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My name is Maihan Far Alam, I am an Afghan 
American and I graduated from the University  

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of Virginia in 2019. I received my bachelor's 
degree in foreign affairs with a minor in  

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Middle Eastern studies. I am originally from 
Khasni Afghanistan but I grew up in Phoenix,  

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Arizona. On September 11, I was only five 
years old I was in kindergarten at the time  

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so my initial reaction I don't quite remember 
and I do remember watching the television with  

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my family around me just watching images of 
twin towers falling over and over on the news  

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and my mother was crying that day but 
I couldn't quite understand why and it  

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wasn't until years later that I would understand 
the impact of that day. Prior to the events  

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of September 11, I hadn't quite placed much 
thought into the fact that I am an immigrant  

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it wasn't until after the events of 9/11 that I 
became acutely aware of my cultural and religious  

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background. My brother and I would get called 
terrorists or people would often refer to Osama  

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Bin Laden as my uncle and my mom would always warn 
us about telling people where we were from or our  

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family background. When the United States invaded 
Afghanistan the Taliban regime fell and I put that  

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in quotes because the Taliban still continues to 
maintain control of large parts of the country,  

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but in major cities in Afghanistan like Kabul, 
women were now able to go to school they were  

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able to work outside the home but that freedom 
that they were given that they didn't have before  

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came at a cost. The war on terror led to mass 
displacement, it led to the destructions of homes,  

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hospitals, schools, entire neighborhoods, and the 
mass murder of thousands hundreds of thousands of  

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innocent afghan civilians. It kind of leads to 
the question what kind of freedom is that if  

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you leave for work in the morning to go to work 
or school you wonder if you're going to return  

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home because you don't know if you're going 
to be killed that day you're left wondering  

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when you go to bed at night if your house is 
going to be the next target of a rocket attack  

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and that's something my family has experienced 
we lost some of my cousins last year in a rocket  

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attack when rockets hit their home in Kabul. And 
this past year alone another one of my cousins  

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was shot by a Taliban member and he continues 
to remain in critical condition because he is  

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not able to obtain the health care that he needs 
due to the lack of infrastructure in the country  

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as a result of the war. For Americans September 
11th is a day of mourning it's a day of reflection  

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it's a day of grieving and commemorating 
the innocent American lives that were lost,  

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but for Afghans especially for lack of a better 
word they don't have that luxury to grieve,  

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they don't have that luxury to mourn, war is 
their everyday reality it's something that  

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they have learned to live with and cope with 
and the impact that September 11th has had  

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on people in Afghanistan and and many other 
countries in the middle east is profound  

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and that's something that a lot of Americans 
either fail to realize or completely ignore.