By Warren Cornwall
Herald Writer
EVERETT — Each day, Kamelia Sarwary sits before the TV in her Everett apartment and watches the latest news about the U.S. bombing of her hometown.
Six thousand seven hundred miles from Kabul, the 24-year-old thinks of the frightened civilians in the county’s capital. She recalls when she cowered in her home there a decade ago, counting the rockets as they roared overhead. One, two, three … 30 in one minute.
It is all disturbingly familiar.
"From the time before I was born, they were fighting in Kabul," she said.
Sarwary, along with her six sisters, brother, mother and grandmother, is among the recent Afghan refugees settled in Snohomish County. Seven months after leaving Pakistan and nearly three years after departing her war-ravaged country, she has the unsettling experience of seeing that region in the cross hairs on television every day.
The incidents of the past month have brought sadness on top of sadness, she said.
First, the devastation of Sept. 11, which prompted her to make a tearful visit to a Seattle memorial. Now, the bombing of Afghanistan leaves her worried that civilians may suffer.
"I really pray for those that are dying in Afghanistan, and those that are on the border with Pakistan," she said.
She offers no support for the Taliban government, which she and her family fled. She said she considers the group an import from Pakistan, born in the religious schools there. And she condemned the attacks on the United States.
"I’m just waiting that the U.S. government arrest those people that they want," she said.
Sarwary is one of 3,000 Afghan refugees who entered the country in the 12 months before October, according to U.S. State Department statistics. The number of Afghan refugees coming to the United States surged starting in 1999 after a long lull in the preceding decade.
The nation accepted 20,000 Afghan refugees from 1982 to 1989, years when the Soviet Union was embroiled in a war in that country. It accepted only 6,200 refugees from Afghanistan in the 1990s, after the Soviet pullout, according to the State Department.
The State Department recently had been stepping up efforts to help resettle Afghan refugees, particularly urban Afghan women who had moved to Iran and Pakistan, according to a State Department fact sheet.
That was before four U.S. jetliners were hijacked Sept. 11 and crashed into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and a Pennsylvania field, killing an estimated 5,600 people. U.S. officials have named Osama bin Laden, the head of a terrorist network headquartered in Afghanistan, as the prime suspect.
"It’s been pretty much shut down since Sept. 11," said Greg Hope, director of the Episcopal Church’s refugee resettlement program in Seattle.
Sarwary and her family fit the description of people the State Department was trying to help.
She had grown up in a family of professionals, her father a civil engineer and her mother a schoolteacher, she said. They had lived in Kabul until the early ’90s, when they moved to Mazar-e Sharif after armed men came to their house and questioned her father and brother, she said.
They eventually returned to Kabul, and Sarwary said she planned to attend medical school there. Then the Taliban came to power, imposing restrictions on women, barring them from most work and education outside the home. Her family is Shiite Muslim, unlike the Taliban, which is Sunni, she said.
Her father, she said, left the city, fearing his ties to an earlier government could make him a target. She and her sisters spent much of the following year confined to their home, unable to go out unless accompanied by a man. Finally, in the late ’90s, they left for the Pakistani border town of Peshawar.
There, she found work with a human rights organization, first as an office assistant and then as the designer of its Web site, she said.
This summer, those skills translated into a three-month internship with the Everett firm Nth Degree Creative, which specializes in light and laser shows at entertainment events.
Jeff Silverman, the company’s owner, said he worried Sarwary might be a target for discrimination from people angered over the attacks. But Sarwary said she has instead received support. Friends from Pakistan e-mailed her, fearing for her safety, she said.
"I told them, ‘If you can believe me or not, nobody was discriminating against me," said Sarwary, who in her jeans and sweater, with no traditional head covering, has few outward trappings of her Muslim faith.
Now, she is taking computer classes in Everett and thinking that someday she might return to Afghanistan to help the people living there. But she hesitates at the idea of returning there for good.
"I am scared," she said.
You can call Herald Writer Warren Cornwall at 425-339-3463 or send e-mail to cornwall@heraldnet.com.
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