Trauma and the Taliban: How their return to power has caused thousands of Afghans in Canada to relive the horrors of the past

Ahmed Fadozai can still remember the moment when the knife sank into the man’s neck.

Fadozai, now a Houston businessman, was at Kabul’s Ghazi soccer stadium in 1998, waiting to watch a soccer game with friends. Instead, military trucks arrived, soldiers jumped up, picked up a man, and then beheaded him.

“This person’s head was cut off with a knife in front of thousands of people,” says Fadozai, his voice shaking as he vividly recalls the moment.

Was 10.

With the recent return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Fadozai is among the thousands of Afghans now living in North America reliving the horrors of their past.

Almost six million Afghans have been displaced from their homes during four decades of war, reports the United Nations Refugee Agency. And according to refugee settlement officials in Canada, recent images of Taliban violence in the media are bringing terrifying memories to the roughly 100,000 Canadians of Afghan descent.

Erin Pease, director of the refugee office for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Hamilton, says she has received hundreds of calls from Canadian Afghans in the past month concerned for their relatives in Afghanistan and about reliving the horrors they suffered at the hands of the years of the Taliban. behind.

“It just gives me goose bumps,” says Pease. His office has two full-time employees, but also has a team of volunteers to help respond to Afghan Canadians in crisis. “Watching TV is getting them to go to the hospital, get care and take medicine, and it’s really devastating.”

Ottawa’s Dr. Kazim Hizbullah, a global health expert, is experiencing firsthand how disturbing images trigger traumatic memories. His voice falters as he relives one of the many threats he received from the Taliban while working at a US military base in Kunar province in 2008: “This time we forgive you. We don’t shoot you. But next time (we will) “.

Hezbollah, whose calm demeanor did not mask the terror it felt for its young wife and three-month-old baby, went on to lead a happy and successful life in Canada. But a recent Facebook video of two little girls crying over their brother’s corpse in Kabul triggered a mental health crisis.

“I couldn’t sleep well, I woke up four or five times a night … it was a painful situation,” he says. Hezbollah says he normally approached his wife for support, but this time he couldn’t: “His (mental health) situation was worse than mine.”

Dr. Craig Haen, a trauma therapist in White Plains, New York, and co-chair of community outreach for the American Association for Group Psychotherapy, says that media images play an important role in our traumatic reactions.

A study in the journal Psychiatry in 2002 it found that people who repeatedly viewed images of “people falling or jumping from the World Trade Center towers” had almost three times the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than those who did not. Haen works with trauma victims to help them regulate their exposure to distressing media and talk about their experiences.

Noor Sabir Sabaru, an energetic Uber driver in North York says he cries when he remembers his 41 years living in a war zone. His earliest memory is running barefoot, at age 4, from his village in Khost province in 1980. His family’s house was burned down. They rebuilt it again when the Russians left in 1990, only to suffer under the Taliban.

“The Taliban beat me because my beard was too short; They put my brother in jail, ”recalls Sabaru.

When the Americans invaded in 2001, the trauma returned.

“There was a lot of bombing,” Subaru says. He fled to Canada in 2015 after the Taliban shot his family and bombed the family car. “I was lucky not to be in that car.”

Shelley Kavenaugh, a Toronto psychotherapist who specializes in trauma, says refugees are so busy with the necessities of life when they arrive in North America – housing, school and work – that their mental health is not a priority and that trauma is not. resolved can be reactivated when events repeat.

Fresh from Kabul, 26-year-old Farzaneh (not her real name) suffers from severe PTSD but says she doesn’t have time to seek help. She is overwhelmed by the care of her parents and younger siblings, who had to run away with her as a result of her work as a writer.

In July 2016, Farzaneh was near Deh Mazang Square in Kabul when two suicide bombers killed 120 people and injured hundreds more. He passed out, he says, and woke up in an apocalypse.

“He was hurt, he was bleeding… there was meat everywhere. I saw people who were divided into several pieces and bodies cut in half, without the head, ”says Farzaneh in a choked voice. She says she saw several close friends whose bodies were mangled. The fragments of other friends would never be found.

Farzaneh’s PTSD recurred when he escaped from Kabul with his family. Soldiers constantly fired their weapons into the air, bringing back memories of the bombing. And members of the Taliban beat people with sticks while they waited for hours at the airport.

“My mom, my sister and my brother were beaten up by the Taliban” at the airport, Farzaneh recalls. “It happened right in front of the Americans and they were just looking at us.” His mother still has bruises on her head and back more than five weeks later.

Mujeeb Anjar, a father of seven who settled in Halifax in 2013, has been trying to manage his re-trauma in different ways.

Watching the news from Afghanistan brought back memories of the threats from the Taliban that he endured as a correspondent for Afghan Radio Freedom in 2010-13. “It was like a baby without a mother, crying 24 hours a day,” he says.

Anjar says he tries to stay busy with his driving instruction business and stay away from social media. He says that medication and religion have not helped much: “If you communicate with Allah, then it helps you, but not enough.”

Integrating Islam into treatment is important for religious refugees, according to research from the Khalil School of Islamic Psychology and Research, which has wellness centers in the United States and Toronto. But depression and other mental health conditions are stigmatized in Afghan culture, according to Hizbullah, which practiced medicine in Afghanistan until 2008.

Hizbullah estimates that more than 70 percent of Afghans need some form of mental health intervention, as they have lived most of their lives in a war zone. But Afghans rarely see psychiatrists, and mental health services are extremely scarce.

“It’s like a double-edged sword: on the one hand you have a lack of resources and on the other you have the stigma.”

Karima (not her real name), 41, who came to Canada from Afghanistan in early September, is not afraid to ask for help, but has not yet been able to see a mental health professional.

He raised his family in a war zone and constantly cared for his six children when they were away from his home in Afghanistan.

The drugs he received a few years ago in Pakistan for depression and anxiety have now run out. Safe in Canada, Karima has recurring memories of the blood-soaked hand of a young girl killed in an explosion and the corpse of her brother-in-law. You’ve seen Canadian doctors for stomach and eye problems, but you haven’t seen a psychiatrist yet.

Afghan refugees like Karima tend to have high education or strong life skills and may be seen as needing less support when they arrive, according to the executive director of a refugee trauma support organization in Toronto that doesn’t wants to be identified to protect. the name of your organization. Statistics Canada research shows that permanent resident refugees of Afghan origin are more than four times more likely to have post-secondary education than those from Southeast Asia. In an email, the director of refugee trauma support said the organization doesn’t see many people from Afghanistan: “We may not see them as they get by with less formal support.”

Mohammed (not his real name), 53, has never received formal support to cope with the trauma of growing up in Kandahar during the Russian occupation from 1979 to 1989.

“Shooting, rebels, explosions and rockets all my life,” recalls Mohammed. Walking home from school when he was 11 years old in 1979, he and his friends were caught in a crossfire and one died. The following year, the secret service pulled Mohammed from a public bus, pointed a gun at his head and held him for hours in a location far from his home, he says.

Mohammed’s voice falters as he remembers the corpses he saw every day as a child outside a hospital near where he played. Relive the moment when a medical worker asked him to help him move four charred bodies and he escaped. Was 14 years old.

But Mohammed says that telling his story and the kindness of others have helped him heal.

“A female immigration officer, she was so kind. She started crying when she heard my story. “Mohammed now has children of his own and often tells them traumatic stories from his childhood so they know how lucky they are.

It is important to offer support to Afghans who are being re-traumatized, says trauma therapist Haen: “Isolation is like fertilizer for traumatic reactions. The more lonely people feel, the more embarrassed they feel about their reactions, the less they share with people who understand, the more traumatized they will feel ”.

Ahmed Fadozai still wakes up every day with the image of the man in the stadium and is terrified. “It bothers me mentally, emotionally and physically even just hearing his name: Taliban.”