Attacked at home, Afghan Sikhs find community on Long Island | International

Police later warned the household to not attend their funerals as a result of terrorists had planted land mines outdoors the temple. They have been in the end in a position to attend, however solely after officers did a sweep and cleared them to enter the shrine.

“That’s after we determined we wanted to go away Afghanistan,” Soni stated. “There was completely no future for our household in that nation.”

After a two-year wrestle to make an exit, together with practically a 12 months below restored rule of the fundamentalist Taliban group, Soni and 12 relations together with his mom, siblings, nieces and nephews, arrived in the USA final month.

They’re settling in Hicksville, on New York’s Lengthy Island, a neighborhood that has come to be a rising refuge for not solely Afghan Sikhs but additionally Hindus, each of them spiritual minorities which have more and more suffered discrimination and persecution of their house nation.

Sikhs and Hindus make up solely a tiny fraction of the inhabitants of Afghanistan, which is sort of completely Muslim. Underneath the Taliban within the late Nineties, they have been requested to establish themselves by carrying yellow armbands or badges, harking back to Nazi Germany, and in recent times they’ve been repeatedly focused by extremists.

In July 2018 an ISIS suicide bomber ambushed a convoy of Sikhs and Hindus as they have been on their option to meet President Ashraf Ghani within the jap metropolis of Jalalabad, killing 19. On June 16 of this 12 months, an ISIS gunman attacked a gurdwara, or home of worship, in Kabul, killing one worshipper and wounding seven others. Sikhs additionally face challenges with cremating their lifeless, which they think about a sacred perception however Islam views as sacrilegious.

A 12 months after U.S. forces’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, a latest report by the bipartisan U.S. Fee on Worldwide Non secular Freedom warns of “a fast decline and close to extinction of the already small Afghan Hindu and Sikh communities” in Afghanistan, along with persecution of different spiritual minorities.

In October 2021, the report says, the Sikh neighborhood shared movies of alleged Taliban members vandalizing and ransacking their gurdwara within the neighborhood of Karte Parwan, which is house to the remaining 100 or fewer Sikhs and Hindus in Kabul.

Soni, now 27, nonetheless has contemporary recollections of the 2020 gurdwara assault that in the end drove the household from the nation. When the assailants stormed the prayer corridor early that morning, he was within the subsequent room on the Gurdwara Har Rai Sahib, the place his father was the chief granthi, or ceremonial reader of the Sikh sacred textual content.

He noticed males operating into the temple with sneakers, one thing that’s prohibited. As he darted out to cease them, Soni noticed the our bodies of a safety guard and a teen in a pool of blood proper the place devotees often washed their toes earlier than getting into. He retreated with two siblings to a room, the place they locked the door and hunkered down for a number of hours.

When the siege ended, Afghan particular forces had killed the assailants and rescued no less than 80 worshippers. Soni rushed to the prayer corridor, the place he discovered his three family lifeless and his mom and older brother wounded.

“My mother advised me (the gunman) saved capturing and throwing bombs at the same time as folks tried to cover,” Soni stated. “My brother heard his daughter’s voice calling out to him to assist her. He was helpless.”

In late August of final 12 months, after the Taliban took over Kabul, Soni, one of many few English audio system in his neighborhood, assumed the function of a spokesperson and negotiator working to safe their exit from Kabul. He tried to speak the Canadian authorities into evacuating about 250 Sikhs and Hindus, together with his household.

After an ISIS suicide bombing on the airport scuttled that plan and fears escalated below Taliban rule, the ladies and youngsters in Soni’s household moved to New Delhi and the lads shuttled between India and Kabul to care for his or her sacred shrine. It then took months of wrestle and every day communication between the U.S. State Division; the Sikh Coalition, a Sikh American advocacy group; and Afghan Sikhs in Hicksville to get the whole household of 13 to the U.S.

Paramjit Singh Bedi, a longtime neighborhood chief who moved to the USA in 1984 and was instrumental in bringing them over, is now hoping to assist them get housing, work permits and medical insurance coverage, and the kids enrolled in class.

“This household has been via loads,” Bedi stated. “However we’re a resilient folks and we’re sturdy and steadfast in our religion. I do know they are going to be OK.”

Bedi has advocated for the everlasting resettlement of the Afghan Sikh neighborhood right here, and estimates there are about 200 of them dwelling on Lengthy Island.

There are additionally about 800 Afghan Hindus within the space, in response to Doulat Radhu Bathija, a pacesetter of that neighborhood.

Bathija stated he sees the Hindu and Sikh communities as “the identical,” they usually go to one another’s locations of worship and have fun collectively Diwali, the pageant of lights.

“We get collectively for weddings and funerals,” he stated, “like a household.”