We don’t know what to do.. it has become a hell on earth
WOMEN’S rights advocate Zahra Nazari has been trying to flee Afghanistan with her mother and 18-year-old sister since she was promised a place on a US flight last week. Here, the 20-year-old businesswoman describes scenes of horror outside Kabul airport… When we got to the airport the Taliban weren’t letting women go through with their suitcases, they were taking them away. The side of the airport was full of women’s suitcases.
So many people there brought the email they received from the US Embassy, like me, telling them to come to the airport. But the gates had stayed closed and some people had been there for three or four days.
The place is so dirty, because there is nowhere for people to go to the toilet. Yet there were many families, women and children, even newborns, who had spent several nights there, in the heat and with no food or water.
Men were trying to get in and when they surged forward everyone was crushed. The children were in the middle and they couldn’t breathe. I saw eight women crushed to death. Another five women had died from hunger or thirst.
Everyone was crying, saying “where is the United Nations, the Government, the police?” People were getting crushed and shouting, “help me”, but there was no one to help them.
All that time the Taliban were going around whipping people or just shooting into the crowd. It was terrifying.
I saw three men shot dead by the Taliban. One man was with his young daughter, who was left orphaned and alone in the crowd.
There were two babies whose parents had got on to the plane and left them behind.
People are so desperate to get out of Afghanistan that they are only thinking of saving themselves.
After leaving the airport on Friday night, I returned with my family on Saturday, but an American soldier pushed me off a three-metre-high wall into the crowd below.
A man saved me but I was injured. I saw the Taliban kill another man.
I don’t know what to do now. Afghanistan has become a hell on Earth. We’ll never forget how the world has abandoned us.
We are very scared and don’t know what to do. Please take us away from here before the
Taliban comes and kills us.