Stranger Becomes Neighbor

An ambitious 16-year-old girl has graduated two years early from her high school in Afghanistan. She is ready to take the medical school entrance exam to pursue her dream of being a doctor, but she never gets the chance. In August of 2021, the Taliban regains power and she and her family rushe to the Kabul airport. She is one of the lucky ones who makes it through the gate, but when she looks around, she realiz...

Their father killed by the Taliban, a girl and her family fled to Pakistan then America, but this happened more than 20 years ago. Now, Nazifa is using her own experience as a refugee to help hundreds of Afghans who were part of the mass exodus when the U.S. military pulled out of the country in 2021. But she is only one person and the need is immense. Who will step up to help? 

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Looking at a young woman in a headscarf quietly ringing up groceries at Walmart, you would never know the dramatic life she has lived. During the war in Afghanistan, the US military trained a small, elite force of Afghan women called the Female Tactical Platoon (FTP) to serve alongside American special forces on dangerous night raids of suspected Taliban homes and compounds.

These female soldiers had to keep th...

When thousands of Afghans arrived in US communities in a short time frame, the refugee agencies were challenged to meet the needs of the evacuees. It fell on regular Americans to try to fill in the gaps.

This story follows the efforts of two especially driven volunteers: one a former refugee herself, the other a stay-at-home mother of five. They reach the limits of what they can do alone, and try to figure out ...

Americans know very little about the Afghan special forces known as the Zero Units who were instrumental to the war on terror in Afghanistan, but now they’re living among us in America. One of these Afghan veterans has a family of four with another baby on the way, and they are in desperate need of a home. A neighborhood pulls together to help them, even though it means moving them far from refugee servic...

After more than a year in America, 5-year-old Ava - who we met earlier in the podcast - is still living with her aunts in Salt Lake City, while her parents remain in Afghanistan. The urgency to bring them to the U.S. is underscored by a terrifying visit by the Taliban.

Meanwhile, the family’s future in America, along with most of the Afghans who were evacuated to the US remains uncertain. They apply for a...

As refugees living in the US, Nazifa and her sister founded a non-profit organization called HOPE for Afghanistan, which funded education for girls and women in their home country. But when the Taliban took power in 2021, everything they had been working on collapsed overnight. The students and teachers they were supporting risked death if they tried to continue their quest for education. It seemed as though th...

An experiment to allow women in Afghanistan to help U.S. special forces during combat raids was a full-fledged program by the time the American military pulled out of the country in 2021. Sergeant Rebekah Edmondson was there as the Cultural Support Program began and Americans started training women from Afghanistan to became soldiers as part of the Female Tactical Platoon. In a candid interview, she gets honest...

When small business owner Doug Richmond heard the story of one Afghan father and how he risked his life helping Americans in their counterterrorism efforts, he was inspired to help his family. He realized the best thing he could do was to offer him a job in his business. It started with one hire, but Doug had no idea he would end up hiring a dozen men from the same Afghan special forces unit. Doug talks to Andr...

They’re known as Zero Units – forces of Afghan men who served in their country’s National Strike Units, the NSU. These specially trained counter-terrorism soldiers worked in cooperation with the U.S. military and intelligence communities.

In this episode, Andrea speaks with Geeta Bakshi, a former CIA operations manager and counterterrorism expert- code named "Blackbird." Bakshi has first-hand ...

In our final bonus episode, host Andrea Smardon talks to one of the founders of the Blacksburg Refugee Partnership, the all-volunteer group that supports Sima and other veterans of the Afghan Female Tactical Platoon as they rebuild their lives in the U.S.

Co-founder Scott Bailey talks about how it all started with a conversation among concerned friends in church and shares the secrets to their organization&rsqu...