‘Failure upon failure’: Despair in Afghanistan as flights leave empty

The Kabul airport gates were a path not to escape but to hospital for one Afghan human rights activist this week.

A relative was shot in the head in the melee of people trying to leave, and so she spent the evening trudging to a market to buy alcohol and gauze for his wounds. The hospital had run out.

Every day, people are shot, beaten and choked with teargas as they gather outside the concrete barricades that shutter off the last tiny sliver of western-held territory in Afghanistan, and the last hopes of escaping the Taliban regime. At least 12 people have died trying to reach the airport this week, from gunshots or in stampedes.

While the US and UK say their evacuations are gathering pace, there seems to be little sign of that on the ground in Kabul, where many Afghans are stuck outside the airport or behind checkpoints that seem impossible to pass.

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Still the crowds are gathering in their thousands, willing to risk their lives, and their children’s lives, for fear of what lies ahead at home now.

Almost none are getting out. Flights are leaving Afghanistan empty, or carrying mostly foreign citizens. There are some Afghans who manage to successfully run the gauntlet of Taliban checkpoints, surging crowds and foreign military to make it inside the compound.

But they are mostly people with links to the western military and its embassies. An expanded US scheme covers those who worked for western media or NGOs. But Britain has excluded many, including contractors and those who worked for embassy affiliates such as the British Council.

This is the reality of what has unfolded in Afghanistan this week, as the Taliban has returned to govern the country after 20 years.

For Afghans who have spent all that time fighting within Afghan organisations for the values the west claimed to promote, including democracy and women’s rights, there is even less chance of getting out. They have no foreign organisations to sponsor the visas they need to flee.

"I am devastated. It is failure upon failure," said Shaharzad Akbar, who leads the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

Her organisation has spearheaded the fight against both Taliban and government abuses for two decades, and some of its staff have paid the ultimate price; several of its activists have been killed in targeted assassinations by the militants in recent years.

Not a single one had been evacuated from Kabul yet, she said. Some have been offered flights, and tried to reach the airport, some – including elderly and disabled people – have been twice, to no avail.

They were now poised, Akbar said, in a horrible balance of fear: terrified of staying, and terrified of the consequences of trying to leave.

“Right now when colleagues have flights, I have to convince them to go to the airport. They have tried once, twice and they have failed and so they dread going again,” she said. And the journey is only getting harder, as the Taliban consolidate control of the city.

“Female heads of household, women travelling alone, they are getting more and more harassment.”

Inside and outside Kabul there is growing rage and despair at the failures of a crippled evacuation programme that in its current state risks leaving most of the most vulnerable Afghans behind.

"What's happening is a fiasco. We should all hang our heads in shame," said Rachel Reid, a human rights consultant working with Afghan organisations.

“Thousands of Afghans who have stood up to the Taliban for years are at risk. But they are being pushed out of the way at the airport gate as the US and UK and other states fly their citizens out over the heads of vulnerable Afghans.”

The anger was directed at the governments that failed to plan, and the international organisations that are letting their staff down.

UN employees have resorted to begging friends and former colleagues for help, as they say the international institution has no plans to evacuate most of them.

"Dear Antonio Guterres. I worked for the UN in Afghanistan for four years and my inbox is full of Afghans I worked with at the UN desperately pleading for my help in escaping. Kindly advise me who I should refer them to," said Heather Barr, from Human Rights Watch, on Twitter.

Despite the Taliban’s promises of general “amnesty” in press conferences, Afghans have lived with the group before, and heard reports of atrocities that trailed their advance across the country. There has already been a massacre documented in the last week, and in Kabul the Taliban are going house to house, looking for people with links to both the government and foreigners.

It is fear of this record, this pattern of behaviour, that drove a young football star to risk, and lose his life, clinging to the side of a US military plane in a desperate bid to escape. The same terror drives crowds to surge to the sides of the airport, day after day, despite shootings, beatings.

As the scale of the government vacuum became clear, a network of individuals tried to fill the gap, including international figures such as Hillary Clinton.

"Last week, the evacuation options to get women's rights activists out came largely from an informal network of powerful, connected, some very wealthy people, some trying to literally charter private jets to evacuate women thought to be Taliban targets," said Marie Clarke, the vice-president of global programmes at Women for Women International, which has operated in Afghanistan for nearly two decades.

“It is amazing that private individuals and concerned citizens of America are organising themselves together to try and protect Afghan women, because of this vacuum of official, government-run mechanisms for those most at risk to have safe passage out of the country.

Like almost anyone who has worked in the field, she was moved by the scale of mobilisation, but seemed furious that the initiative was necessary, that governments had failed. “It really says something about this moment.”

It also meant that countless hours were wasted in cross-checking lists governments could have drawn up months ago, or with organisers ringing individual NGO workers asking if they would be able to support a planeload of refugees arriving in a country where they operated.

And for all the money, and goodwill, very few people have managed to get out, because of the logistics of getting to the airport, and then the logistics of getting planes in.

There are still just a few thousand people a day being flown out, and human rights groups estimate that tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Afghans are now at risk.

For people in Kabul there is perhaps a hope, if a slim one, that the west might reach a deal with the Taliban to smooth evacuations. For those outside the capital, there is almost no hope at all.

One former British Council educator from another major city wrote in a message to a colleague: “I am in a very worst situation than before because now I am hiding myself under the ground in a deeper and narrow hole and there is also lack of oxygen.

“I can’t take my wife to doctor and I can’t stay with my kids because I am selfish, I want to save my life from Taliban.”

“All day my mum is standing near to the hole and calling, ‘Son, are you okay?’ and throwing bottles of water to drink. Just at night I can came out of hole and if we hear knocking on the door of my home, then I go down as soon as I can.” – Guardian