Tariq Safi had gone his entire life — about 28 years — without having a seizure. But just a few months after he'd escaped Afghanistan, via a military plane as his country fell to the Taliban, that changed. He blacked out in his room in a Dutch refugee camp, an ambulance rushed him to the hospital, and he was given a new diagnosis.
"I got epilepsy here," Tariq says. "I lost everything here."
Kazim Abdullahi, a former Afghan translator who migrated to Spokane eight years ago thanks to the Special Immigrant Visa program, dedicated the waning days before the United States' withdrawal from Afghanistan to getting as many family members of local Afghans out as possible.
Most on his list didn't escape, but Tariq — Kazim's brother-in-law — was one of the lucky ones. The plane lifted off the tarmac with Tariq on board. Tariq hoped he would be able to come to America under the "humanitarian parole" provision and join his brother-in-law in Spokane. But for many refugees, their final destination after leaving Afghanistan was beyond their control — and carried considerable consequences.
"In a lot of cases, people didn't know who was evacuating them," says Adam Bates, policy counsel for the International Refugee Assistance Project. "There are folks in Kosovo, there are folks in the Netherlands, there are folks in Pakistan, there's people in the UAE. It's just turned into this, you know, logistical nightmare."
But while others ended up on planes that flew to Pakistan, to Germany, and then to the United States, Tariq ended on a plane bound for the Netherlands. He thought it would just be a temporary layover.
"When we came here, the United States Embassy told us, 'Your case will process in seven or 10 days, and we will take you to the United States,'" Tariq says.
Instead, Tariq has been effectively trapped at an ad hoc Dutch refugee shelter at the Walaardt Sacré camp in Zeist, for six months — grappling with epilepsy, poverty, depression, hunger and a deep uncertainty about what happens next.
"We are still in here," Tariq says. "We really don't know why."
Kazim, who flew to the Netherlands to visit his brother-in-law last week, describes the despair at Walaardt Sacré as almost palpable.
"It is a personal cell," Kazim says, "a personal prison."
It's like his brother-in-law can see the sunlight through the bars, he says, but it's just out of reach — he can't touch it, can't feel the warmth on his face.
During the 2002 trial of the terrorist who bombed Pan Am Flight 103, the Zeist base actually did serve as a prison. And Tariq isn't the only one who feels trapped. Asma Amin, an Afghan who worked with the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, sits next to Tariq on the Zoom call with the Inlander.
As the Afghan government collapsed, Asma was one of those with the ability to decide who got to leave on the planes, Kazim says. She had a very good reason to be one of them. Her father had been killed by the Taliban, and her family was in danger. But while the rest of her family got on a series of flights that brought them to America, she and her diabetic mother landed in the Netherlands.
"We had hoped to go to the U.S. and live a normal life," Asma tells the Inlander, "but we are stuck here for like six months."
Typically, the Netherlands' Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers runs 71 permanent camps for refugees, agency spokeswoman Sonja Kloppenburg writes in an email to the Inlander.
"There, you get money to buy your own food," she says. "Although you often share a living room and kitchen, you have a certain amount of privacy."
But Walaardt Sacré, where Tariq is staying, is a military barracks where soldiers trained, not a dedicated refugee camp.
"It's not intended for permanent housing [of refugees], so we have to make do," she writes. "Because we needed to shelter more people than the forecast in 2021, we opened dozens of temporary shelters, where the conditions are not up to our standards."
There's little privacy, Kazim says. Refugees can't lock their doors. Inspections are regularly conducted. And no, Kazim says, these refugees don't get money to buy food. They weren't allowed to cook their own food, either.
Instead, the food they've been given is "garbage," he says. He tried the breakfast offered one morning — cheese and milk — and promptly threw up. It had gone bad, he says. He sends over a photo of a carton of chocolate milk: It expired about a month ago.
Worse, they'd receive meals stamped with labels warning Muslim refugees that the chicken or beef was not "halal." Islam has strict dietary restrictions about what kind of food is allowed, and how it must be prepared. Food is either "halal" (permissible) or "haram" (forbidden).
If, say, rice or vegetables even touches haram meat, Kazim says, you can't eat any of it. But often, he says, the Muslim refugees at Walaardt Sacré haven't been given another option. Instead, he says, they could either violate the commands of their faith or go hungry.
"They will give you the 'choice' of not eating food," Kazim says.
Asma says she complained but was effectively told that it was better than being stuck in Afghanistan.
In an email, Kloppenburg says she had never heard a complaint about non-halal food before, but would look into it.
"It is possible that not all food is halal. That could well be the case, but there should be enough alternatives for all to eat a healthy meal," Kloppenburg writes. "Food is important to people, especially when you don't have your normal life."
Shortly after the Inlander's questions, Tariq reports, they stopped receiving haram meat — and started receiving meat with the "halal" label instead.
The lack of meal options wouldn't be a problem if the Afghan refugees could afford to buy groceries. But when the Taliban took over, their Afghan bank accounts were shut down.
"We had money in Afghanistan, but it's all gone. Closed. Every bank. Every account," Asma says. "We left everything in Afghanistan. Our homes, our jobs, everything."'
Without money, transportation options are limited. Asma says she fell from the stairs and broke a tooth. Since she didn't have money for a taxi, she had to ride a bike to the dentist. But because she didn't have insurance or money to pay the bill, they told her they couldn't help her. Tariq faced a similar problem when he was hit with a more than 800-euro ambulance bill after his seizure.
"I told them, I don't have even 5 euros to buy a burger to eat," Tariq says. "How should I pay this much money?"
Without a job, they didn't have an income. And according to Kloppenburg, to get a job in the Netherlands, a refugee needs a specific work permit.
"Being here in transit, I assume they have no Dutch permit nor did they apply for one," Kloppenburg writes. She stresses that the staff and the community at Walaardt Sacré have a reputation for being welcoming, and it's a good camp overall. But she also recognizes the misery that some of the refugees are facing right now.
"All in all, it is hard: leaving your country, waiting for a transfer, not being able to start your new life in the Netherlands, staying in a shelter, sharing your living spaces with limited privacy, not being able to cook," Kloppenburg writes. "The waiting."
"We left everything in Afghanistan. Our homes, our jobs, everything."
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Yet the bulk of the blame for that wait can't be heaped upon the Dutch. All Asma and Tariq need to leave the refugee camp and join their families in America is approval from the United States. Asma has almost completed the entire lengthy "Special Immigrant Visa" process — her work for the American embassy offering the same route to the United States that Kazim took.
"She's basically done," Kazim says. "She's waiting on her visa interview."
But she's been waiting for that interview for months.
Back in August, just weeks before the American military withdrew, the U.S. created another special visa process for Afghans who worked for the U.S. as subcontractors, like Tariq. But that path has been effectively blown up for most Afghans who can't verify that status.
"After the Taliban got control, nobody was able to find a phone number for their boss," Kazim says. "You're not using your work email anymore. You're not using your work phone anymore."
Kazim was left with one last option for his brother-in-law Tariq — file for "humanitarian parole," a route that would allow Tariq to stay in the United States temporarily, though it wouldn't give him a pathway to citizenship.
In the meantime, Tariq's name is in the mix with more than 30,000 others waiting on a visa.
Bates, from the International Refugee Assistance Project, says it's hard to know exactly what's happening with the thousands of Afghan refugees in various stages of the immigration process.
"There's just a severe lack of information and a lack of transparency from the [Biden] administration," Bates says.
Some of the problems refugees have faced can be blamed on the Trump administration or the poor planning in the lead-up to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. But there are problems that can be fixed right now, he says. President Biden has sweeping constitutional authority when it comes to immigration and foreign policy.
"I just think it's a lack of willpower to do the right thing," Bates says.
Using the history of Cuban immigration as a model, he says, Biden could easily declare that those who, like Asma, are in the final stages of awaiting approval of a Special Immigration Visa could do so from the safety of the United States instead of in Afghanistan or a refugee camp.
Meanwhile, Tariq waits in the Netherlands.
"Here, I can't start a new life, another life," Tariq says. "I've got depression. I've got epilepsy."
And for Asma, it's not just her who's feeling the despair. She says her mother wants to go back to Afghanistan. "She says Afghanistan was better than here."
At least the Taliban might only kill them once, Asma says — but here, in this camp, they're killed every day "by depression or an uncertain future." ♦