″ I was very afraid that they would kill me and my family ″
Orchestra conductor of the National Institute of Music of Afghanistan and more than a hundred musicians were welcomed in Portugal two weeks ago. They are sold in Lisbon, Cascais and Loures.
On the night of the day the Taliban took power in Kabul, Afghanistan, Mohammad Qambar Nawshad began composing a song called “A World Outside the Earth?” (A land outside the Earth), at home, before fleeing. Four months later, in a small room shared with six family members in Cascais, he creates music and imagines the reopening of the National Institute of Music of Afghanistan (INMA), where he teaches percussion and conductor. He is one of 131 musicians, employees and their families, from this music school, who landed in Lisbon two weeks ago.
In a country where the Taliban forbid music in public and call women promiscuous just for playing or singing, artists fled the Afghan capital as soon as they could. First to Qatar, in October, and then to Portugal in December. Mohammad Qambar Nawshad had already run away twice. “Most people know who I am and where I lived because I was on television. A month and a half before the Taliban entered the city I wrote two Afghan patriotic songs. me and my family and I changed my location twice,” he confides to JN.