"I'll have programs there and collect money, and give this money to charity and people who don't have houses and who are in need. ... I will try to be safe and visit places that I feel safe," Farida Mahwash told the Chronicle journalist Jonathan Curiel before her departure from the US.

One of Afghanistan's most popular female singers in the 1960s and 1970s, Farida Mahwash was termed as "one of Afghanistan's living treasures" by John Baily – a music professor at the University of London and an expert on Afghan music who wrote the Freemuse report about Afghanistan, 'Can you stop the birds singing'. John Baily has studied Mahwash's music and visited her in her home in exile in Fremont, USA.

Jonathan Curiel described Mahwash as 'Afghanistan's equivalent of Barbra Streisand or Ella Fitzgerald'.


Threatened by the mujahedeen
Farida Mahwash fled Afghanistan's civil war and became a refugee in 1989, but she remained an exalted figure in her homeland, particularly among older Afghans who remembered her songs that were constantly played on the radio.
In music shops around the capital, and in Afghan communities in the United States and Europe, her CDs are still popular sellers, and her voice is sampled by young Afghan singers on dance-oriented recordings.

Farida Mahwash left Afghanistan because the mujahedeen, the loosely-aligned Afghan opposition groups, were threatening the government of then. Mohammad Najibullah seemed on the verge of taking over the capital Kabul, where the famous 38-year-old singer lived.

"The mujahedeen targeted Mahwash because she was a prominent female singer and because she was associated with the government-controlled Radio Afghanistan," explained John Baily in the Chronicle article.

Kabul's government also targeted Mahwash's family. In the days before she fled, Afghan authorities arrested her husband, Farouk, after he refused to "join them," and kept him jailed for two days.

"After she fled to Pakistan, Najibullah's regime said she had abandoned her country and that the country's secret police would hunt her down and harm her. Her life was definitely in danger," Baily said.

Hurrying to leave the country, she sold the family's five-story house in the center of Kabul for the equivalent of 5,000 US dollars. When she was in Pakistan, a UN official discovered her amid the hundreds of thousands of other Afghan refugees and helped arranged asylum for her in the United States.