Back from Afghanistan, restaurant owner tries to help home country from afar

A hand-lettered sign near the cash register at Khorasan Kabob House requests donations to benefit the Afghan people whose lives were upended by the Taliban’s return this summer. In exchange, donors can take a piece of roat, a sweet flat bread served in Afghanistan.

Restaurant owner Arian Wisaal has collected only $20 or $30 in the weeks since the sign went up. He is not dismayed by how small the collection is since at the current time he cannot send the money back to Afghanistan anyway. The sign, written in black, green and red markers, truly has only one purpose, and that is to remind customers of the struggles facing his family back home and other Afghans.

Arian Wisaal, his wife, Tamana, and their three children, age 7 to 10, visited Afghanistan earlier this year. He stayed until late June; the rest of the family returned in late July, days before the Taliban overran the capital of Kabul and seized control of the country.

Since then, they have had to deal with the uncertainties that accompanied the Taliban’s return to power, namely, will the harsh rule of the late 1990s return to Afghanistan. In September, a Taliban official and chief enforcer of a harsh interpretation of Islamic law, said executions and amputations of hands as punishments for criminals once again will take place. This time, however, the punishment might not be in public.

The Wisaals, who had begun the process of bringing Tamana’s father to the United States, deal with the stress daily.

Tamana Wisaal spends “day and night praying that things can get changed,” she said. “We don’t have a choice. We’re thinking all the time about them.”

Arian Wisaal likens his family’s situation to imprisonment. The Taliban sets strict requirements for the Afghan people, he said.

“It’s kind of like being inside a cage, and I don’t want my family to be in that cage,” he said. “I run away from that cage, I hate that cage, and I don’t want any human being to be in that cage.”

Arian Wisaal left Afghanistan in 1997 and lived as a refugee in Pakistan before he came to the United States in 2003. He opened his first restaurant, Global Village Cafe, on 41st Street in September 2005. The Khorasan Kabob House has been operating on South Marion Road for 18 months. He also sells rugs from the restaurant.

When the Wisaals arrived, Lutheran Social Services of South Dakota helped them find a place to live and a job and helped with medical expenses. LSS announced earlier it would not bring any Afghan refugees to South Dakota. Many Afghans who had to flee the country don’t have the federal financial assistance needed to settle here, officials said. South Dakota is one of five states that decided against taking in Afghans.

Arian Wisaal brought four foster children with him when he first moved to the United States, along with the two children he was raising with his first wife, who died of throat cancer several years later. For many years, he did not worry about bringing other family members to this country.

“We’d been feeling like we could bring back in my country a good future,” he said. “We did not need to bring our family over.”

That was about 20 years ago, when the United States first sent troops to Afghanistan. As government officials failed to keep promises and corruption disrupted the country, those hopes gradually began to fade.

In the 1990s, Arian Wisaal had served as a cultural adviser and a translator for the U.S. military, “but to be honest, no one was listening to us,” he said of the former role. “They been acting like they know much.”

The Wisaals stay in touch with their extended families in Afghanistan as often as they can, using WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger for conversations. They know that line of communication could end at any time because the Taliban wants to disrupt the internet.

“They don’t want information to go out of the place,” he said. “They’re coming in the back of the houses, and they take younger people, who have been working with the U.S. government or helping the U.S. government. They think we sold the village out. We are infidel, first of all.”

So much has changed in Afghanistan since the Wisaals visited this summer that the trip seems as if it took place a long, long time ago, they said. All they can do now is wait and hope.

“We can’t even help them from here,” Tamana Wisaal said.