After the Taliban takeover, Afghans in Canada call on Ottawa not to let their country, families be forgotten

Thousands of delicate purple blooms sit bathed in sunlight against a background of towering jagged slopes in the Afghan province of Herat, their distinct fragrance gently sweetening the air as they await their fate.

Inside, each bloom contains just three fragile red threads, carefully hand-plucked to produce the world's most expensive spice: saffron.

But this year, as harvest season approaches, the fate of the flowers, picked almost exclusively by women farmers, is in the hands of the Taliban, who will decide if the women will be allowed to gather the blooms, if they'll be picked at all or left to rot.

For Nazaneen Qauomi, it's as if the saffron blooms themselves symbolize the future not only for the farmers but for all of Afghanistan.

After immigrating to Canada in 2014, Qauomi recently visited her home country to create a social entrepreneurship program with a group of women farmers meant to provide them with microloans to eventually launch their own businesses. 

"Saffron was the biggest hope they had," Qauomi told CBC News from her Toronto home.

But everything changed when the Taliban swiftly took over as the U.S. made its exit from the country in August. Afghans who escaped their rule decades earlier watched as the country seemed to be plunged back in time virtually overnight. 

"It was a shared pain that we all felt and a repeated history that we all saw," said Qauomi. "Especially for my mom, it wasn't easy watching the news, and again repeating all their history of how we used to escape from city to city, how we were afraid of the bombs."

Now, two months after that familiar reality so many tried to forget has once again set in, Afghans like Qauomi fear that as the international community threatens to sideline the Taliban for human rights violations, ordinary Afghans, including women and minorities, will suffer in the process. They are pleading with the world and Canada in particular not to allow their country and their loved ones still there to be forgotten. 

"We need the world's attention for Afghanistan … not only thinking about what Afghan women should wear but thinking about the biggest problems that people are facing and those are poverty, lack of access to education, lack of access to health centres," said Qauomi. 

"All the women who lost their jobs, who are the breadwinners. How are they going to survive?"

WATCH | Nazaneen Qauomi worries for Afghan women who were their family's breadwinners:

Rustam, a Canadian citizen, narrowly escaped Afghanistan after the Taliban took over.

He'd travelled to Kabul to visit his father dying from COVID-19 just before the Taliban moved in. But now he fears for his brother left behind and other human rights defenders like him who he says are likely to be targeted by the Taliban.