Tabesh walks through a portion of Marine Corps Base Quantico last November with other former Zero Unit soldiers and staffers from the FAMIL nonprofit group. (Valerie Plesch/for The Washington Post)
At night, as his wife and seven children sleep in their Baltimore apartment, the former Afghan warrior lies awake — in pain, worried and angry.
His prosthetic left leg — the one he needs after losing the real one in a 2017 firefight — leans against a wall, the dull metal catching the moonlight.
In the next room sits the accordion file folder where A. Tabesh, 39, keeps the commendation he received for rescuing a wounded American CIA officer during the same battle.
He was a member of a clandestine U.S.-trained counterterrorism force known as the Zero Units, drawing backslapping praise from American handlers who called him "brother" and hatred from Taliban leaders who accused the group of war crimes.
When he got to the United States, Tabesh expected a hero's welcome. Instead, his immigration status is in limbo, unpaid bills are piling up, and his family's new home is in a neighborhood plagued by violent crime.
"It's been four days that I have been unable to sleep because of this hurt, this pain I feel," Tabesh, whose full name is not being used because he has relatives still in Afghanistan, said through a Dari interpreter. "I lost my leg because of them."
Many of the 85,500 Afghan nationals who arrived in the United States as part of the massive U.S. evacuation in August 2021 are also struggling for stability. But the hardships are even more acute among the former Afghan Special Operations forces who fought alongside Americans and now suffer from battle trauma, according to nonprofit groups seeking to help those fighters.
As they wait on visa applications or U.S. asylum petitions bogged down in government bureaucracy, many struggle with depression or suicidal thoughts. Others say they would rather return to Afghanistan or even neighboring Iran, where they could at least understand the language.
With a proposed Afghan Adjustment Act — which would give most Afghan refugees permanent legal status — unlikely to pass Congress any time soon, former American counterparts worry about the fate of the Zero Units, arguing that the Biden administration is neglecting what was a key asset during the war.
"The moral injury is pretty immense," said Daniel Elkins, a U.S. Army Green Beret who co-founded the Special Operations Association of America advocacy group. "We know that there would be more of our community buried in Arlington National Cemetery today if it were not for our Afghan allies who fought shoulder-to-shoulder with us."
Former Zero Unit soldiers from Afghanistan gather for an Afghan meal with FAMIL staff. (Valerie Plesch/for The Washington Post)
A former Zero Unit soldier during a rehabilitation session in Fairfax County, Va. (Valerie Plesch/for The Washington Post)
Tabesh holds a photo from his time in a U.S. military hospital in Afghanistan after he was wounded in battle. (Valerie Plesch/for The Washington Post)
An elite strike force
The CIA created the Zero Units early in the Afghan war, initially recruiting from among anti-Taliban militias for help with gathering intelligence and carrying out covert missions against the Taliban and al-Qaida. Over time, the units evolved into an elite strike force whose members hailed from various branches of the Afghan military. Not even family members knew what they did or who employed them.
The units were officially incorporated into the Afghan government's National Directorate of Security intelligence agency in 2009, though the CIA still advised the fighters on thousands of missions carried out with U.S. military logistical support.
They killed or captured enemy targets in nightly raids while protecting government-held areas against incursions — an unyielding storm of firefights, bomb blasts and sniper attacks, with little sleep in between, that frequently left their members dying in the dark.
When the Afghan government collapsed in August 2021, Zero Unit soldiers collected U.S. civilian personnel and members of the NATO coalition from their homes, shepherding them through the chaos and crowds outside the Kabul airport while also guarding its perimeter. Some of them were shot during the confusion, by the Taliban or someone else.
"The reason Americans got out of that country, the reason coalition personnel got out of that country, was because of the Zero guys," said a former U.S. government official with knowledge of the units, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he did not have permission to discuss the group. "There are dozens of instances where they put themselves in the line of fire to save Americans."
With those missions, though, came reports of human rights abuses and potential war crimes by the Zero Units. In 2019, Human Rights Watch documented 14 cases in which Zero Unit soldiers allegedly tortured or killed civilians during attacks in Taliban-controlled areas that were based on faulty intelligence.
A CIA spokesperson said such reports do not reflect the realities of a war where the Taliban often placed innocent people in harm's way and distorted the details of events. The operations included U.S. government oversight when executed to ensure that no abuses occurred, a policy that was strictly enforced, the agency said.
Whether the allegations were true, the group's image was tarnished among Afghans — including in the United States — and the stigma has followed the several thousand former Zero Unit fighters now in this country.
"We are losing our minds," one former unit commander said, adding that the hardships he and his colleagues endured during the war are being ignored. "People have used bombs and all kinds of things on us. We're mentally and physically tired."
Calling on 'Blackbird'
Sameer, a former captain in the Zero Units, was living at a temporary refugee site at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Northern Virginia four months after the fall of the Afghan government. Injured, lost and in despair over what to do next after being stuck in the resettlement camp while a wounded brother was hospitalized in Bethesda, Md., he considered ending his life, asking himself: "How am I here now?"
Then he thought of the former CIA counterterrorism expert he met weeks earlier when she visited the camp, whom he knew only as "Blackbird."
"Blackbird," whose real name is Geeta Bakshi, convinced Sameer to remain strong, saying anything that came to mind during a late-night phone call to help him feel he wasn't alone.
Bakshi, who helped train Zero Unit fighters in Afghanistan, was fielding dozens of such frantic phone calls from former members. She said one confided: "There are times when I just think to myself, 'Just drive your truck into a wall.'"
Tabesh holds a photo from his time in a U.S. military hospital in Afghanistan after he was wounded in battle. (Valerie Plesch/for The Washington Post)
A photo of Tabesh from his time as a Zero Unit soldier in Afghanistan. (Valerie Plesch/for The Washington Post)
Tabesh at his home in Baltimore. (Valerie Plesch/for The Washington Post)
After leaving the CIA that April, Bakshi founded a nonprofit organization aimed at helping former Afghan military personnel, calling it FAMIL — "family" in Dari.
She said she saw the need for FAMIL during her October visit to Quantico's tent city, which housed former Zero Unit members along with Afghan civilians. The fighters told her their families were going hungry, while overworked resettlement agency caseworkers didn't return phone calls.
"There were children running around without clothes on," she said.
With several former CIA leaders serving as board members or advisers, FAMIL's staff of three and a network of volunteers work to help the former Afghan soldiers — many of them seriously wounded — navigate the U.S. benefits system, find English classes and develop new job skills.
Often, they serve as go-betweens with resettlement agencies working toward the same goals. But it hasn't been easy.
The Zero Unit fighters are eligible for special immigrant visas, or SIVs, that are reserved for Afghans and Iraqis who helped the United States during the wars in their countries; the visas grant them legal permanent residency and a pathway to U.S. citizenship. Yet many of the fighters still have not received letters from the U.S. government confirming their work — essential for advancing their applications. The wait is a source of worry as the two-year clock on their status as individuals granted "humanitarian parole" winds down toward expiration this summer.
Still more fighters are stuck in a federal government backlog of visa applications and U.S. asylum petitions numbering in the tens of thousands — caused in part by a staff shortage at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency processing those applications, immigration attorneys say. That leaves them ineligible for federal disability payments, other government services and jobs that require a green card.
The State Department said it is working to expedite the SIV application process for all applicants after adding staff to its SIV program. The CIA said it is assisting in that effort with respect to the Zero Units and others who have helped the agency.
Since January 2021, nearly 21,000 such visas have been issued, the State Department said. Still waiting for approval are 14,000 "principal applicants" and their family members.
"It's frustrating," Bakshi said, about the wait. "There is a lot of vetting on these individuals. For them to be in a waiting period for an indefinite period of time is very difficult. It's emotionally difficult, and it's pragmatically difficult."
A dramatic rescue
In Kabul, Tabesh would often sleep with a pistol under his pillow, in case someone learned where he and his family lived. It was part of a life undercover after the former Afghan government intelligence officer joined the Zero Units in 2007.
The fighters blended into Afghan society, to more easily tap into enemy intelligence and to know if something amiss pointed to a security risk for Afghan or U.S. officials in the area. But they were occasionally discovered.
That happened to Tabesh shortly after he was first shot in a battle in 2009, receiving a bullet through the chest. During a family visit to his home village, where the Taliban had a large presence, a resident asked about Tabesh's still-noticeable wounds. Tabesh said they were from a car accident, but the villager loudly accused him of working with the Americans. He stopped going back, skipping his mother's funeral when she died in 2019.
Tabesh with his new prosthetic leg during a fitting session in November at a rehabilitation facility in Linthicum Heights, Md. (Valerie Plesch/for The Washington Post)
Tabesh with his wife and baby daughter, Moqadas, at his home. (Valerie Plesch/for The Washington Post)
His fellow fighters, including the American advisers, became his extended family. They watched over one another on and off the battlefield, including the night in 2017 that led to Tabesh losing his leg.
His unit was seeking a top-level commander with the Islamic State-Khorasan terrorist group in Parwan province. As the fighters headed toward the man's compound at about 1 a.m., a sniper fired, wounding one of Tabesh's men.
Tabesh and an American adviser on the mission — known to the group only as "White," his radio call sign — began pulling their colleague out of the line of fire, and the sniper struck again, this time wounding the American.
Within seconds, four more Zero Unit fighters were hit. But "White" was now lying directly in the sniper's line of sight.
Tabesh and two colleagues raced toward the American — but when those two were also shot, Tabesh continued on his own, crouching, and dragged "White" to a land barrier about 30 feet away.
He noticed while doing so that some radio equipment had fallen. Knowing that would be a valuable intelligence prize for the enemy, Tabesh ran back from the land barrier to retrieve it.
That's when a sniper's bullets blew holes through his leg and groin. Lying there bleeding, unsure whether he'd live, he heard excited ISIS-K radio chatter over his earpiece and more gunfire. Then he saw a spotlight from an American helicopter overhead, which unleashed a storm of artillery rounds toward the compound. Tabesh destroyed the phones and equipment he had on him, then dragged himself down a small hill, where he was rescued. "White" and the wounded fighters were also saved.
Years later, Tabesh beamed with pride in recounting the incident, initially leaving out the fact that American military surgeons twice amputated parts of his leg in agonizing attempts to save it before ultimately cutting it off at the hip.
Asked why he risked his life for White, Tabesh said: "Because we are a whole family when we go into a mission. It requires us to be like a family, to rescue our family members."
A letter written in Dari and English under an Afghan government seal commended Tabesh for his "prideful bravery" and wished him "success and good luck in the future." Tabesh said that at the time he considered that gesture of appreciation his family's ticket to a good life in America.
"I did a big thing," he told his wife and their children as they were anxiously preparing to flee Kabul four years later, reminding them of the incident. "They're going to support us. We won't have to struggle with life."
Tabesh’s son Shafiq looks outside the family’s apartment in Baltimore. (Valerie Plesch/for The Washington Post)
Tabesh’s daughter Asia prays before sunrise. (Valerie Plesch/for The Washington Post)
'We are going to deal with it'
Tabesh buckled on his prosthetic leg and, thrusting his pelvis forward in a rotating motion, awkwardly stepped along a set of parallel bars.
"One step at a time," Bakshi told him through an interpreter that late November morning inside a prosthetics and orthotics facility in Linthicum Heights, Md. She meant it two ways: the walking practice he would have to put in, and the new life he was living.
Tabesh had waited nearly a year for his new leg, using forearm crutches to get around, just as he had in Afghanistan after ditching a wooden leg that was too painful to use.
Often, he simply sat inside his family's apartment.
"I'm ashamed of the life I have," Tabesh said.
FAMIL made arrangements for the prosthetics facility, Dankmeyer, to manufacture a titanium leg for Tabesh after nothing had come from resettlement agency caseworkers' assurances that they'd get that done. Bakshi learned that the $25,000 expense could be covered by Medicaid benefits available to some refugees.
Because his SIV application is still pending after three years, Tabesh does not qualify for federal disability payments. His 34-year-old wife is busy caring for the children — 9 months to 15 years in age — but has been taking English courses in hopes of eventually finding work.
The resettlement agency assisting his family of nine had placed them in a three-bedroom apartment in Baltimore's Druid Hill Park neighborhood, where aggravated assaults and armed robberies are frequent. After a neighbor was held up at gunpoint inside the building, Tabesh considered getting a gun to protect his family.
But they couldn't afford the $1,300 monthly rent. The $11,000 in State Department "welcome money" allocated to the family when they arrived — meant to cover basic expenses for about three months — was long gone. The resettlement agency had stopped paying rent to their landlord, leading to an eviction notice that Tabesh's two eldest sons had discovered taped to their door when returning from school.
With their still wobbly English, they pieced together that the family had 10 days to clear out their belongings if the $4,302 they owed wasn't paid. The agency has since arranged for the rent to be paid through state of Maryland funds — but that program expires in June.
One day, Tabesh's 7-year-old daughter, Frida, came home from school crying after some Afghan schoolmates, apparently overhearing their parents' gossip about the family's troubles, told her she would soon be homeless.
"We are going to deal with it," Tabesh promised his child, feigning confidence.
