We’re playing with the lives of Afghans if we think the mess we’ve left at the gates of Kabul International Airport is close to being resolved.
Hour by hour, the desperation of the crowds grows as they wave documents proving they have qualified to be airlifted out of the newly minted Islamic Emirates. So many of these people, who the UK, US and wider international community have already agreed to help, feel their only opportunity for salvation is slipping away.
My uncle, a British citizen, is one of them. He’s been there four days and currently I can’t get through to him. We have no idea if he’s going to be able to make it inside the relative shelter of the airport. Everyone is risking their lives but there’s little choice.
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This morning I got a voicemail with news on the ground. It’s like a scene from World War Z. People are trying to throw their children over the barbed wire fences away from the Taliban-infested streets to the US-occupied airport side. Pregnant women are fainting from lack of food and water, refusing to leave the airport gates in the rare case the doors open and some of them are saved.
I see an update flash on my instagram quoting a source helping these people, a Brit: “It’s a complete rugby scrum to get to and into the airport. It’s free for all. No one can really help.”
Almost empty planes are taking off to safety (for example, a German plane carrying just seven Afghans).
This is a man-made, bureaucratic mess that either the Johnson government saw coming and expected, or they were blindsided and ill-prepared to sort. Either way, as the Taliban beat back the gathering waves of Afghan refugees with rubber pipes and shoot into groups of gathering people, we are living now through a humanitarian crisis. It’s only a matter of time until the tension is broken and the American forces come face to face with Taliban fighters.
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I look at these images and hear their pleas and am back to being that seven-year-old Nelufar, breathless in the stiffening heat under my mothers burqa, who’s forcing her hand over my mouth to be quiet. That was us as we escaped the Taliban in 1994, when I became an Afghan refugee.
I felt trapped, insignificant, unheard and hopeless. We were the lucky ones that got away, but over the years, I have spent much of my life as a journalist going back to Afghanistan to report on the small pockets of progress and the shoots of democracy that were growing there.
Seeing these scenes and feeling time ticking away as the Taliban become impatient and restless I can only pray for these people we’ve left destitute.
A lot of people are asking me who I hold responsible. We can look to blame the government of the day, left holding the dirty political football that is Afghanistan but I don’t think that’s enough.
We Afghans have been failed by the brutal Taliban regime, by the corruptible Afghan government, and by the West.
