Afghans in U.S. Thrust Into Spotlight

They arrived by the thousands beginning in 1979, political refugees chased from their homeland by war. And until now, America’s Afghan expatriates have been among the nation’s smallest and least visible immigrant communities--quietly living, working and raising families in their adopted country.

That all changed Sept. 11, when the terror attacks on the East Coast thrust Afghan Americans into public prominence.

For immigrants from the war-shattered country, recent weeks have been surreal. Not only have they suffered the shock of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, but many Afghans are also experiencing new scrutiny.

Katrin Fakiri, 30, arrives these days at the block-long strip of Fremont, Calif., dubbed “Little Kabul” by the large community of local Afghans and invariably finds two or three TV news trucks.

“I want them to put a face on our community,” said the Silicon Valley worker. “We’re like other immigrants: We struggled, we tried to survive, we tried to incorporate the positives of both our cultures.”

By most accounts, Afghan immigrants have blended seamlessly into American life, forming tightknit communities in the East Bay Area, Orange County, the San Fernando Valley, Alexandria, Va., and Flushing, N.Y. Although immigration statistics list fewer than 50,000 Afghans in the United States, members of these communities say there are more than 150,000.

Many have joined the ranks of physicians, engineers and other professionals. Others left prestigious careers in Afghanistan to work blue-collar jobs. Some of the older arrivals have subsisted on the public dole.

“The cream of the crop of Afghan society migrated to the U.S. or Europe,” said David Yaar, an economics professor at Cal State Hayward. “But I’ve seen medical doctors driving taxis. I’ve seen former governors selling hot dogs from a cart.”

They came to the United States for its freedom, its melting pot of ethnicities and the job opportunities. Most landed where relatives had set down roots years before. Others heard of burgeoning Afghan expatriate communities through the grapevine.

The political divisions of the old country were imported along with Afghan sweet teas and flat bread. Afghanistan is a country of dozens of ethnic groups, tribes and clans, and political and cultural rifts from the old land traveled to the United States. So at an event put on in Fremont by the Tajiks that populate that area, most older Pashtuns--the biggest ethnic group in Afghanistan--would not even think of attending.

Their children don’t tend to hold the old grudges, but assimilation has not always been easy.

Like many immigrants, they are of two worlds. At home, parents rule. At school, independence flourishes--though the dictates of Islam can make assimilation tough. Schoolgirls may be expected to avoid contact with boys at American schools. Dating, makeup and trendy clothes are often off-limits.

Some children have revolted. Afghan Americans talk honestly and openly about the failures--the teenagers who slipped into drugs, a few who committed crimes and ended up in jail. For several years, a gang called the Crazy Afghan Tribe operated in the Bay Area.

But they were the exception not the rule. Fakiri said hundreds of young Afghan professionals work in the Silicon Valley. In Pasadena, an Afghan is a top scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

California and the Washington area became hubs of the Afghan immigrant population partly because the charities and organizations most active in helping the refugees were based on the two coasts. One of the most active organizations was Catholic Charities USA, based in Alexandria, Va., with an office in Oakland.

Mohammed Safdari was a center for the Afghan national soccer team. His games took him to Bangladesh, Russia and China. He had a job as an accountant at a bank in Kabul, and a future, he figured, as a soccer coach.

With the 1979 Soviet invasion, Safdari and his wife hiked over the mountains into Iran, carrying their 1-year-old son. They spent three years as refugees in Tehran. Then the family bribed officials for visas to India, where they settled in New Delhi.

A year later, in 1985, they were moving again, this time across the world to Los Angeles, where Safdari’s father-in-law had found work in a grocery store.

Toiling each day, Safdari saved up enough money to start his own meat market with a brother.

An American citizen for a year, Safdari now runs a pizza parlor in Northridge. He kept the pizza and decor--complete with a mural of gondolas, wine-red Naugahyde booths and place mats that say “Bella Italia.”

But the menu now includes Afghan dishes. And at the front, right under the old neon sign of a pizza slice, he stuck the name “Khybar.”

Taj Mohamad Wardak, 77, used to be a powerful man: He governed three Afghan provinces. Now he lives in a North Hills ranch house with a big American flag out front.

He is not alone. A former foreign secretary runs a liquor store. A former army leader has a gas station on Wilshire Boulevard. This is what happens to immigrants. One of Wardak’s daughters, who speaks little English, was a teacher in Afghanistan. Now she works with her hands, baking bread in a Northridge Afghan bakery.

In San Diego, where Afghans number about 2,500 spread throughout the community, the settlers include former ministers of the interior, defense and agriculture.

Zia Nasery, owner of the Afghan Khyber Pass restaurant in San Diego, is the former head of Afghanistan’s version of the Drug Enforcement Administration. After fleeing to Pakistan, India and Germany, he arrived in San Diego in 1984.

“San Diego is like paradise to us,” Nasery said. “The city represented the hope many of us saw in America.”

But the Afghans’ acceptance of diversity and their practice of a more liberal form of Islam has caused friction in the local Muslim community, Nasery said. In particular, some Muslims objected to the independent streak of Afghan women.

“They said we were too westernized,” he said.

Afghan women “adapted very well,” said Rona Popal, who in 1992 organized the Afghan Women’s Assn. International. “They went to school, they went to work, they really jumped in.”

That shift has created some difficulties, she added. Domestic violence has been a problem.

Popal still remembers the lonely days after she arrived in 1980 to a new home in Fremont.

The area was very cheap and very quiet, Popal said. Immigrants were also drawn by the availability of government assistance: housing help, bilingual caseworkers and public adult schools to teach English.

Fremont’s Little Kabul is known to Afghans around the country.

David Yaar, the Cal State Hayward professor, won’t set foot there.

Until the attacks of Sept. 11, Yaar supported the Taliban, Afghanistan’s besieged ruling government. His reasons were simple: The regime had brought relative stability to a troubled land.

But the denizens of Little Kabul, many of the Tajiks who support the rebel Northern Alliance, almost universally loathe the Taliban.

Yaar has abandoned his Taliban ties, but figures a trip to the street would quickly turn to angry recriminations and perhaps worse.

“We are divided, unfortunately,” Yaar said. “I can assure you, it is not unusual: In one Afghan family, you can have members who belong to different opposing groups.”

Sometimes the rifts go deep. Farid Younos is a social scientist and hosts an Afghan TV show in the Bay Area. He also advocates women’s rights. So he has run afoul of hard-line Muslims in the United States. For his public pronouncements, holy men at a Bay Area mosque labeled Younos an infidel.

Younos said a dozen telephone death threats followed. One caller told Younos to stop polluting religion. Another threatened to burn down his house. Still another threatened to beat him. “Rough stuff,” Younos said. “But I can’t stop thinking and writing because someone threatened me.”

Exiled Afghan poet Raziq Fani fled Afghanistan in 1988, but the controversy followed him to America. A few years ago, outside a mosque in San Diego, a pro-Taliban Afghan approached Fani. The man denounced his writing, then started grappling with him.

This is the United States of America, Fani told him. Don’t start this fighting here.

Like many of his fellow refugees, Barna Karimi had begun to give up on ever returning to his homeland. But this week’s airstrikes have given him hope that maybe there is a future in Afghanistan.

The events of Sept. 11 changed Katrin Fakiri in a different way.

An immigrant at age 9, she became an American citizen a few years ago at the behest of her mother. It was a practical decision for practical reasons. Even after becoming a citizen, she said, “I considered myself an Afghan living in the United States.”

But after Sept. 11, something turned in her soul. Along with her friends, she cried for America.

“I didn’t know I cared so much,” she said. “After that day, I became an Afghan American.”

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Times staff writers H.G. Reza in San Diego and Eric Bailey in Fremont contributed to this report.