DALLAS: With the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan, in the summer of 2021, Fahima Soltani and her fellow undergraduates tried for days to get to Kabul airport, but were refused by armed extremists.

She remembers one shouting, “No education, just go home.”

After nearly two years, Soltani, 21, is safe in the US and working toward a bachelor’s degree in data science at Arizona State University in Tempe on a scholarship. When she’s not studying, she loves hiking in nearby Tempe Bute, the kind of outing she’d enjoy in her mountainous homeland.

Seeing students like Soltani scramble to leave in August 2021 as the United States withdraws from Afghanistan after 20 years, colleges, universities and other groups across the United States have begun pooling funding for hundreds of scholarships so they can continue their education outside their home country.

The women of Sultani’s generation, who were born around the time the United States toppled the Taliban after the September 11, 2001 attacks, grew up in school and watching women pursue their professions. The return of the Taliban has turned those freedoms upside down.

“Within minutes of the government collapsing in Kabul, American universities said, ‘We’ll take one.’ ‘We’ll take three.’ ‘We’ll take a professor.’” We’ll take a student, said Alan Goodman, CEO of the Institute of International Education, a global nonprofit that helps fund such scholarships.

The fears that sent students onto flights were quickly vindicated, as the Taliban introduced a harsh Islamic rule: girls could not attend school after the sixth grade, and women, who were again required to wear the burqa, were banned from universities and barred from most jobs.

Sultani is one of more than 60 Afghan women who arrived at ASU by December 2021 after fleeing Afghanistan, where she was studying online through the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh during the pandemic.

“These women came out of a crisis, a traumatic experience, got on a plane not knowing where to go, and ended up in the United States,” said Susan Eddington, executive director and chief operating officer of Global Academic Initiatives at ASU.

Having made their way to universities and colleges across the United States in the past two years, many are close to graduating and planning their futures.

Mashal Aziz, 22, was a few months away from graduating from the American University of Afghanistan when Kabul fell and she boarded a plane. After she left, I scoured the internet, researching which schools offered grants and what organizations might be able to help.

“You’ve already dropped everything and are thinking maybe there are barriers to your higher education,” she said.

Aziz and three other Afghan students arrived at Northeastern University in Boston in January 2022 after being transferred first to Qatar and then to a military base in New Jersey. She graduated this spring with a bachelor’s degree in financial management and accounting and plans to begin work towards a master’s degree in finance this fall at Northeastern University.

Just two days after the fall of Kabul, the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma announced that it had offered two scholarships to Afghans seeking refuge in the United States. Later, the university established five more scholarships that went to some young Afghans who had settled in the area. Five other Afghans have received scholarships to study there this fall.

Danielle McDonald, associate professor of anthropology at the school, has organized a regular encounter between TU students and college-age Afghans who have settled in the Tulsa area.

About twenty young men attend the events, where they talk about everything from American slang to how to find a job. McDonald said their outings included visiting a museum and going to a basketball game.

“It’s become a really cool community,” she said.

Soltani, like many others who have left Afghanistan, often thinks of those left behind, including her sister, who used to study at a university but now has to stay home.

“I can go to universities while millions of girls go back to Afghanistan, they don’t have this opportunity that I had,” Sultani said. “I can wear whatever I want and millions of girls now in Afghanistan, they don’t have that opportunity.”

Since the first wave of scholarships, efforts to help Afghan students have continued, including the creation of the Qatar Scholarship for Afghan Project, which has helped fund 250 scholarships at dozens of American colleges and universities.

But there are still more young people who need support to continue their education in the United States or even get to the United States from Afghanistan or other countries, explained Jonah Kokodiniak, senior vice president at the Institute of International Education.

Yasamin Sohrabi, 26, is among those still trying to find a way to the US Sohrabi, who was studying at the American University in Afghanistan, realized as the withdrawal of US forces approached that she might need to go abroad to continue her studies. The day after the Taliban captured Kabul, she learned that she had been accepted into Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, but was unable to get to the airport to leave Afghanistan.

A year later, she and her younger sister, who had also been accepted to the university, obtained visas to Pakistan. Now they are trying to find a way to get to the US, and their brother, who accompanied them to Pakistan, is also applying to school.

Sohrabi said she and her siblings are trying not to focus on what they’ve lost, but instead on how to get to WKU, where 20 more Afghans will study this fall.

“That’s one of the things we think about these days,” she said. “This keeps us going.”