00:00 A unique and imperiled group of female commandos was left in Kabul when the Taliban took over.
00:05 Close to 40 have been relocated but are struggling to legalize their statuses
00:10 even as a group of these female Afghan commandos tagged as command purpose is telling their tales
00:16 of survival and hope to relieve their trauma while earning livelihood as VOA's Carla Babb reports.
00:25 In the small town of Buda, Texas these women are creating something new using pieces from their
00:33 past. This transformative process of turning clothing into paper usually people don't believe
00:39 it you know and so it's this magical process that they get to be part of and I always say it's kind
00:43 of like alchemy. Military uniforms, hats, head scarves cut up, washed and pulverized into a pulp.
00:53 Pulp that's either pressed into paper or used to make these paintings. It's about releasing that
00:59 pain, it's about liberating and through connection building something beautiful
01:05 from something that was traumatic. It's called Project Raha after the Dari word for release.
01:13 The Afghans here served in the Afghan National Army's female tactical platoon deploying with
01:20 American special forces to collect intelligence in areas men couldn't. Some of these women even
01:28 served together in Afghanistan that is until the Taliban took over two years ago this month. That
01:36 whole evacuation was I mean it was it was a mess. I think a lot of us felt really helpless like it
01:42 felt like something that was so close to our hearts, a culture and people that we loved and
01:49 cared about. We were watching things just fall apart in a matter of days and hours. Army veteran
01:55 Sarah Scully worked with the female tactical platoon from 2019 to 2020. When Kabul fell,
02:03 she and other military women helped get their Afghan counterparts out of the country. It's a
02:08 time that's painful for the commandos to talk about. We lost our dream, we lost our goals,
02:16 we lost everything. Everything was like changed in one day, everything. After two years,
02:23 almost all of the nearly 40 female commandos who came to the United States remain in legal limbo,
02:29 stuck in a backlog of asylum applicants. They were they're from a country that being a woman in the
02:36 military was like putting a target on your back and the fact that some of these women still do
02:42 not have asylum and some of them still have their futures up in the air and there's a big question
02:47 mark of what's next is an injustice. Hassani says she wants to know that she and her family will be
02:55 safe away from the Taliban's reach. She spent her whole life wanting to be in the Afghan military,
03:02 a dream the Taliban took away. She now wants to join the U.S. Army but she can't without a green
03:09 card. I know I'm losing the time if I get older I couldn't join the army and couldn't follow my
03:18 childhood dream. Piece by piece they place their loss, love and hope onto canvas. The Veterans
03:28 Support Group Command Purpose will display their work in a New York art gallery in November
03:34 to raise money and awareness. Hassani's favorite piece that she created is a tribute to the Afghan
03:40 army and Afghan flag. Afghanistan is everything, Afghanistan is my heart. Trauma transformed,
03:49 old made new, one art piece at a time. Carla Babb, VOA News.
