The Taliban has her son, she says. It’s starving him.

His captors have fractured his arm and beaten him, her beloved child, only 18.

Karimi, 40, tries to describe her torment. Can you imagine, as a mother, as a parent? Your son being broken, and you cannot help him? She’s 7,000 miles away in Philadelphia, after the U.S. military evacuation of Afghanistan, while her boy is tortured in a Taliban jail because his parents fought for the Americans.

“My brain is not working,” said Karimi, who asked to be identified only by her last name for security reasons. “I forget everything. Sometimes I’m thinking and nothing is in my brain, because I’m worrying too much.”

A year after the fall of Kabul touched off the largest evacuation since the Vietnam War, many Afghan arrivals struggle for peace of mind.

Studies show almost all refugees suffer some trauma in being wrenched from their homelands. But professionals who work with Afghan evacuees say many are plagued not by specific mental-health conditions, nor by anguish that peaks and slowly passes, but by unresolvable grief and anxiety over the loss of living children and spouses who could not get out.