A River Is Made follows one Afghan family from the upheavals of war through years of displacement into the challenges of resettlement in the United States. Fazal Moneer Adil writes with clarity and restraint about service alongside American forces, the evacuation during Operation Allies Refuge, and the ongoing work of building stability and safety for a child with complex medical needs. This memoir offers a grounded, firsthand perspective on war, responsibility, and the meaning of belonging.
A River Is Made follows one Afghan family from the upheavals of war through years of displacement into the challenges of resettlement in the United States. Fazal Moneer Adil writes with clarity and restraint about service alongside American forces, the evacuation during Operation Allies Refuge, and the ongoing work of building stability and safety for a child with complex medical needs. This memoir offers a grounded, firsthand perspective on war, responsibility, and the meaning of belonging.
The Fall Had Begun
On July 30, 2021, the U.S. government passed new legislation reducing the employment requirement for Afghan nationals applying for Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) from two years to one. This revision, which applied specifically to non-linguist employees, made Afghans who had worked for or on behalf of the U.S. government for at least one year between October 7, 2001, and December 31, 2023, eligible to apply for the SIV program.
For me, it was a breakthrough. After all I had endured, I could finally claim my SIV eligibility. The thought of securing a safe future for my family now felt almost real. But its possibility quickly faded as the country slipped even deeper into chaos.
At Chapman, conditions were becoming untenable. Since the U.S. supervisors left in May, the base had been directed from Eagle Base, in Kabul.
In early August, we received orders to evacuate to the capital. For the Khost Protection Force, the order was both a logistical directive and a challenge to the identity it had built over decades. The commander believed that leaving Khost, a city the KPF had protected for years, would be an act of betrayal to the people who had placed their trust in us. Under the KPF’s watch, Khost city was thriving. Departing without warning would undo that, leaving the city vulnerable to looting, bloodshed, and the breakdown of public trust.
By early August, the situation across the country was unraveling at alarming speed. On August 6, Zaranj fell, the first provincial capital in the south. The next day, Sheberghan fell in the north. On August 8, Sar-e-Pul, Kunduz, and Taloqan were lost. Aybak fell on August 9, and Pul-e-Khumri on August 10. Every day brought news of another city gone, erasing what little confidence we had left.
By August 11, it was clear there was no path forward. The Taliban’s advance was faster than anyone had predicted. Orders came from Kabul to leave Chapman and fight our way to Kabul if necessary. We would have no air cover, not even a single drone for security. Perhaps, like the SIV program, the full reality on the ground was not being shared with us. Road travel to Kabul was impossible. All of Afghanistan had fallen to the Taliban.
At Chapman, my friends gathered nightly, sharing updates and trying to make sense of the chaos. The news drained the room of energy until only silence remained.
Pul-e-Alam fell on August 14, and Gardez followed the next day. These were the last two cities between us and Kabul. On August 15, Kabul itself collapsed. The news hit every KPF member like a final blow. The capital, our symbol of progress, was gone in a single day. We sat in disbelief, knowing the country we had fought for years to protect was gone.
With no safe road to Kabul, an airlift was our only chance, but even that seemed unlikely. If the heavily fortified Kabul airport was being overwhelmed by crowds, how could Khost’s lightly guarded new airport remain open? The situation felt like doomsday.
Meanwhile, negotiations between the KPF commander and his advisors in Kabul repeated the same demand: leave Khost immediately. But the commander resisted, wanting an orderly transition to avoid panic in the city. The truth was that even our reputation was no longer enough to keep Khost safe.
Outside of Chapman, the provincial governor and the police chief had already negotiated their surrender, avoiding immediate bloodshed. Through these same channels, the Taliban offered the KPF safe passage, promising no harm if we left peacefully. We debated this for days, aware of their history of broken promises. Since the Doha Agreement, they had used every opportunity to expand their power, breaking trust repeatedly.
The KPF and the Taliban had long been fearsome rivals. Now, with options dwindling, the Taliban demanded the KPF’s surrender. This was unacceptable to the commander and the soldiers. In the morning of August 15, after four tense days of exchanging demands, chaos swept through the base. At times, we had declared we would fight to the last bullet, and it seemed that moment had come. Everyone moved with urgency. All forty-one towers were manned and stocked with ammunition, ready for battle.
Then, at last, a deal was reached. Local elders and the now-fallen provincial officials urged the KPF commander to avoid dragging Khost into a bloodbath. The Taliban’s shadow governor guaranteed that no shots would be fired. The base itself, however, was to be left intact with everything inside it. Even so, mistrust hung heavily in the air. Leaving the gates of Camp Chapman would mean no return. We would either make it to Kabul by any means necessary or remain and defend the base, fighting for as long as possible.
Since morning we were preparing for our departure and destroyed everything that could not be left behind. At SIGINT, we smashed the hard drives, reducing years of intelligence to ashes. Since the first of August, all KPF personnel had been recalled, even those on vacation, and soldiers manning the Border Control Points had been withdrawn for safety. The number at Chapman now stood at over 4,000 soldiers, civilians, medics and interpreters.
The scale of our departure was staggering. The convoy was stocked with enough food, water, and needed supplies to last for days. Combat soldiers took their positions at the front and rear of the convoy, while civilians, interpreters, and the medical team were sheltered in the middle. We were ready to leave. Khost city, once secure under our watch, now stood on the edge of an uncertain future.
The fall had begun, and nothing could stop it. All we could do was trust that Khost might endure without us, that promises to its people would be kept, and that somewhere beyond this collapse, a future worth building could still be found.
The Trap
A few months earlier, I had trained on the basics of an AK-47 and a pistol for self-defense. Open, fix, and fire. I had even flown by helicopter to the Border Control Points with my supervisors, but that was not a battlefield. I had never expected to see one. My work was with computers and words, translating documents or interpreting between individuals. I had never picked up a gun with the intent to fight. (see Figure 8-9)
But on this night, the choice was simple. Live or die.
We were to leave in the evening. Though we had been promised safe passage, no one truly believed it. Back home, now my father knew where and what was my job. They were constantly waiting to hear from me. For the last five days, I had been lying to them, offering vague reassurances to shield them from the truth. Up to this point, we had never told our families what was truly happening at the base. Now, there was no more hiding. With the Taliban in control, the cellular network had become unreliable, the signals flickering in and out of existence.
We had been preparing since morning. My phone battery was low and there was no time to charge it. I called my father first, quickly explaining the situation and asking for his prayers. Then, I sent a WhatsApp message to my wife.
“In case I don’t make it to Kabul, or if anything else happens to me, I may not be able to talk to you again soon. But if I can’t for few days, it will mean that I am living no longer. In that case, you are allowed to remarry. The marriage should not be forced or a matter of culture. It should be your own decision. My children need someone’s care. And tell everyone that I was not afraid of death. If I have to die, I will die with honor, not by turning my back on my comrades.”
My colleagues and I gathered for a final check. We adjusted our chest rigs, slapped the magazines into our AK-47s, and chambered a round. We said our last prayers and headed out. In the luxury Toyota Land Cruiser I shared with friends from National Directorate of Security (NDS), a heavy silence fell. It was an emotional moment.
It was Sunday, August 15, at 7:25 p.m. As the gates of Chapman opened, a crowd stood waiting outside. It was a mix of Taliban fighters, local people, and children, all eager to loot the base and pick up whatever they could as soon as we were gone. It was a moment our commander had anticipated, one that could have decided the fate of Khost city had we left without an orderly departure. A massive convoy of more than a thousand military trucks, armored vehicles, and civilian cars began to roll onto the town roads, joined by the medical team and their ambulance.
Inside the ambulance was a soldier who had been critically wounded just days earlier. He was part of a small support team sent to help the OSF (03) from Paktika province reach the Kabul-Gardez highway safely. Though the OSF had made it through, KPF’s small support team was ambushed on their way back. They had fought for hours, suffering casualties before reinforcements could arrive. The soldier in the ambulance was one of the survivors of that attack.
This road ahead could either lead to Kabul or to our graves. As we traveled through the city, the crowd’s reaction was a painful mix of love and anger. Children and elders offered prayers for our safety. Some shouted, “We will miss you!” and men ran up to our vehicles to embrace their loved ones who were leaving KPF and Khost forever. But others cried with rage, some even spitting toward us and shouting, “Cowards! You are leaving us!” The KPF was a force of Khosti men. They were brave, people of their Pashtunwali, and men of honor. They were the kind of soldiers Afghanistan had needed for twenty years. They were well-equipped, well-armed, and well-trained. The only thing missing on that journey was air support. Perhaps it was there but we simply were not told, but had the men known that drones or air cover watched from above, their morale would have soared. With that assurance, I believe no one would have spoken of surrender or negotiation.
We left the city behind and entered the mountains. It was quiet and black darkness was all around us, broken only by the headlights of our convoy navigating the curved, steep roads. We received warnings from sympathizers along the way, telling us we were walking into a trap, but the decision had been made. There was no turning back as Camp Chapman was no longer our fortress. Our commander was a hot-headed man, and he was prepared to fight to the last breath if circumstances required it.
We had been traveling for about two hours when the front of our long convoy ground to a halt at a Taliban checkpoint. Our military personnel went forward to negotiate, reminding them that we had been promised safe passage by their governor. The response was chilling. The orders to stop us, they said, had come from their same governor. Words were exchanged. Then, gunshots cracked through the night.
Our vehicle was near the middle of the convoy. We didn’t know who had fired or why. But bad news travels fast. The word came back down the line that we were being prevented from moving forward. In the exchange of fire, one Talib had been killed in their checkpoint.
The commander gave the order to turn back toward Khost city. The plan was to either capture the airport and wait for an airlift or fight our way back into our base. But after traveling only a short distance, our convoy stopped again. Another Taliban checkpoint had materialized behind us, blocking our retreat. We were trapped.
Three civilians from our convoy were sent forward to tell them we had negotiated with the Taliban governor and were returning to Khost. As soon as the lead negotiator opened his mouth to speak, he was shot in the mouth, his body collapsing onto the road. The two men with him sustained injuries. Another volley of gunfire erupted, but this time, no one else was hit. This standoff continued for hours, with periodic exchanges of fire and moving forward and backward.
We were blocked on both ends of the highway in the mountains, near Anar Bagh, roughly twenty-eight miles from Khost city. The road was a narrow ledge carved from the side of the mountain, a sheer drop of fifty meters to the valley below. To our other side was the mountain like a wall of solid rock. There was no way forward, no way back, and no way out. We were not outnumbered in manpower and arms, but our position was a deathtrap. The Taliban held the well-fortified hilltops across the valley. It was a perfectly laid trap; one they had clearly been preparing for days. (see Figure 10)
Everyone prepared for what was to come. Our men poured out of their vehicles, finding whatever cover they could. Chants of “Allahu Akbar!” roared from our side, a declaration of defiance. Gunfire erupted from our convoy. Our men fired toward the sparks of enemy muzzle flashes coming from positions across the valley. After an hour of tense silence, a few vehicles carrying local elders approached from the city to negotiate with our commander. They urged to wait until morning. The Taliban governor was sleeping, and a decision would not be made until he had performed his morning prayer.
Easy to locate Afghanistan on the map, all thanks to the sharp focus it has received over the years. Is it as we see in the media and watch in the movies? Fazal Moneer Adil's memoir, A River Is Made, delivers answers. To have risen to a point where he's able to give his family a peaceful home in America, he battled a lot, all of which he shares in this memoir. He remembers the dusty roads he and the family took, the hills they climbed, all to escape death in their motherland, and while in a foreign country, just as he began to settle, they’d move again. He remembers his struggles when back to Afghanistan, how corruption curtailed growth, and how his own fellow countrymen were suspicious of him. In a nutshell, there’s so much to unpack here, not just religion, culture, war, one man’s fight for a better tomorrow, and the pain of losing a loved one. But more.
Adil redefines what it means to be a refugee. He dwells on what a refugee leaves behind and carries with them, what awaits them ahead, and the journey itself. Religion and cultural practices shape society, and Adil begins here, reaffirming that culture and faith were at the heart of the society that raised him: I was relieved to learn Dearborn, Michigan, was home to one of the largest Middle Eastern Muslim communities in America, with beautiful mosques like the Islamic Center of America.”
His achievements were small, but he soldiered on, going from a mere refugee to an interpreter for U.S Special Operatives and to finally living the American dream. Adil's life journey confirms that “drop by drop, a river is made.”
I haven’t read many books about Afghanistan, but I’m certain this book opens up enough. Its pages revealed to me the good and the bad of the land. There are well-wishers who held Adil's hand when he needed help. When the truck that carried the body of their loved one stopped moving, some locals came with a tractor and helped them. “Their kindness was like a divine intervention, saved us all from freezing to death,” writes Adil. When he writes a will to his family, it’s because bad times had ganged up on him, convincing him he’d reached his end.
Memoir readers should get involved in Adil’s journey, as best in this in-depth, wonderfully-written memoir. Because there’s much to learn.