A former security guard supervisor at Australia’s shuttered embassy in Kabul has issued a personal plea to Scott Morrison for help escaping Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, saying 1,000 men, women and children are stranded outside Kabul airport as foreign evacuation flights wind down.
“We have been five days now with the visa you sent us on Sunday night,” the man says in a statement addressed to the prime minister and seen by the Guardian.
“Please we are begging you to save us. Get your brave ADF soldiers to come out, and protect us, help us, we are flying our beautiful Australian flag upside down to show distress. Please help us.”
Australia was expected to join other coalition countries in beginning to pull out of Kabul in coming days.
A handful of Australian-run flights were expected to fly overnight Thursday to carry several hundred people already inside the airport, but it was unclear how many more missions would be able to safely enter and exit the country.
France’s prime minister said his country would no longer be able to evacuate people from the airport after Friday night, and the Danish defence minister said: “It is no longer safe to fly in or out of Kabul.”
Thousands of foreign nationals and Afghan citizens seeking escape from Afghanistan remained massed outside the fortified airport gates, despite warnings of the risk of an imminent suicide bomb attack from an anti-Taliban Islamic State affiliate.
The ADF had flown about 4,000 people – including Australians, Afghan nationals and other foreign nationals – out of Kabul since the beginning of the emergency flights just over a week ago. But Australia issued a travel warning on Thursday urging people near the airport to “move to a safe location and await further advice”.
Standing by the perimeter fence of Kabul’s international airport, the former guard supervisor at the Australian embassy, whom the Guardian is choosing not to name, said in his statement to the prime minister: “We are now 147 members with our families. We are now waiting for your evacuation team outside the airport gates.”
Dozens of former guards had remained by the razor-wired walls of the airport – amid the massing crowds seeking entry – carrying emails confirming visas to Australia, as well as “Australian Evacuation Flight Offer” letters from the Department of Home Affairs instructing them to go to the airport “to await a planned outbound military flight”.
Glenn Kolomeitz, a migration lawyer and former army major who represented former ADF interpreters and Australian support staff, said the government needed to “step in” to ensure evacuations proceeded given the security situation was deteriorating.
Kolomeitz said his clients had been rejected at the gates on three occasions after the legitimacy of their e-visas was questioned.
“We have 147 guards and their families, so that’s about 1,000 people total, that are stuck outside in a safe location but very close to a gate,” Kolomeitz said.
“They have visas, they’re coordinated … and we’re imploring the government to make something happen.”
In a sign the Australian flights were about to end, Morrison said on Thursday that the government would soon be “moving to a post-evacuation resettlement phase”.
The prime minister said the situation on the ground was “terrible, brutal and awful” after an Australian citizen was beaten and kidnapped by the Taliban while trying to leave. The defence minister, Peter Dutton, described the security situation as “dire” and “deteriorating”.
The Australian government was expected to keep encouraging people to apply for humanitarian visas, even after the evacuation flights had ended, but it was unclear how people would be able to get out of Afghanistan.
There was an expectation within government ranks that the humanitarian crisis stemming from the Taliban’s taking of Afghanistan would result in a flow of people across the border, resulting in pressure on neighbouring countries.
Ben Wallace, the UK’s defence secretary, had speculated Afghans who wanted to flee to Britain may be better off “trying to get to the border” than awaiting Royal Air Force evacuation.
Australia’s foreign minister, Marise Payne, said the government would work with the International Organisation for Migration and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees “to provide humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan and in neighbouring countries”.
Emotions ran high in Canberra on Thursday, with the Labor MP Julian Hill booted out of parliament for 24 hours for shouting “you are killing my constituents” as the home affairs minister, Karen Andrews, was about to speak about resettling Afghan nationals.
Hill – whose Victorian electorate includes more Afghan-Australians than any other seat – has been critical of visa processing delays.
Footage sent to the Guardian showed thousands of people crammed into a water canal filled with human waste near the airport. Some reported standing knee-deep in the sewage for days as they tried to grab the attention of coalition soldiers to let them in.
One former interpreter who slept for days in the dirt with young children said: “Finally when I made it in, a British soldier assisted me to see an Australian soldier. I showed him what I had, all papers and passport and he said this is not a visa, this is just an evacuation offer.”
Another interpreter abandoned his efforts completely after witnessing increased Taliban violence. He said he had gone into hiding and would wait for further advice from Australian officials.
“It’s too difficult to reach the gate, honestly! There might be 20,000 people standing in line, which makes it impossible to move forward,” he said.
“Freezing kids due to the cold, sleeping on wet ground, falling kids down under their feet due to crowds, crying women for their unknown future. It was a gathering of ghosts almost.”
The prominent Afghan-Australian and Muslim women’s rights campaigner Mariam Veiszadeh had been inundated with pleas for help, including from her own family who were among those seeking safe haven in Australia.
She said the reports of Australian visa holders being turned away were frustrating and highlighted a lack of coordination on the ground.
“I have extended family members who despite them being issued with 449 visas were told the Australian visa means nothing unless they have an Australian passport, so this is the situation on the ground with multiple families.”
“I feel actually devastated and betrayed and completely hopeless and what makes that pain even more excruciating is knowing that much of these [issues] could have been prevented,” she said.
Paul Johnstone, who managed security contractors at the Australian embassy in Kabul and had been lobbying the government to ensure their evacuation, said confusion on the ground between DFAT and the ADF would cost lives.
“I have definitely heard multiple cases now where Australian soldiers aren’t letting them come through and they’re constantly saying to them, ‘you can’t come through with an electronic visa’,” he said.
“I think a lot of these people have come to the conclusion that they’re not going to get out, and if they stay at the airport any longer after that last plane takes off, there’s going to be a bloodbath.”
The former Australian army Captain Jason Scanes, who assists personnel such as former interpreters in lodging applications for protection under the locally engaged employees program, said the government had left its evacuation efforts too late.
He said the Taliban was “converging on Kabul” and he would “imagine in the next couple of days, when everybody’s supposed to be out of there, they’ll be going door to door”.
