A mother and son in suburban Sydney, almost 100 lives on the line and a perilous rescue mission on the other side of the world. Can they pull it off?
It had just passed midnight on August 25, 2021, and Nawid "Sourosh" Cina could hear gunfire and screaming over the phone from his townhouse in suburban Sydney.
Ten days had passed since Kabul had fallen to the Taliban, and the 25-year-old had somehow managed to get a large group of children and carers from his mother's orphanages within 200 metres of the Kabul airport gates. He thought their lives were at risk and he wanted to get them out of the country.
He had barely slept in days and was running on adrenaline.
The situation at the airport was diabolically bad and the next decision he made could mean the difference between life and death for those on the ground.
"Every minute the situation was changing drastically so no one knew what was happening," Sourosh tells Australian Story. "It was complete and utter chaos."
He was relying on conflicting advice from within Australia. One official said if he could get the group to the airport gates, they would be let in; another said to turn them around because it wasn't safe.
Outside the airport, it was going from bad to worse.
"The [phone] reception was really bad," Sourosh says. "I could hear the gunshots, like they were shooting in the air to disperse the crowds and to control them.
"The fear that these kids had for their lives was so palpable, so real. And so I made the call. Go back, turn around, turn everyone around. That was that."
That decision left Sourosh feeling crushed. Days later, evacuation flights from Kabul airport ceased and he had to completely rethink the plan.
But he could never have imagined how long that would take, how difficult it would be and what it would ask of him.
'I know how hard it is to lose a child'
Lobbying politicians, navigating Australia's visa system and organising an evacuation effort from half a world away is not how Sourosh expected to be spending his 26th year.
But when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, he knew what it meant for the children and staff in the orphanages that his mother, Mahboba Rawi, had set up there through her Australian-based charity.
The four orphanages, each called Hope House, incorporated medical centres, schools for girls and vocational training programs aimed at providing sustainable futures for widows, and pathways to university for orphan boys and girls.
The Taliban takeover put them at "extreme risk", Sourosh says.
"I can't put into words how distasteful the idea of these children being with Australians is to the Taliban," he says. "Every moment was like life or death. That's how it felt and that's what it was."
For Sourosh and Mahboba, the threat also felt deeply personal. The orphanages represented a life's work.
Mahboba Rawi fled Afghanistan when she was in her early teens after protesting the Russian occupation, and arrived in Australia as a refugee with her husband when she was 18.
Mahboba's Promise, the charity she set up a decade later, was born of unimaginable tragedy. In 1992, her seven-year-old son Arash drowned along with six others when he was washed off the rocks at the Kiama Blowhole during an outing with relatives.
Mahboba Rawi's son Arash died in tragic circumstances in 1992. After his death, she dedicated her life to helping children.
Supplied: Mahboba Rawi
"When I lost a son, the direction of my life changed," she says.
"I became a very spiritual person. I said, 'I'm going to give my life to save children because I know how hard it is to lose a child'.
"In Afghanistan, mothers, they're lucky to lose one or two or three. Some mothers, they lost four or five or six or eight. So that's why I establish this charity."
Born a few years after his brother's death, Sourosh literally grew up with the charity. As a young child he would help count coins and stuff money into envelopes at the table of the family's modest townhouse.
"By virtue of my mum's work, and the way I grew up, I've always had a really deep passion for human rights," Sourosh says.
He studied law and international studies at university and after graduating took a research job with an organisation dedicated to achieving gender equality.
When the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, he quit and dedicated himself solely to the plight of the Afghans associated with his mother's orphanages.
"He become like a hero for this evacuation for me," Mahboba says. "I was so emotional, my mind is not working anymore. All I know is that I want to take the kids out, but I need help. So my son moved forward to help me."
Sourosh and Mahboba have a remarkably close relationship and share many similarities. They are both strong, persuasive personalities and that can make for a volatile mix.
"I think that Mahboba likes to think that she has more control of Sourosh, and Sourosh likes to think that he has more control over her," observes lawyer Sarah Dale, who has worked closely with the pair for the past 18 months.
"She's a typical Afghan mum," Sourosh says, "which means she's overbearing and intense and she wants you to get married all the time. But you learn how to deal with that."
"We are very, very close," Mahboba says, "but sometimes recently it's too much for him. So I have to back up a little bit and be patient with him."
Such is the banter and gentle sparring that goes on between the pair, it seems at times almost like a comedy act. Even in moments of extreme pressure and stress, laughter is never far away.
"You can never expect privacy when you've got an ethnic mum," Sourosh jokes, after Mahboba threatens to follow him on an upcoming trip to Europe.
Navigating a system in 'disarray and chaos'
Sourosh had the determination to organise an international evacuation, but not the experience.
Fortunately, in the days after the fall of Kabul, he was put in touch with Sarah Dale from the Refugee and Advice Casework Service, who was able to provide help with paperwork and visa applications.
But little prepared him for a system in a "state of disarray and chaos".
"One of the things that became really clear for me was no one knows what they're doing, no one knew what was happening," he says.
Their immediate priority was to secure emergency visas for those most at risk and so they began compiling lists.
"We had to go through that process of who's at more risk than whom and why this person should come over this person," Sourosh explains. "How do you make that decision? You can't."
Eventually they settled on a list of about 200 children and carers and began lobbying anyone they thought might be able to help.
But the task they faced was immense. Australian authorities expected a level of documentation that was simply unrealistic.
"Afghanistan's a country where people don't even have passports," Sourosh says. "Their date of birth half the time isn't registered."
And the suddenness of the Taliban takeover had taken everyone by surprise.
"Nobody really knew what the system was," Sarah Dale says. "Everybody was just throwing everything they had at the wall."
While this was going on in Australia, Sourosh somehow managed to organise the evacuation of children and carers from three Hope House orphanages outside Kabul and gather them in the capital.
But he held off sending them to the airport in the hope that visas would be issued, or at the very least some guarantee that Australian troops at the airport would allow the group through the gates.
They waited days as the security situation deteriorated. Then on the morning of August 25, the Australian government issued emergency visas for 17 of the group.
"No one could tell us how those visas were granted and why," Sourosh says. "It was just like, completely random."
Scenes of chaos at the Hamad Karzai International Airport in the days after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in August 2021.
Reuters: Supplied
It became clear that no other visas were going to be issued that day so the decision was made for the group to head to the airport that afternoon. But by then, the situation on the ground was out of control.
That's when Sourosh made the decision to turn the group back.
The following day, a suicide bombing at the airport killed 183 people and a few days later all flights to the West ceased. The chance to get the children and carers out by air had passed.
"When that last flight left Afghanistan, knowing the thousands of people that had been left, it broke my spirits," Sourosh says.
They still had hopes that more emergency visas would be issued but after weeks of waiting in vain, they decided to get the 17 who had visas out of Afghanistan by land.
This time, the evacuation went off without a hitch. The group crossed the border into Pakistan and, with the help of the Australian government, were flown to Australia, arriving to a flurry of media attention in late September 2021.
A dangerous trip proves a turning point
With so many Hope House children still left behind in Afghanistan, Sourosh struggled to appreciate the arrival of the group.
"I couldn't see them straight away," he admits. "I just gave myself a bit of distance."
But then he saw the young children visiting his mother's house for meals and playing in the park.
He realised how momentous the achievement actually was and how much the kids looked up to him.
"That's when it became real for me and I was like, 'hey, these kids' lives have been saved'," he says.
"And that's when I became really happy. I let myself feel something."
Nevertheless, his focus remained on securing more emergency visas from the Australian government. But he was making little headway.
After months of fruitless lobbying, he decided he needed to do something dramatic – he booked a flight to Kabul.
"I was like, 'absolutely not; you're not going to Afghanistan'," Sarah Dale says. "It's too dangerous. It's too risky. But I was overruled."
"It was very, very brave of him to go," Mahboba says. "But if we [are] all scared for ourselves and scared for our children, then who's going to bring change to the world?"
The decision was risky on several fronts. There was, of course, the obvious danger of being an Australian in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, although Sourosh was cautiously optimistic about that.
"If they did find out that I was an Australian, it's a very low likelihood that my life would have been in danger, but high likelihood of being beaten, going to jail or whatever."
On the other hand, if it was safe for him to be there, the Australian government might argue that it was also safe for those at the orphanages.
Sourosh's presence on the ground seemed to provide the final push that was needed back in Australia. Even before he was back in the country, the then-immigration minister, Alex Hawke, signed off on the 91 visas they had been waiting on.
"That was a real turning point for us," Dale says. "I think we finally realised that perhaps this was real."
Despite their relief at getting the emergency visas, the greatest obstacle still lay ahead – how to get everyone with a visa out of Afghanistan.
“When the government grants you a visa it means we will give you permission to enter our land," says Sourosh.
"It doesn't mean we will get you. It doesn't mean we will give you a passport. It doesn't mean we'll book you a flight. It doesn't mean all of those things.”
The evacuation plans moved at a glacial pace. It became clear that it would be impossible to get passports for any of the children and with the Taliban tightening its grip on the country, the security situation was deteriorating by the day.
The expiry date for the visas came and went and the Australian government had to grant an extension.
Finally, plans to move everyone to the border were in place. But a lot had changed since the first group had passed into Pakistan.
"I thought it would be much easier to get them into Pakistan because we had done it once before," Sourosh says.
"We had all those elements in place do it again, but it was only once we got the visas and started to plan seriously that we realised how difficult it had become."
'My mum has a lot more courage than me'
When the evacuation day finally arrived in late July last year, it was night in Australia, and Sourosh and Mahboba sat side-by-side on Sourosh's couch, wrapped in blankets, mobile phones glued to their ears. Tension hung thick in the air.
"I don't think I ever had this level of anxiety in my life," Sourosh says.
"The first day of evacuations did not go to plan at all.
"They knew as soon as we arrived without passports and visas, we're probably going to the West. Complete chaos after that."
There was fighting on the border between the Taliban and Pakistan paramilitary. By the end of the day, only 11 people managed to get across.
It was a reality check. Sourosh and Mahboba had to rethink the entire operation again.
Over the next week and a half, there were more sleepless nights. Frustratingly, there was a limit to what Sourosh and Mahboba could do from a living room in suburban Sydney, but they found different ways to try to get the children and carers across the border.
"Fear is good because it keeps you grounded in some ways," says Sourosh, "but courage is what's fundamentally needed. And I think my mum has a lot more courage than me. So there were even points where I was like, 'it needs to end'. And she was like, 'no, we need to keep going'."
"Because of the risk of staying, it really wasn't an option to do nothing," says Sarah Dale. "But there was never any plan, any route, any possibility, without risk."
To protect those left behind in Afghanistan, it is not possible to describe in detail the subsequent evacuation attempts, but ultimately almost everyone with a visa was able to get into Pakistan for processing by the Australian government.
The evacuees arrived in Australia in groups over the course of September last year. The airport scenes were joyous.
"In that moment, their lives have shifted insurmountably," says Sarah Dale.
"To see that and feel that and be a part of that is beyond words."
That joy, however, is tempered but the fact that there are those still left behind in a country where the rights of women and girls are more curtailed with each passing day.
The Australian government is no longer issuing emergency visas, which means visas need to come through Australia's humanitarian program. That requires biometric testing and interviews and with no officials on the ground in Afghanistan that is next to impossible.
"For every one that's crossed, there's still one that's left behind," Dale says.
"Every celebration of someone landing in Sydney is immediately followed with that gut-wrenching realisation that there are those that are stuck … in these perilous situations."
In December, Sourosh and Mahboba were awarded the Australian Human Rights Commission's 2022 Human Rights Medal for their work with women and children in Afghanistan and the help they provided to those fleeing the Taliban.
It was a fitting recognition of the extraordinary efforts they have made since the fall of Kabul, putting their lives on hold to help the children and carers at the Hope House orphanages.
And while the knowledge of those who remain in Afghanistan make their celebrations bittersweet, they are able to reflect on what they've achieved.
"Every morning, kids pick up their bags and all these young girls go to school," Mahboba says.
"It's an historical moment, something huge. Hopefully this generation of children come here, have opportunity and be the next generation of support for my charity and continue my dream forever."
"It's an incredible thing that Australia has stepped in to take responsibility for these lives," Sourosh says.
"We have an incredible capacity to make an impact on the world around us – every single person. It is actually so much easier than people think.
"If responsibility comes to your doorstep, you have to take it."
Watch Australian Story's After the Fall, 8pm (AEST), on ABCTV and ABC iview.
Credits
- Producer/reporter: Olivia Rousset
- Writer: Greg Hassall
- Photography: Dean Sewell for Australian Story, Reuters, supplied: Sourosh Cina
- Digital Production: Matt Henry, Megan Mackander
- Video: Olivia Rousset, supplied: Sourosh Cina
