson, Queen Elizabeth, Elon Musk, Mahsa Amini, the midterm elections, Sam Bankman-Fried, ChatGPT, earthquakes, floods, fires, two Super Bowls, six Trump investigations, dozens of mass shootings, and the return of Biden versus Trump, Marshman, on her own time, has worked single-mindedly to keep her network of Afghans alive and bring them to safety. Through the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Slap, Dobbs v. Marshman never stopped trying to get them out. (In my account of those events in this magazine, she was given the pseudonym Alice Spence.) Scores more women were left behind, including 32 FTPs, all thoroughly vetted by the U.S. As the Taliban took over, Marshman, working with other American military women, and texting from her house in Honolulu, helped guide more than two dozen Afghan military women and their family members into the Kabul airport and out of Afghanistan, heading to the U.S. In August 2021, just before the fall of the Afghan government, one of them, a female commando named Mahjabin, was murdered in Kabul. Marshman became close to several members of the FTPs. Marshman had served in Afghanistan, where she trained all-women Afghan special-forces units called Female Tactical Platoons, or FTPs, and joined them on dangerous combat missions with male Afghan and American commandos. It would have been dangerous, maybe fatal, to tell the Talib that she had named her daughter after a United States Army reserve captain named Victoria Marshman. “Why Victoria? Why didn’t you give her a proper Islamic name?” Noori showed them hospital documents requiring medical treatment for her C-section. “Why aren’t you happy here in Afghanistan?” All that mattered was whether someone was a good human being. “In our eyes, we don’t see black and white,” Noori replied. Why did you crossbreed? Why does this family exist?” “You should have married a Hazara, and you should have married a Tajik. “Why is a Hazara married to a Tajik?” a Talib demanded. Only the baby’s birth gave her the strength to keep going.īorder guards searched their bags and examined their documents. At times, Noori later told me, she’d considered suicide, even after she knew that she was pregnant. They had spent the past year in flight from town to town, safe house to safe house. As former special-forces soldiers who had fought alongside Americans, and as a mixed couple-he is Tajik, she Hazara, a persecuted Shia minority-they were prime targets for revenge killing by Afghanistan’s new rulers. They hadn’t seen their parents since the fall of Afghanistan a year before. They had sold everything else, including the furniture and handmade curtains and bedspread that made up Noori’s wedding dowry, to buy passports. Noori and Elham, in their early 20s, were carrying just two small bags, one with the baby’s clothes, the other with their own. The day was hot the baby was crying the crowd pressed in.
Last September, Safia Noori her husband, Fakhruddin Elham and their four-month-old daughter, Victoria, traveled to Torkham and joined a throng of Afghans waiting to be allowed across by Taliban guards. One of them crosses the mountainous eastern border with Pakistan in a town called Torkham. T here are few ways of escape from the Taliban’s Afghanistan.
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