Afghan baby missing after being handed over Kabul airport fence
ONE of the babies handed to US troops over an airport fence in dramatic scenes during the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan has gone missing, the US has admitted.
Two-month-old Sohail disappeared at the gates of Kabul airport as his parents pushed through a chaotic crowd to make their evacuation flight.
US State Department officials confirmed on Friday that “no one can find the child”, but said they are working “to explore every avenue” to locate him.
Fearing Sohail would get crushed in the melee, former US embassy guard Mirza Ali Ahmadi and his wife Suraya handed Sohail to a soldier, thinking they would soon get to the entrance, which was only about 16ft away.
But at that moment, Mirza Ali said, the Taliban – which had swiftly taken over the country as US troops withdrew – began pushing back hundreds of hopeful evacuees. It took the rest of the family more than half an hour to get to the other side of the airport fence.
Once they were got through, Sohail was nowhere to be found. “I spoke to maybe more than 20 people,” Mirza Ali said in an interview through a translator. “Every officer – military or civilian – I came across I was asking about my baby.”
He said one of the civilian officials told him Sohail might have been evacuated by himself. “They said ‘we don’t have resources to keep the baby here’.”
Mirza Ali, 35, Suraya, 32, and their other children, 17, nine, six and three years old, were put on an evacuation flight to Qatar and then to Germany and eventually landed in the United States.
The family is now at Fort Bliss in Texas with other Afghan refugees waiting to be resettled in the US.
“All I am doing is thinking about my child,” Suraya said.