It was August 25, a few days after Ashraf Ghani’s flight from Kabul and the Taliban’s assumption of the city’s control well before the time of their expected arrival. On this day I left for Kabul from Peshawar via Torkham.
To my utter surprise, within thirty minutes of crossing into Afghanistan, my Pakistani WhatsApp number started buzzing: Broadcasters from India, Spain, and Pakistan, some of them known and most of unknown by me, were bombarding me with calls and messages.
As if spoke to the callers, I realized that the departure of Afghan journalists from Kabul had created some space for people like me. So, these institutions were looking for people with knowledge and skills to understand their work and needs. However, I told them plainly I could commit anything until I understood the situation on the ground.
Late in the afternoon, I reached the house of my host near Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International airport. The calls from international media agencies and the viral videos of the 16 August incidents of Afghans falling from the US planes had aroused my curiosity about the goings on at the airport.
“I have to go to the airport”, I told my host after putting away my luggage. Being a very hospitable Pashtun, he took me to the airport which was just a few minutes’ drive away. We were outside the airport among the multitudes gathered there, hoping to be evacuated by the United States. Among them were men as well as women, aged people and children, sitting and lying everywhere.
While walking between them, I was constantly examining where bathrooms and food facilities were for these people. Many among them were sick. Most of the people looking to be evacuated from Afghanistan seemed educated and spoke English along with Dari (Persian).
I tried to find an answer to the question as to why they so desperate to leave Afghani- stan in a hurry. No one was willing to tell us about their profession and business in Afghanistan – until my host was able to draft the services of a friend who knew some of them.
When we finally sat down and struck a conversation, I found that most of these people had served foreign forces in Afghanistan over the last twenty years as interpreters or local guides.
Also among the lot were locals who had seen better times in Afghanistan before the Taliban first came to power, meaning their families were in good positions and lost it after the Taliban arrived.
A third category was educated people who had worked in various government departments and were disheartened since the end of Ashraf Ghani’s rule, and they found their future dark in this second round of Taliban.
Finally, there were those who wanted to emigrate to a Western country, and finding the open invitation by the United States useful, they had arrived in throngs.
Some of them were shaken by the people falling from the aircraft. They could not imagine why an aircraft would take off with people clinging to its wings or landing gear, who ended up dying in spectacularly tragic fashion. Could they not wait to remove the people bodily before take-off?
All of them knew that the purpose of taking them away was to prevent the Taliban from tapping their skills and thus be unable to run the country – and they were still willing to go. Some of them believed their lives were not in danger, and yet they were at the airport, hoping to board a flight out of Afghanistan.
Sitting there in the middle of them, I remembered the videos from 16 August, when the people gathered at Kabul Airport were clinging to the planes as if it were not planes but buses they could hitch a ride on.
But the people gathered at Kabul Airport were not only those who were present in Afghanistan or their lives were in danger, among them were those who had lived in Pakistan for many years.
I remembered an incident that happened to me in Peshawar just the day before. I met an Afghan from Kabul named Farooq in front of Yousafzai Market in Hayatabad, a modern town in Peshawar. He is one of the many other Afghan refugees living in Pakistan who do business in Peshawar and live in Hayatabad.
Hayatabad is the first housing development of Peshawar as you travel from Afghanistan via Khyber District. Apart from the big government hospitals, there are private hospitals popular with patients from Afghanistan.
Farooq was happy in Peshawar, and whenever there was talk of returning to Afghani- stan, he would laughingly touch his ears in a gesture of mock compunction and say, “Now our body will go to Kabul.”
But as soon as we met on 24 August, he said to me, “Will you help me so that I can get my family to America or Europe from Kabul Airport?” I reminded him that he had always refuse to go to Afghanistan.
Now that this has happened, he said, planes are flying from Kabul Airport taking people to the United States and Europe without travel documents. Now this gentleman holds British citizenship.
He said this was an opportunity for him to take his whole family to the UK, which
would be an impossible task otherwise. I told him I was travelling to Kabul in a couple of days and I would do something for him, and then we both left each other.
I heard from Farooq’s voice later. He told me he had arrived in Kabul, US planes were not picking up Afghan civilians anymore. He reached Kabul two days after the blast at Kabul Airport, in which around 200 people were killed and the air operation was restricted to foreigners only.
He is now in Kabul along with his family, waiting for an opportunity to board a plane to a Western country.
Farooq is not alone in his plight. Thousands of Afghans have descended on Kabul and its surrounding areas in the hope of catching a flight bound for the West.
Hazrat Usman is also from Kabul. The only words I heard from again and again since I met him in Kabul as a Pakistani journalist are, “You are a great and famous journalist. You must be very well known. Please tell your people (at the Pakistani embassy) to drive me and my two brothers to the airport and put us on a flight for America”. I stopped taking him seriously after a while.
I asked him, “You have a good business here. Why must you get out of here?” But he would not listen to any of it. He was eventually able to get in any embassy car to the airport, and board a plane.
Hazrat Usman’s other brother owned a large plaza comprising twenty-eight flats which he has rented out, collecting a healthy sum every month. But he too followed agents all day prepared to pay up to a million Pakistani rupees, hoping to draft their help to board a plane.
These were the days when Ashraf Ghani had left Kabul and the Taliban had to enter the city of Kabul and take over the power. There was uncertainty everywhere. No one knew what would happen next.
Tens of thousands of public servants had gone without their salaries for the past few months due to a tiff between Parliament and President Ashraf Ghani on certain issues. Ashraf Ghani’s sudden exit from the country had further complicated their situation.
The Taliban were present in the streets and some government buildings inside Kabul, but they were not ready to believe that the country was officially their responsibility.
Americans and their allies were confined to the airport and it seemed that at least initially, they had intended to take along as many educated and skilled Afghans as possible, including every man and woman who had helped them in the past.
There were warnings of a terrorist threat form ISIS targeting the gathered multitudes at and around the airport. Such concerns were also being expressed by US officials and many others, but no one paid attention until the city’s atmosphere erupted on the evening of 26 August and more than 150 funerals were held the next day.
I initially thought Farooq and Hazrat Usman were the odd ones who were desperate to leave Afghanistan, but I was mistaken. I found out during the days spent in Kabul towards the end of August that every person in Afghanistan, especially the youth, wanted to leave, and for that they were willing to pay a price.
It seemed the only people not eager to leave Afghanistan at that point in time were the Taliban and their supporters.
