Three years ago, nearly 300 young Afghan musicians, their teachers and staff from their music school fled Afghanistan in fear for their lives after their country fell again to the Taliban. NPR followed them on their journey from Kabul to a new life.
Since then, they’ve been permanently rebuilding their community as refugees in northern Portugal. NPR visited them as they began to put down roots and recently caught up with them again, just before they tour the U.S. as the Afghan Youth Orchestra.
The Afghanistan National Institute of Music represented an exciting vision of Afghanistan. It brought together kids from all over the country, boys and girls alike, from vastly different socioeconomic circumstances, ethnicities and language groups, says Ahmad Sarmast, the school’s director. He founded the school in 2010.
“I think one thing that connects us is not just our nationality or language or religion, but playing music,” Sarmast observes. “Making music together also plays a significant role in keeping our identity as a community.”
That shared love of music is what binds them together.
“The group is very diverse, like Afghanistan itself,” he says. “The community of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music is a mosaic, a smaller mosaic of the beautiful, diverse Afghanistan.”
The school quickly gained international prominence; its musicians even toured the U.S. in 2013, including a performance at New York City’s Carnegie Hall. It seemed like a new era was dawning.
But even before the Taliban seized power again in 2021, everyone at the school knew that they were still at serious risk. The danger became very real: A suicide bomber attacked one of their concerts and severely injured Sarmast, who was sitting just a few seats from the attacker.
“Our school was in the high hit list of the Taliban. They attacked one of our performances in 2014, where two people were killed and I was injured,” he says.
Sarmast was nearly killed in that attack — with 11 pieces of shrapnel lodged in his skull — and his hearing was severely damaged. Over the next few years, there were several more planned attacks on the school and Sarmast himself, all of which were foiled.
Once the Taliban reseized control of Afghanistan in 2021, however, he felt there was no other choice. Once again, schooling for girls past the sixth grade has been banned. So has playing and listening to music — and the Taliban have seized and burned instruments.
“We knew when the Taliban was going to come [back],” Sarmast says, “our school will be the first target, and it will be the beginning of another cultural genocide.”
So in the fall of 2021, with the assistance of the governments of Qatar and Portugal, students, faculty, staff and some family members were airlifted out of Kabul and resettled together as a community. They were going to recreate the musical heart of Afghanistan — in northern Portugal, near Braga.
I visited them in Portugal in the fall of 2022, not long after they had been moved from temporary quarters in Lisbon to Braga, a quieter area not far from the border with Spain.
They were still settling in, enrolling in local schools and getting used to the food. I ate lunch with some of the teenage students at a local Catholic charitable organization, where most of them politely pushed plainly cooked fish and overboiled Brussels sprouts around their plates. It was a world away from the spiced meats and pilafs of their homeland.
15-year-old trumpet player Zohra Ahmadi, a member of the Afghan Youth Orchestra.
Emilie Charransol
/Courtesy of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music
But the taste of home came when they pulled out their instruments — such as the sitar, santoor, rubab and harmonium — and began rehearsing traditional Afghan music.
They love playing and are fulfilling their lifetime dreams of being musicians. But also, they understand their responsibilities, says 15-year-old Zohra Ahmadi, who plays trumpet.
“We are the voice of a country that has no music,” she says. “It’s a bit sad to think about it, that we are the only ones playing.”
Sarmast, the school’s director, says the school’s mission has expanded and become even more urgent. He says his students must be the ones to preserve their country’s music from more than 4,000 miles away. He says it’s not just a mission: It’s a duty to the country they had to flee.