More than 100 young artists, teachers and their relatives affiliated with the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, a celebrated school that became a target of the Taliban in part for its efforts to promote the education of girls, fled the country on Sunday, the school’s leaders said.
The musicians, many of whom have been trying to leave for more than a month, boarded a flight from Kabul’s main airport and arrived in Doha, the capital of Qatar, around mid-day US eastern time, according to Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the head of the school, who is currently in Australia. In the coming days, they plan to resettle in Portugal, where the government has agreed to grant them visas.
“It’s already a big step and a very, very big achievement on the way of rescuing Afghan musicians from the cruelty of the Taliban,” Sarmast, who opened the school in 2010, said in a statement. “You cannot imagine how happy I am.”
The musicians join a growing number of Afghans who have fled the country since August. Among figures in the arts and sports worlds who have escaped are members of a female soccer team who resettled in Portugal and Italy.
Still, hundreds of the school’s students, staff and alumni remain in Afghanistan and face an uncertain future amid signs that the Taliban will move to restrict non-religious music, which they banned outright when they previously led Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001.
The school’s supporters, a global network of artists, philanthropists, politicians and educators, plan to continue to work to get the remaining musicians out of Afghanistan. “The mission is not complete,” said Sarmast, an Afghan music scholar. “It just began.”
Yo-Yo Ma, the renowned cellist, helped raise awareness about the plight of the musicians among politicians and other artists. He said he was “shaking with excitement” by the news.
“It would be a terrible tragedy to lose this essential group of people who are so deeply motivated to have a living tradition be part of the world tradition,” Ma said in a telephone interview.
New York Times News Service
