On August 15, 2021, Marwa set her alarm for 1 A.M., the time when electricity in Kabul was reliable, to iron a new pink dress in preparation for a return to her fourth year of medical school. She awoke in the morning to pings of the same message over and over flooding her phone: “They are coming!”

‘They’ was the Taliban. Kabul would fall in a matter of hours.

She and her family learned they had 30 minutes to each pack a small backpack of belongings and run for the airport.

Deplaning in Mexico City (Photo credit: Azam Ahmed)

At this very moment, Rebecca was at a family wedding in Columbus, Ohio, the first stop on a cross-country road trip to take her son Eli back to college after the pandemic. Immediately, she got swept up in a race against time to evacuate all of the locals who had worked at the NYT bureau during the two-decade war. The group of 124, which included reporters, drivers, cooks, translators—and their families—endured a harrowing departure, waiting for days on the tarmac and coming under attack by militants at the airport. On August 31, they miraculously landed in Houston, becoming the largest privately sponsored refugee group in modern American history. Figuring out how to resettle them became Rebecca’s day job.

For Diana, her connection to this story began in 2012. She traveled to Afghanistan on assignment for a story for More magazine. She was profiling a British physician who went on to build or remodel 130 schools. The girls in those classrooms were determined to study. They wanted to go to university. Most of their mothers were illiterate.
It was a moment of extreme change and modernization for Afghanistan. Diana never forgot those girls and their dreams.

Over dinner in New York in early 2022, Rebecca shared with Diana the details of this experience she just could not shake. By the end of the evening, the two college friends had decided to write the details down, and keep following along. Rebecca already had the name for the book: THE LAST FREE WOMEN.

We have been following four young women in the group since they arrived in 2021: Samira, Mursal, Marwa and Maryam.

To help the young people in the group pay for college, Rebecca and a team at the NYT and elsewhere launched a GoFundMe. That was soon formalized into a nonprofit, The Journalism Refugees Education Fund.

When Samira, Wais and Durrin arrived in the dead of winter, they had no belongings. Laura Kessler stopped in to check on them. When she saw the state of things in the apartment, she burst into tears. She jumped to action. Step one: Buy a proper mattress.

Checking out Samira, Wais and Durrin’s apartment at Chatham.

Marwa and Mursals’ dorm rooms at Chatham and Cornell.

They gave us a window into their past lives back home as well.

We are so honored and moved that these amazing young women shared their unfolding lives with us. In America, they had to start completely over.
They left Afghanistan with 30 minutes notice, with just a backpack of belongings.

Marwa and Mursal’s eyes are on our cover. We would have liked to feature all four, but the look of that was crowded.

Seeing the photos of them holding the book for the first time made Diana cry.

The book tour began on August 22, at the Ram’s Head Inn on Shelter Island.