| inbluevt | Date: Tuesday, 2013/08/13, 9:45 PM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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She flies risky medevac missions to the Afghan frontlines and has fought against the Taliban for two governments and an Uzbek warlord. Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai talk to Latifa Nabizada, the first female to join the Afghan Air Force.
When 18-year-old Latifa Nabizada graduated from helicopter flight school in 1991 along with her younger sister, Lailuma, they proudly became Afghanistan’s first-ever female pilots. But they also received their wings and their commissions at the peak of the destructive Afghan civil
war, which immediately threw the two women into perilous combat. They were flying for the beleaguered government of the Russian-backed dictator, Najibullah, which was fighting for survival against the U.S.-backed mujahideen guerrillas. Latifa, now 40, a colonel and pilot
in the fledgling Afghan Air Force, recalls in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast how dangerous it was in those days to pilot a lumbering, Soviet-built Mi-8 chopper on resupply, medevac, and combat
missions while she and her co-pilot sister dodged salvos of lethal CIA-supplied heat-seeking, anti-aircraft missiles. “Most of our flights were high risk because of the Stingers,” she says. “The mujahideen hunted us constantly with those missiles.” “But we didn’t care,” she
adds. “You don’t get your wish if you don’t take the risk.”
Flying had always been her dream, says Latifa, an ethnic Uzbek, while sitting in a Kabul restaurant dressed in a plain brown shawl, which covers her hair and shoulders, and a brown Afghan dress. “I am in love with the sky,” she says. “The closer I am to the sky the more pleasure I feel.” While she and her sister were growing up in Kabul, they never played with dolls; they played pilots. “We went after our dreams,” she says. As top students, the sisters could have gone to medical or
engineering schools upon graduation, but without hesitation they volunteered for, and were accepted in, air force pilot training in 1988, just one year before the battered Soviet army withdrew from
Afghanistan. For all its murderous abuses, Najibullah’s communist-leaning, authoritarian regime staunchly promoted women’s education and rights.
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Message edited by inbluevt - Tuesday, 2013/08/13, 10:18 PM |
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