Published: 12 August 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
PHYLLIS CHESLER spent a year working with anti-trafficking experts, ultra-Orthodox rabbis, and military veterans to help Meena Safi and other Afghan women escape.
Last year, on July 26, 2021, my dear friend and colleague Mandy Sanghera, a London-based human rights activist and philanthropist, called and asked me if I wanted to help rescue women from Afghanistan.
“Are you kidding? I’ve probably been waiting for this opportunity all my life.”
“I thought you had some unfinished business there,” she wisely said.
I was once held against my will in Kabul as a bride a very long time ago, and have since read many memoirs written by Muslim or ex-Muslim women, by Muslim reformers and dissidents, and by Westerners who have travelled to Afghanistan - and I had a very good idea of what being trapped there might be like for women, dissidents, infidels, and gays forced to live in an Islamist 10th century.
I immediately threw myself into this very feminist, very moral, and very Jewish work, full-time, with all my might.
Mandy introduced me to the feminist Meena Safi, who lived in Kabul. Beginning on July 26, we began to exchange confidences via Signal, an encrypted messaging app, via WhatsApp, via text, and eventually via email. I connected Meena to our team, which had, in a short period of time, rescued many hundreds of Afghan women and their families.
Last August, I did not know whether Meena had actually made it to the airport under the hail of the Taliban’s whips, bullets, and death threats. I did not know whether she was alive or dead.
Meena was on the last flight out on the very day, August 26, that a suicide bomber attacked Kabul airport.
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Rescuing Meena (Tablet)
Photo: Phyllis Chesler and Meena Safi (Phyllis Chesler/Tablet)
