SULAIMANIYA, Iraq — As the Taliban closed in on the Afghan capital, Kabul, in August, what had been a privileged training on the American University of Afghanistan out of the blue turned a harmful legal responsibility.

Students and employees frantically looked for an escape route from a nation that, with the withdrawal of American forces, would fall to the Taliban — a group that has described the U.S.-funded college as a den of infidels and has shut schools and universities for girls and women.

Iraq, although, was not the primary vacation spot that got here to the scholars’ minds as a refuge.

“OK, now I’m leaving the Taliban behind,” stated Mashall, 24, a grasp’s pupil in info know-how. “And now I’m going to face ISIS,” she stated, describing her concern over the Islamic State when informed her evacuation flight would find yourself in Iraq.

Those fears have proved unfounded for Mashall and her classmates, who’re among the many first Afghan college students to reach on the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani. It is positioned in the Kurdish metropolis of Sulaimaniya, a liberal metropolis dotted with parks, full of cafes and eating places, and thought-about the most secure main metropolis in Iraq.

The college students stated they realized as a lot once they arrived, welcomed in the nighttime by the college’s president and professors with bouquets of flowers to a campus with no excessive partitions or safety patrols.

So far, 109 younger Afghans are learning in Sulaimaniya, a portion of the 300 American University college students which can be finally anticipated to relocate there.

Many of the relocated college students, traumatized by the lack of their homeland and haunted by fear over the households they left behind, are nonetheless in a state of shock and unsure methods to navigate life in a unusual land.

On the college campus, a group of relocated college students informed their tales to The New York Times, talking publicly for the primary time since they had been evacuated from Kabul. The Times is utilizing solely their first names and shouldn’t be displaying their faces in pictures to guard their households nonetheless in Afghanistan.

As the Taliban neared Kabul in August, Neda, a enterprise pupil who labored part-time on the college, frantically fed pupil paperwork into a hearth on the almost empty campus. “We tried to burn all the contracts or documents so they couldn’t find the students’ names and addresses,” she stated.

The college students and employees feared the Taliban would hunt them down together with their households and kill them.

“The Taliban came to an office I was working at,” recalled Murtaza, a legislation pupil who was later evacuated. “They wanted to beat us. They called us infidels and American spies.”

That evening in August, as Neda burned papers, the international employees on the college had already been evacuated to a British-run safety compound close to the airport. For virtually 4 hours Neda and a handful of different Afghans threw pupil data into the hearth.

And then it was time to go away for the British compound, in what would grow to be a harrowing journey ending in what lots of the college students initially thought-about to be the harmful vacation spot of Iraq.

But the Afghan college’s tutorial administrator knew higher.

Vice President Victoria Fontan had labored in Iraq and throughout the pandemic had collaborated along with her counterpart in Sulaimaniya on an internet curriculum. When the Kabul college began trying to find a place to relocate college students, she considered Iraq and a community of highly effective buddies kicked into motion.

President Barham Salih of Iraq, the founding father of the college in Sulaimaniya and himself a former refugee, pledged to take in as much as 300 college students and organized for them to enter with out visas or in some instances even passports.

“The Iraqis really took an enormous leap of faith in this,” stated Jared Cohen, the chief government of Jigsaw, a know-how incubator previously generally known as Google Ideas. He turned concerned in a private capability after being requested by a good friend, an Afghan-born BBC journalist, to assist evacuate college students.

Mr. Cohen stated he obtained in a single afternoon from American philanthropists pledges of $three million to evacuate and fund the research of the 109 Afghan college students in Sulaimaniya and relocate one other group of civil society professionals and journalists to a different nation. The Qatari authorities supplied planes to evacuate the scholars.

The president of the Afghan college, Ian Bickford, stated 106 college students different had been despatched to the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan, and about 200 to different nations, together with Pakistan and the United States.

Another 375 American University college students are nonetheless in Afghanistan, together with many extra employees and a whole lot of alumni, Mr. Bickford stated. Many are in hiding.

Students in Afghanistan nonetheless have entry to on-line programs led by academics now residing outdoors the nation. But a lot of these college students not have dependable entry to the web or really feel secure to attach, their former classmates stated.

Some college students, like Neda, are nonetheless traumatized by their escape. The British safety compound the place she was sheltering with the college’s international employees was taken over by the Taliban, who demanded cash and automobiles earlier than they let the occupants go away. Neda was terrified that the Taliban, who later took pictures and movies of everybody on the buses to the airport, would acknowledge they weren’t foreigners however Afghans.

When they lastly arrived on the Kabul airport gate with the international employees, she stated, British troopers barred them from getting into.

“They said, ‘No, you guys are Afghans, you cannot go,’” Neda stated. She stated they had been kicked out of the airport and into an space managed by the Taliban. “I was in a very bad situation because I had never seen the Taliban face to face.”

Eventually, she made it onto a Qatari evacuation flight on Aug. 21, leaving in a sandstorm amid the chaos of international troopers together with Turks making an attempt to regulate an airport overrun with folks determined to flee.

“The Turkish Army and American Army treated us in a very bad way,” she stated, wiping away tears. “I mean, it was my own country, it was my own land. But still they shouted at us.”

Neda didn’t inform her household she was going to Iraq as a result of she knew they might fear. “All you hear about Iraq is the Islamic State and explosions,” she stated.

Murtza, 22, a legislation pupil who was amongst these relocated, stated he missed Kabul, even with its frequent electrical energy cuts. “I didn’t feel safe around Kabul,” he stated. “But it was my hometown. It was my country. It was my soul and it was my heart.”

Mujtaba, a legislation pupil, was among a group of students who relocated to Sulaimaniya in October. Before he left, he would lie awake at evening, listening to the fixed roar of planes leaving Kabul.

“We couldn’t sleep because of the sound. And not just the sound, the thought that so many great people are just leaving the country. It was just devastating,” he stated. Now he has grow to be one in every of them. But he says he’s decided to return to Afghanistan when he can to assist rebuild it.

Mujtaba taught English and ran a e book membership in Kabul, whereas additionally instructing his mom to learn.

In the small room he shares with one other Afghan pupil in Sulaimaniya, Mujtaba writes inspirational notes to himself on sticky notes positioned above his desk.

“Be strong,” stated that day’s notice, with a smiley face drawn beneath.