Ahmad booked a midday flight because he thought going to the airport when it was busy decreased his chances of being caught. It was early December, in 2021, and cold in southern Russia, so he wore warm winter clothes.
He pulled his black suitcase, which he had wrapped in layers of plastic, toward security. Inside of the bag were the passports, nearly 300 of them.
Ahmad, an Afghan man, figured that border guards wouldn’t bother asking him to open his bag if it meant unravelling the plastic wrap as a long line formed behind him. Still, he was filled with fear as he placed it on the conveyer belt and watched it make its way toward the X-ray machine.
After he’d walked through security and went to collect his suitcase, a border officer was waiting for him. The guard asked him to explain what all the little booklets were in his bag.
Ahmad knew he had to stay calm. He smiled and, with feigned confidence, told the guard he was going to a food exhibition in Tehran, and that he’d brought along brochures. He even had details of a specific event that would happen a few days after his arrival.
The guard waved him through.
He went to the airline desk and picked up his boarding tickets. He would have a short layover before heading finally to Tehran, but his bag was checked. It would make it all the way through.
He pulled out his phone and messaged the group chat that he had successfully passed through airport security. The first dangerous step in their mission was complete, but there were several more to follow.
On the other end of the chat was Farouq Samim, a former Afghan journalist and military medical doctor living in Ottawa, and Lewis Retik, a lawyer. Ahmad’s text pinged their phones at 2:33 a.m., while they were both at home.
Dr. Samim was awake, in case something happened. “Amazing,” he wrote, and wished Ahmad safe travels.
‘If the Taliban find them first, it will be certain death’
Aug. 15, 2021, the day that Taliban insurgents swept into power in Kabul during the withdrawal of U.S. forces, was chaotic, sending Afghans who had aided Western governments into a panic. For a brief period, military flights scrambled to evacuate them, but tens of thousands of people who were trying to reach safety were left behind and in danger of Taliban reprisals.
With Western governments failing to get all of them out, non-governmental organizations, and some individuals simply moved to help those in need, took it upon themselves to save people.
Dr. Samim was one of them. Born in Afghanistan, he moved to Ottawa from Kabul 15 years ago when he was 32, after being awarded a scholarship to study communications.
He was in tears the day he left his home. He was leaving behind his large family, but also the fragile democracy that he had wanted to continue building. Afghanistan was headed in the right direction. There was still violence in pockets of the country, and it wasn’t perfect, but its younger generation was becoming educated – including women – and for him, that held so much promise.
In Kabul, he had gone to medical school. But he found his true passion working as a fixer for international journalists, a role that was part reporter, interpreter, and guide. For years, in the 2000s, he worked alongside former Chicago Tribune journalist Kim Barker, who wrote a 2011 memoir about her time there called The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Tina Fey later played Ms. Barker in the film adaption, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Actor Christopher Abbott portrayed Dr. Samim.
When Dr. Samim, who had also helped train Canadian troops and authored a guidebook for NATO forces, moved to Canada in 2009, he didn’t plan on staying. He intended to bring his communication-in-conflict skills back to the country he loved. But six months after he moved to Ottawa, his wife and children joined him there. As they settled in and enjoyed life in Canada, they thought less and less of moving back. Also, as the Taliban became more aware of Dr. Samim’s work, it became increasingly dangerous for them to return.
Dr. Samim was at his home in Ottawa when he learned the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan. He thought about his family back home. They were progressive and highly educated, and included teachers, human rights defenders, as well as those who worked in support of the Afghan army. They were all about to lose everything.
A few days later, Dr. Samim received a call from his friend, Dan Demers, who works in government relations and lives in Ottawa. He asked if Dr. Samim’s family was okay, and what he could do to help. Dr. Samim said he needed to rescue his sister Shahnaz, who has a disability, and explained that she was in grave danger because of his work.
That night, Dr. Samim got an invite to a virtual call with his friend and Mr. Retik, an Ottawa-based partner at Gowling WLG, an international law firm. Mr. Retik, whose practice is focused primarily on product regulatory and commercial law, scribbled several pages of notes as Dr. Samim described his family’s circumstances.
As Mr. Retik listened to Dr. Samim’s story, he thought of his own grandparents, who had also once needed to escape a tyrannical force – the Nazis. He told Dr. Samim that he would stop at nothing to help. He anticipated a lot of challenges, but he was determined.
“‘No’ is the beginning of a negotiation,” he told Dr. Samim. It was a phrase he’d learned from Jacques Shore, a partner at Gowling WLG who specializes in regulatory and administrative law, and whose parents had survived the Holocaust. And after they hung up, the very first phone call Mr. Retik made was to Mr. Shore. He didn’t need any convincing.
Dr. Samim, playing the harmonium at his home office in Ottawa, set out three years ago with Mr. Retik and Mr. Shore to help vulnerable people escape from Afghanistan.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
Dr. Samim was at a gas station when his cellphone rang. A heartwarming voice was on the other end. It was Mr. Shore, reassuring him that he would assist however he could.
As the three men began their advocacy, Dr. Samim considered who else the Taliban could harm. He had four close relatives through marriage who he would add to the immediate list.
They started working the phones, calling officials in Canada, the U.S., and other countries, looking for any way to extract Dr. Samim’s relatives. Brandon Geithner, a career bureaucrat, offered his support, among others.
Mr. Shore wrote to federal ministers and officials that he recognized politicians were in the middle of an election campaign and so he was also trying to reach minister’s staff. He even approached Erin O’Toole, who was then the federal Conservative Leader, while he was out for a jog in their neighbourhood. Mr. Shore ran up alongside Mr. O’Toole and encouraged him to make a bigger deal of the government abandoning Afghan allies in the election campaign.
In an e-mail, Mr. Retik warned an official that “the window for extraction” is closing. “I can’t express enough that this is not a theoretical risk, his family has been threatened, and if the Taliban find them first, it will be certain death.”
Dr. Samim made calls, too, looping in Ms. Barker, who was now working for The New York Times.
The trio, along with the other concerned individuals who helped their efforts, eventually got a critical lead on an opportunity to fly Dr. Samim’s relatives, as well as some of his former Tribune colleagues, out of Mazar-i-Sharif airport in northern Afghanistan. Non-governmental organizations had been trying to pull money together to charter a pair of planes. Dr. Samim’s relatives could get on board – but in order to do so, they had to raise approximately $1-million to contribute to the cost. Also, once they’d chartered the planes, they would still need to find a country that would let them land.
As their efforts were starting to turn into something real, Mr. Shore thought about why they were undertaking this daunting task. The effort was interfaith, so they would call themselves Operation Abraham in honour of the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan became increasingly dangerous. Dr. Samim had been in constant communication with his nephew Walid Safi, who was an interpreter for NATO, and who was desperate to escape. Dr. Samim had warned him not to go to the airport, that he would help Mr. Safi and his family evacuate. But he didn’t listen. Dr. Samim was on a conference call with Mr. Shore and others when he learned that Mr. Safi had been killed in an attack on the airport.
They needed to quickly come up with the funding for the flights and ultimately were able to do so thanks to generous Americans. (Those who contributed asked Operation Abraham to keep their involvement confidential.)
On Aug. 31, 2021, five of Dr. Samim’s relatives joined hundreds of Afghans, travelling by buses on a dangerous ten-hour ride from Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif, through the Hindu Kush mountains, all of them fearful the entire trip that the Taliban could put an end to their escape.
They stopped short of the airport, hiding in one wedding hall and then another, for weeks, while Operation Abraham and NGOs tried to find somewhere the planes could go.
Mr. Shore wrote e-mails and made a number of phone calls pleading with multiple countries, including Canada, to allow the planes to at least land temporarily until the passengers could continue to their final destinations.
Finally, the U.S allowed the planes to land at its airbase in Qatar.
Qatar – which shares its al-Udeid air base with the U.S. military, currently an important hub for aid shipments into Lebanon like this one – was critical to 2021's plan to rescue Dr. Samim's relatives.CALLUM PATON/AFP via Getty Images
On Sept. 21, the plane carrying Dr. Samim’s relatives took off. The second plane departed the first week of October.
Dr. Samim and the others helping with the mission stayed up the nights the planes took off, tracking their journeys on a flight radar app. His relatives were not in Canada yet, but they were out of danger.
And Operation Abraham’s work was just getting started.
While they had a small team working on the evacuation of Dr. Samim’s relatives and Chicago Tribune staff, it would be up to just the three of them – Dr. Samim, Mr. Shore and Mr. Retik – to continue their work to save the rest.
Dr. Samim had other relatives he now needed to get out, including three nephews he’d raised when their father left them – and all of whom had worked for Afghanistan’s army, aiding NATO forces. And, as they learned of more people at risk of Taliban reprisals, the list of people they wanted to help grew.
A month before the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Canadian government had announced a special resettlement program for Afghans who had helped with its military and diplomatic missions, and it later established a humanitarian resettlement program for other Afghans vulnerable to Taliban persecution, such as women leaders and human rights activists.
But beyond the painstaking process of getting people’s applications approved for resettlement, Afghans would need something crucial: a passport.
The embassy in Moscow
In the group chat, Ahmad updated Dr. Samim and Mr. Retik that he’d landed in Tehran and was headed in a taxi to the hotel. It was 2:30 a.m. on Dec. 9 in Iran, but still evening the day before in Ottawa.
“Wonderful news!” Mr. Retik replied.
Ahmad, and nearly 300 passports belonging to Afghans who needed them, had made it safely to the next phase of their mission. (The Globe and Mail is using a pseudonym for this man, and is not naming the airport that he departed from, to protect his safety and the safety of others.)
Of course, prior to the problem of moving the documents, they’d had to get the passports approved and printed in the first place, which had been no small task.
Earlier that fall, Operation Abraham had learned through Afghan diplomats and others that Afghanistan’s embassy in Moscow was one of the country’s only embassies abroad that could possibly print their passports.
They worked their connections until they landed a call with Afghanistan’s ambassador to Russia, Said T. Jawad, who was staunchly against the Taliban. After hearing about Operation Abraham and its efforts to rescue vulnerable Afghans, he agreed to help, deploying his diplomats to process and print the passports.
In Ottawa, Dr. Samim retreated to his basement in the evenings, missing family dinners and time with his kids as he worked tirelessly on passport applications. People who didn’t have access to Internet or struggled to fill out the forms sent their information to him so he could do it for them.
He translated the applications from Dari and Pashto into English. And he would edit photos, too, carefully checking the resolution of each, and tweaking them with Photoshop. Getting applicants’ signatures was challenging, and so in most cases, Dr. Samim forged them.
For weeks this process often went on well into the early hours of the morning, until Dr. Samim would finally pass out on his couch before waking and turning his attention to his job in communications for Ontario’s health ministry.
After completing each application, he would send it off in an e-mail to Mr. Retik, who would review it carefully, prepare an affidavit, official payment, and forward all of it to Afghanistan’s embassy in Moscow.
There, the applications would reach two diplomats in their 30s. (The Globe is not identifying the diplomats to protect the safety of their families.)
One of the diplomats was responsible for issuing passports, while the other – a military attaché – had his focus shifted to passports when the Taliban seized control of the country.
The Afghan embassy in Moscow helped Operation Abraham with processing and printing passports.Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters
Afghans living in Russia lined up in droves at the embassy, crowding the hallways, desperate to renew their passports and pick up other documents, fearful of what would happen when the Taliban arrived. Their small team was assisting hundreds of clients a day.
When the diplomats heard about Operation Abraham, they realized they would need to issue passports under totally unprecedented circumstances. Usually, applicants applied in person and were interviewed. But Ambassador Jawad – and his staff – knew these were extraordinary times and that they had to do what they could to save lives.
They formed a task force, working late into the evenings, entering data, verifying information and hitting print on the old passport machine, which sounded like a fan as each one went through a lamination process before being spit out on the other side.
The mood was tense. They knew the Taliban could arrive at any time.
The young diplomats’ futures were unknown. They would no longer be welcome in Russia, and they couldn’t go home.
At the end of September, Mr. Shore wrote to a government official, relaying news from Ambassador Jawad that Russia had informed him that if the diplomatic status of his embassy was revoked by the Taliban, he and his staff would be “on their own.”
Mr. Shore urged federal officials to bring the diplomats to Canada.
“It must be emphasized that the Afghan Ambassador and his staff are doing all they can to assist potential victims at great risk who are unable to leave Afghanistan without passports,” Mr. Shore wrote.
Ahmad, an Afghan man who helped Operation Abraham, holds an Afghan passport.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
In the meantime, once all the passports were printed, Operation Abraham had another problem to solve: how to get them into Afghanistan.
Dr. Samim asked Mohammad, an Afghan friend in Ottawa, if he knew anyone who might do it. (The Globe is using his first name to protect his and others’ safety.)
Mohammad, after trying others, landed on his own brother: Ahmad. Initially, Ahmad told him he had to think about it, but he quickly decided it was a risk he would take to save lives.
The morning after Ahmad arrived in Tehran, a friend picked him up from the hotel and they hid the bundle of passports under the back seat of his car.
They drove all day and night until they reached Mashhad, a city in northern Iran that borders Afghanistan. They checked into a hotel, resting up before the next day’s task: finding an Afghan truck driver willing to smuggle the passports into the country.
In the morning they drove to the border and Ahmad went to an area where trucks were parked and found a couple with Afghanistan license plates. He approached the drivers to ask if they would transport the documents, but both refused, saying it was far too dangerous. He bought them lunch and asked them to forget what he’d requested.
Ahmad realized getting a stranger to do this job would be impossible, so he called someone in the transportation industry who he trusted, who arranged for the passports to be taken across the border. They would land at a truck stop in Herat, in western Afghanistan.
From there, another friend of Mohammad’s received them in a rented rickshaw, taking them to his home for safekeeping until Dr. Samim, through his network, found a bus driver who would move them the next leg.
The bundle of life-saving documents was on its way to Kabul, to Naweed Haidari, one of Dr. Samim’s nephews who lived in the capital. And the mission was about to become even more dangerous.
Taliban checkpoints
Nelab Haidari was six months pregnant and resting in her bedroom when her husband told her it was time to go.
They set out in a gold Toyota Corolla and weaved through the streets of Kabul, taking backroads and stopping at shops along the way to make sure they weren’t being followed.
The couple had talked about how this day would unfold. How they would go to a bus station to retrieve the precious passports, and would have to pass Taliban checkpoints along the way. Ms. Haidari told her husband she would go with him, rationalizing that her presence as a woman in the car would reduce the chances of being searched.
The first checkpoint was about 15 minutes from their home. Ms. Haidari, as required, was in the back seat as a Taliban officer peered into the vehicle and asked where they were going.
Mr. Haidari told the officer they were going to a wholesale area to buy household items and groceries. They were allowed to pass through, but were terrified afterwards thinking that they might be tracked.
In Ottawa, Dr. Samim followed their every move using a shared-location function on WhatsApp. Every once in a while, he used the app to call for updates.
When the couple arrived at the bus station, Mr. Haidari parked the car. He was shaking with fear, and when he saw the man carrying the package he noticed that he, too, was terrified. They made sure no one was watching, completed the handover, and quickly parted ways.
Mr. Haidari and his wife visited a few shops, trying to look like they were behaving normally. After a little while, they headed back to the car and Ms. Haidari slipped the package under her burka.
As they drove, Ms. Haidari thought about how, almost instantly, life in Afghanistan had dramatically changed.
She used to work as a teacher and would talk to young girls about their rights, but now she was in hiding. She used to go out for coffee, ice cream, or picnic in a park with her family. Now, as they drove away from the bus station, they passed only empty streets – as if the city and its outskirts had become a ghost town.
They came to a busy intersection where vehicles from different regions of the country connect before entering Kabul. Another checkpoint was coming up.
Ms. Haidari’s heart pounded. The passports were pressed up against her pregnant belly as the Taliban officer looked inside the car. Although she was filled with worry for her growing family, she kept composed as best as she could. Mr. Haidari told the officer that he was picking up food and heading home.
At that moment, in Ottawa, Dr. Samim saw their progress halted, figuring they were at a checkpoint. He was anxious to speak with them again, and these delays in communication always made him nervous.
A short while later, Mr. Haidari called him on WhatsApp to say they were almost home.
Naweed Haidari has a pile of made-in-Russia passports in front of him in Kabul in December, 2021, which he and his wife, Nelab, distributed to people on Operation Abraham's list.Supplied
Getting passports into hands
When Dr. Samim left Kabul for Ottawa 15 years ago, he kept his home in Afghanistan for his relatives who still lived there. It was also a place he hoped to one day return to. He had built the house with his own hands, painting it a deep cream, installing a water tank on the roof and sprinkling seeds on the lawn so it was always green. In the summer, the perfectly manicured lawn was lined with rose bushes.
The house sheltered Dr. Samim’s three nephews and their families while Operation Abraham urged the immigration department to accept them for resettlement to Canada. They were terrified the Taliban would come after them because of their own work, but also their relation to Dr. Samim.
Once Mr. Haidari was home, he sent a photo of the package to Dr. Samim, who forwarded it to Mr. Retik and texted: “All passports are safe in my home in Kabul.”
He added: “Mission almost accomplished.”
The Canadian government had been accepting and facilitating the travel to Canada for thousands of Afghans, but it was a slow process. Those on Operation Abraham’s list had not yet been accepted for resettlement, but at the very least, they would soon have passports.
It was up to Mr. Haidari to keep the documents safe. After the sun went down, he went up to the water tank on his roof and tucked the passports on a ledge inside, where they wouldn’t get wet.
The next day, following instructions from Dr. Samim, Mr. Haidari sent some passports in small envelopes to families around the country. He used buses to move many of them, and paid drivers double that of a passenger’s ticket. He never told them what were in the envelopes.
Some people came in person to pick them up. Mr. Haidari didn’t want to give out his address, so he would choose a meeting place, often a nearby bakery, and would ask each person for their license plate. Others were too scared to meet up, so he would deliver them to their door.
Within a few days, the passports were gone.
Mr. Haidari and his wife didn’t actually need passports for themselves; they had them already, but they had remained in Afghanistan because Canada’s immigration department had yet to approve their applications. Like many of the other families supported by Operation Abraham, they were trapped. And so they watched the seasons change from inside the home they rarely left.
Mr. Shore had been pleading with government officials to act, but nobody would move Operation Abraham’s cases along. Then, in the spring of 2022, someone on their list who’d received a passport was shot and killed by the Taliban.
Time had run out.
Stranded in Pakistan
Shortly after the young man was killed, Mr. Shore and Dr. Samim met with a ministerial staffer who understood the dire circumstances these families were in, and they all agreed that moving them to Pakistan would be the best option.
By that time, Operation Abraham had seen some success.
Dr. Samim’s sister Shahnaz, and four of his other relatives, had already started settling into their new lives in Canada. This was after they had spent more than a month in Qatar, waiting for the U.S. to process their paperwork, and then some time at a U.S. base in Virginia.
The ten Afghan diplomats who printed the passports arrived in Canada with their families in the spring of 2022, just as the embassy was about to be taken over by the Taliban. Newcomers would need support once they arrived, and Operation Abraham enlisted the help of friends, such as Bram Bregman, who runs the Danbe Foundation and raised money for families.
Inside Afghanistan, Operation Abraham had helped distribute passports to female judges, journalists, human rights activists and former national army and police, who had supported NATO and had worked against the Taliban. Many of these individuals and their families had the support of non-governmental organizations such as Journalists for Human Rights, among others.
By late spring of 2022, Operation Abraham’s outstanding list was approximately 150 names long. They arranged for these people to be moved to Pakistan, with the expectation that it would not be long before they would come to Canada.
But that September, more than a year after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan, they were still in Pakistan. After months in the country, their visas had expired, and their money was running out. They were terrified of being deported.
Dr. Samim wrote a desperate letter to Mr. Shore, which Mr. Shore shared with a government official. “So far the empty promises by the government has not been helpful at all to our group. It has been a mental torture to those whose lives are hanging in uncertainty for the past three months,” Dr. Samim wrote.
Without bringing them to Canada, he continued, there were only two outcomes: they would remain in Pakistan in extreme poverty, or they would be forced to return to Afghanistan to “the slaughterhouse of the Taliban.”
He asked if the government would really allow more of these people to be killed – like Dr. Samim’s nephew, the NATO interpreter who was murdered at the airport trying to flee, or the young man on their list who was shot by the Taliban before he could use his new passport to escape.
But while they waited for more urgent action from the government, families supported by Operation Abraham did slowly begin to be approved.
The Haidaris named their son Joseph, or Yousof, at the suggestion of Farouq Samim's Operation Abraham partners. Their daughter, Azada, is two months old.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
In March, 2023, Nelab and Naweed Haidari finally arrived to their new home in Ottawa, with their one-year-old baby. They had asked Mr. Samim to help name their first child. He asked Mr. Lewis and Mr. Shore for suggestions and, in honour of Operation Abraham, they picked Joseph, or Yousof: an interfaith name.
But while they got out, by that time, a handful of Operation Abraham families had been stranded in Pakistan for nearly a year.
Mr. Shore wrote desperate e-mails to immigration officials. “My concern has been that some of these families’ individual files may have been lost along the way or fell between some departmental cracks in the system,” he wrote.
“If the situation for these families were not so desperate, we would not be sending you the number of e-mails we have lately.”
Mr. Shore and Dr. Samim also spoke with officials a number of times in person, pleading for help rescuing those on their list, and often breaking down in tears in front of them.
They never gave up. And because of their tireless efforts, this year all of the remaining families finally made it to Canada.
But Operation Abraham couldn’t tell its story until one of those crucial to the effort arrived here safely: Ahmad. No longer safe in Russia because of his involvement in distributing the passports, he finally landed in Canada this past June.
The members of Operation Abraham have had a tumultuous and stressful three years. They lost two people who were waiting to be rescued. And they spent many months with little to no sleep, working around the clock, to save as many as they could. In the end, they estimate they helped rescue more than 1,500 Afghans, including all those on the chartered flights. Hundreds of them came to Canada.
Dr. Samim said that though the past three years have been exhausting, it was the least he could do for his fellow Afghans.
What surprised him the most, he said, were the efforts of Mr. Shore, Mr. Retik and others who had no connection to Afghanistan but did everything they could to help.
“I call them godsends, I call them angels, I call them brothers, dear friends and we will stay like that as long as I’m alive and they’re alive.”
Dr. Samim is grateful to Mr. Shore and Mr. Retik for their support in work that, by their estimates, helped bring more than 1,500 Afghans to safety.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
The fate of Afghanistan: More from The Globe and Mail
Zahra Nader: The Taliban are waging war on women in Afghanistan. This is how we are resisting
Doug Saunders: The Afghan refugee crisis is a migratory time bomb that may soon go off
Kevin Newman: When Kabul fell, Harjit Sajjan had the wrong priorities in Afghanistan
