Fearsome Desperation

"I love the U.K., I love the U.K. people. If they hear my sound, please take me, please evacuate me. I was your interpreter, I helped you, I served for you, but you don't care for me."

"I have just one message, please evacuate me, please take me, please pick me up from this place."

"I had a dispute with my wife. She told me 'We cannot stay more in Kabul, the U.K. doesn't care about you, they don't care about your children'."

former British Army interpreter

 

"It is difficult, we don't know when the wait [to be permitted into the Kabul airport for evacuation] will be over, and if the gate will open."

"Do you [journalist] know?"

Young Afghan boy anxious not to be named 

Thousands of people are scrambling to flee Afghanistan after the Taliban seized back control of the country, almost two decades after they were ousted by a US-led coalition. Getty Images

 

NATO-aligned nations all pledged their intention to evacuate Afghans who had helped their diplomats and their military as interpreters and aides at any time during the last twenty years when the U.S.-led coalition kept the Taliban at bay and went about investing huge sums of treasury and the lives of their military in leading the country to Democracy, to recognizing women's and minority rights, to building schools for girls and boys to receive an education, and clinics to provide basic health care. All the while the Taliban surged back each spring from their winter quarters in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Confident they were winning 'the hearts and minds' of the people, foreign NGOs installed themselves to help the country adjust to a new reality of freedom from enforced fundamentalist Islam under sharia law and Afghan women branched out from enforced burqa-wearing recluses to confident news anchors, beauty shop attendants, medical personnel and business owners. In rural areas the Taliban burned down the schools built for children's education by foreign elements.

Now, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the preferred formal title of the Taliban, has routed the elected government of Afghanistan in the shadows of the agreed-upon final drawdown of foreign troops and diplomats in the country. And Afghans who had worked in any capacity for the foreign military or foreign missions as well as for the Afghan government know they will be hunted down and murdered by the Taliban as traitors.

 

Afghans unable to enter the airport watch on as another evacuation flight leaves Kabul   Getty Images

 

Hundreds of thousands of Afghan citizens are desperate to escape the return of the Taliban; some to save their lives, others to avoid living under their despotic, violent rule. The former British Army interpretor held out hope he and his family would be rescued, and then his hopes began slowly to wane and fade. Would-be refugees including the man, his wife and six children awaited rescue while queuing in a putrid ditch close to the airport, hoping they would be among those airlifted out of Kabul to foreign shores.

The ditch served as a human waste runway, and here people were directed to stand, the disgusting waste making children retch, their parents in despair as filth spilled through around them. No shelter, no food, no water, just the urgency of fear. People clutching documents; passports and visas, holding them high above the mess at their feet to keep them dry and viable. The feeble elderly placed in wheelbarrows to keep them above the foetid water but not safe from its nauseating stench.

While standing there in desperation people had little option but to add to the filth by defecating and urinating themselves into the sludge sliding past them. Childen were given pieces of cardboard to hold to shield hemselves from the sizzling sun. Many standing there sent messages to contacts in countries of the West pleading for help. The long queues led to where members of the British Army processed people, even with the awareness of the risk of a violent attack by the IS-KP terrorists.

 

Afghan families inside a US military aircraft wait for the plane's departure from Kabul airport   Getty Images

 

Former guards at the Australian embassy and their families queued for hours in the sewage canal only to be informed by soldiers standing on the wall above, that they lacked the correct visas. "The situation is unbelievable. People are jumping, falling off walls, there's shootings", one of the guards said. Two young girls were reportd to have been refused entry when their parents were allowed into the airport.

A man, Najibulla Alizadeh, posted a video. "They [the Taliban] hit me. I am Australian citizen" he said, blood pouring from his head. An armed man could be seen attempting to grab his phone, and then a gunshot was heard. And all was still. At the main airport entrance "red  units" of the Taliban on guard wearing militaryfatigues, pushed back people who they declared did not possess the necessary paperwork, enforced their leadership's declaration that Afghans will no longer be permitted to leave.

 

On Friday morning, New Zealand, Australia and Canada announced they were ending their airlift of Afghans out of the country. Not because they had completed their mission of rescuing all those they had promised they would not be abandoned to their fate, but rescued from the talons of the Taliban in recognition of the risks they took working for foreign powers. The Biden administration in the U.S. had adamantly refused all of its allies' requests to delay departure.

And then, on Friday, two deadly bombings took place at two airport entrance gates. Suicide bombers wering vests with detonating devices courtesy of Islamic State terrorists ensconced in Afghanistan killed a dozen U.S. Marines, close to 100 Afghan civilians awaiting the opportunity to leave their country, and wounding countless others.

Wounded people are taken to hospital after the blasts. Photograph: Reuters Tv/Reuters