Canada to leave behind Afghan allies
Impossible to get all out, says Trudeau
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said Thursday his government is unlikely to get everyone out of Afghanistan that Canada has pledged to help. At a campaign stop in Victoria, B.C., Trudeau said Canada now has massive transport aircraft on the ground in Kabul and has staff working with Afghans to get them out of the country, but he cautioned that the planes may not leave full, because outside of the airport, the city is controlled by the Taliban.
“The limit, however, is not on Canadian capacity or Canadian airlifts. The limit on getting people out is the fact that the Taliban continue to block access for Afghans,” he said.
The stark message that former Canadian allies are likely to be left behind comes on the back of new reports that say the Taliban has already assembled teams seeking revenge on Afghans who worked for NATO forces.
Fear of reprisals sparked scenes of chaos earlier this week as Afghans flooded Kabul airport runways with some hopeful refugees grabbing the exterior of planes taking off only to fall to their deaths. American and other international forces have now taken control over the airport and restored order.
Trudeau said while the airport was under international control it was unlikely Canada would be able to get out everyone it wanted to.
“It is going to be very, very difficult to get many people out. We will get some, certainly, but to get many people out, as many as we want, is going to be almost impossible in the coming weeks.”
Afghanistan is now completely under Taliban control after the terrorist group defeated Afghan National Army forces in the last few weeks and seized control over all major cities including Kabul.
Trudeau’s government has faced calls for weeks to help get translators and other Afghans who worked with Canadian forces or with the embassy out of the country, because they face persecution from the Taliban for having worked with Canada.
Afghan interpreters and their advocates in Canada have reported bureaucratic issues for people looking to leave, as the government has demanded former interpreters provide documentation, fill out forms online and even provide COVID tests if they want to be brought out of the country.
Trudeau said the government was looking to strip away any bureaucratic barriers it could.
“Canada has people on the ground now and we’ll have more personnel on the ground later today to help with the processing,” he said. “We will continue to work to reduce those barriers. There are phone calls being made, there are outreaches, there are exceptions being made We are focused on trying to get people out.”
Earlier this week, Conservative MP James Bezan said the government had dropped the ball and should have been doing more to help people get out months ago.
“Thousands of Afghan support staff and their families have been waiting with their bags packed and passports ready for weeks, in some cases months. We have Canadian Armed Forces assets troops and cargo aircraft capable of extracting everyone in the region,” he said.
Taliban forces have said they were not seeking to be vindictive against those who worked with the former regime or international forces, but new reporting suggested that was a lie.
Senior Afghan officials told The Daily Telegraph that they had been forced to go into “deep hiding” to avoid Taliban teams who were hunting for wanted members of former president Ashraf Ghani’s ousted administration.
Their accounts and a UN document leaked to The New York Times contradict the Taliban’s assurances that they would not seek revenge.
In addition to a door-to-door manhunt, the Taliban has searched through crowds at Kabul’s airport.
The UN document from a group called the Norwegian Centre for Global Analyses, which provides intelligence to UN agencies, cited reports the Taliban were working from a list, which includes home addresses, of those they wanted to question and punish.
A former high-ranking counter-terrorism official, who spent years working with the British and Americans putting hundreds of jihadist terrorists into prison, said his life had been threatened by militants now released from jail in Kabul.
He went straight into hiding, with his ninemonth old baby, after the Taliban surrounded the capital, fearing the threat to his life was extremely grave.
Another high-ranking member of the previous government, who spoke to The Telegraph anonymously via contacts in the UK, said he had been targeted for his beliefs that girls should be educated.
When Kabul fell on Sunday, he was visited and questioned by Taliban militants, without threat of violence.
However, following a Taliban press conference on Tuesday, in which an amnesty was offered to all government officials, it was determined that the threat to his safety had in fact heightened, and he went underground.
“My house (has) now become probably their hourly point of search and my kids are deeply terrified,” he said. “The moment they knock at the door all kids start crying. They think they will be killed.”