When it was clear that Kabul had fallen, after checking on my family I fled my house and sought shelter with a neighbor because I feared the Taliban would come looking for me. And they did. That week, fighters came to my home.

A relative told me later by phone that she told the Taliban fighters who knocked on the door she was just a cleaner, that the family had left a week earlier. They came back an hour later, and my relative gave the same explanation. The fighters told her to pass along a message: They were looking for me and I needed to get in touch. If I didn’t, what happened next would be my own fault.

That encounter only reinforced my fear that I face imminent danger. I also come from a military family; my father was in the army and fought the Taliban. Working for transparency and democracy was my way of demonstrating the patriotism and morality my father taught me.