Taliban allow 200 foreigners to leave Kabul on Qatari flight to Doha
FOREIGN MINISTER, DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER HELPED FACILITATE THE FLIGHT
An estimated 200 foreigners, including Americans, left Afghanistan on a commercial flight out of Kabul yesterday with the cooperation of the Taliban — the first such large-scale departure since the US withdrawal.
The Qatar Airways flight to Doha marked a breakthrough in the bumpy coordination between the US and Afghanistan’s new rulers. A days-long standoff over charter planes at another airport has left hundreds of mostly Afghan people stranded, waiting for Taliban permission to leave.
A senior US official said the Taliban’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister helped facilitate the flight. Americans, US green card holders and other nationalities, including Germans, Hungarians and Canadians, were aboard.
Qatari envoy Mutlaq Bin Majed Al Qahtani said another 200 passengers will leave Afghanistan today. It was not immediately clear how many Americans were on board yesterday and how many were still in Afghanistan.
“I can clearly say that this is a historic day in the history of Afghanistan as Kabul airport is now operational,” he said, adding that “hopefully, life is becoming normal in Afghanistan”.
I can clearly say that this is a historic day in the history of Afghanistan as Kabul airport is now operational.”
Airport returns to normal
As Taliban authorities patrolled the tarmac, passengers presented their documents for inspection and dogs sniffed luggage laid out on the ground. Some veteran airport employees had returned to their jobs after fleeing during the harrowing chaos of the US-led airlift.
The airport was extensively damaged in the frenzied final days of the U.S. airlift that evacuated over 100,000 people. But Qatari authorities announced that it had been repaired with the help of experts from Qatar and Turkey and was ready for the resumption of international flights.
The airport is no longer the Hamid Karzai International Airport, but simply Kabul International Airport, with the name of the country’s former president removed. Several Taliban flags flew from the terminal, which was emblazoned ‘The Islamic Emirate seeks peaceful and positive relations with the world’.
Interpreters worried
In Mazar-e-Sharif yesterday, an Afghan who worked 15 years as an interpreter for the US military was moving from hotel to hotel and running out of money as he, his eight children and his wife waited for the OK from the Taliban to leave. “I’m frightened I will be left behind,” he said.
The interpreter said he was one of many former US employees whose special visas the US approved in the last weeks of the American military presence in Afghanistan. But with the US Embassy closed when the Taliban took Kabul on August 15, it has become impossible to get the visa stamped into his passport. He said he doesn’t trust Taliban assurances that they will not take revenge against Afghans who worked for the Americans.
US State Department spokesman Ned Price said the United States is looking at such steps as electronic visas to overcome the lack of an embassy.
Mutlaq Bin Majed Al Qahtani | Qatari envoy