When the Taliban arrived, Ghezal knew she had to get her family out of Afghanistan

I knew the Taliban approached the mazar-i-sharif but I turned my attention by turning on music, dancing, and ironing my new dress.

My father worked for the provincial government. One day he called and said, “We have sold out by our government. Ghezal, run.”

Together with my husband Shiwa and our two small children, I ran through a quiet streets to relatives.

The next day, I returned home to gather some items and saw a man in the Taliban turban and the robe spoke with neighbors and pointed to my house.

I know for sure the Taliban chases me. A local pharmacist told me that two government employees had been shot dead on our way.

After a few days, our relatives asked us to leave. They worry that we made them target for the Taliban. So we paid a lot of money and boarded a plane to Kabul to join our friends, Baktash and Seenta, who were civil society activists.

We thought we would have about three months before the Taliban arrived in Kabul, enough time to escape from the country.

But the next night, we got the news that our city, Mazar-i-Sharif, had fallen. I cried when my friends sent through the photos of the White Taliban flag flying across the city horizon.

Then I received a call from a very trusted source that said that Ashraf Ghani had missed the country.

We were all surprised when neighbors rushed in, notify Baktash and Seenta to burn their documents and hide their laptops and hard drives. They also told them to remove all their daughter photos from the walls – Taliban did not allow images of women to be displayed.

That night, I thought Kabul would be overwhelmed with fighting and that we would all die. I don’t want my children to experience terror before they die, so I made them sleep, hoping the bombing would happen when they slept.

Then we raise music, play patriotic songs. We sang, we cried, we shouted. We came out of our minds.