Afghan journalist Khadija Amin premieres ‘Where are my children?’: “I thank the Spanish Government for helping me get out”

The Afghan journalist Khadija Amina refugee in Spain, has released the documentary ‘Where are my children?’ in which he narrates his fight to recover his three children. In her country she is officially listed as deceased, the father cut off all means of communication with them and could not prove that she is their mother.

“I thank the Spanish Government that helped me leave Afghanistan and the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, who received me at the airport when I arrived (in 2021). I didn’t know that in a country there were women who had such an important position as Minister of Defense (…) The situation is very difficult, it is a trauma. You can’t recover “I feel guilty for having left thousands of women, but I did it to survive and from here I now help many others,” Amin said in a meeting with the press this Tuesday in Madrid, where he has lived for four years.

In the documentary, which will premiere on February 26 on Movistar Plus+ and has two chapters, she narrates what it was like to find her children through Google Maps in Kabul and find out which school they went to and even shows how collaborators of the Taliban regime assured her that they would take out the children that she “had abandoned” if she paid them 20,000 euros.

Now, the woman hopes to obtain Spanish nationality – she has been waiting for six months – with the hope that this will help her “recover” her children who, as she has learned, now live in Germany with their father.

Amin has explained that yes In Kabul it was difficult to locate her ex-husband’s house and know which school they went to, in Germany it was morebecause the children’s father doesn’t let them talk to her frequently.

“They allow me to talk to them very little, the last time I talked to them they told me ‘we don’t want to talk to you anymore’. My oldest son told me ‘Mom, please don’t call us because our father takes good care of us.’ You left, you abandoned us and now I don’t want to talk to you anymore.’. Before this affected me a lot, hearing that my children don’t want to talk to me. But now I think that they are not saying this, it is their father saying it. Before, they wanted to be with me and they asked me: ‘Mom, where can we go to say that we want to live with you?'”, said Amin, who explained that although the documentary has made him relive the “pain”, he has been able to “heal a little”.

The journalist – who has reported that she suffered physical, emotional and now vicarious violence – has been accompanied by the co-director of the documentary, who has assured that her ex-husband “has never had the intention of communicating” with them, although he knows that the feature film has seen the light.

“I want to be strong for my children’s future, so that they can see how their mother continues to be a strong, fighting woman. And let them see that I have not fought only for them“, he added.

“THE STORY OF MILLIONS OF AFGHAN WOMEN PRISONED IN AFGHANISTAN”

Precisely, Amin has explained that when she arrived in Spain in 2021 (after the Taliban took control of the country again), the Spanish authorities offered her four seats on a military plane to take her three children and even her ex-husband out of Afghanistan. He refused, as she explained, and has since cut off communication between her and the minors, who continue to believe that Amin “abandoned” them and has done “nothing to get them back.”

“I want this (the documentary) to be an audiovisual letter because they are told that I abandoned them and left.. I want them to see that their mother has never stopped fighting for them, so they know how I have fought.. This is a story of millions of Afghan women who are imprisoned in Afghanistan. I want it (this documentary) to give visibility to girls and women. “The international community abandoned us at the hands of terrorists,” he added.

In Afghanistan, Amin had divorced her husband after denouncing him for mistreatment. But after the divorce, she explained, the agreement does not mention that she has three children and in her family she is an “outcast.”

“Before they gave us a little protection but if it were today, it would be impossible because the new law (in Afghanistan) says that a husband can beat his wife until her bones break. All women in Afghanistan were left without rights: they cannot leave their house, nothing has been left for the women so that they can live there. It is very difficult to understand the situation,” Amin lamented.