A New Zealander who fled a terror attack at Kabul’s airport says she fears persecution by the Taliban, now that the Government has abandoned planned evacuations from Afghanistan.
The woman, who Stuff has agreed not to name for her security, was outside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai Airport with her husband and one-year-old daughter on Thursday afternoon (early Friday, New Zealand time), hoping to reach New Zealand soldiers.
But the 19 Defence Force staff at Kabul’s airport and a Hercules plane had left hours earlier, on the last evacuation flight. And, as the crowds remained hopeful the airport’s gates would be opened that evening, she said there was a “bomb blast”.
“We were near to there, like 10 minutes away. We heard the explosion,” she said.
After the Taliban took over the country 10 days ago, the Defence Force, alongside allied nations, started evacuating New Zealand citizens, their families, and Afghan allies who assisted New Zealand during two decades of conflict in Afghanistan.
The Hercules has been shuttling back and forth between Kabul and the United Arab Emirates.
The Defence Force had planned on running flights through the weekend too, ahead of the August 31 deadline for all American-allied forces to be out of Afghanistan.
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But the mission ended prematurely on Friday morning after two suicide bombers and gunmen attacked the crowds of Afghans flocking Kabul's airport, killing at least 60 Afghans and 13 US soldiers. ISIS-K, a branch of the fundamentalist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) which opposes the Taliban, has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Now without a route home, the woman, an Afghan-New Zealander who returned to Afghanistan nearly three months ago to visit her husband’s sick father, said she was concerned Taliban fighters would target her family because they were of the minority Hazara ethnicity.
“They don't like us. They just want rid of us. Now we don't know what to do if the [international] armies are going to leave,” she said. “It’s not safe. Yesterday or one day before ... They killed a man. For what reason? No-one knows.”
As of Friday evening, there was no advice from the Government to New Zealand citizens and visa holders on how to leave Afghanistan, and whether further assistance would be provided in the near future remained unclear.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she did not expect the Defence Force Hercules would return to Kabul. “We have finished the deployment as it stands, now we need to look at next steps, and we’ll have to work with international partners on that.”
Some 276 New Zealanders, their family members, and visa holders were evacuated on the first two Hercules flights, and a further 100 New Zealand and Australian evacuees were on the third and final flight on Thursday.
It is not clear how many may have been left behind.
“We wanted to bring more, but we did bring at least several hundred people to safety,” she said.
Many that did not make the evacuation flight will be Afghan allies, people formerly employed or connected to the Defence Force, police, aid programmes, or the Operation Burnham inquiry – which the Government promised to evacuate after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban last week.
Most of a group of 37 Afghans that worked as tractor drivers, labourers, cleaners, and cooks for the New Zealand Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Bamyan, received their visas within 24 hours of the final evacuation flight.
Despite warnings of an impending terror attack, five had travelled to the airport in the hours before the explosion but found the airport’s gates crowded and inaccessible.
Nawidullah Atayee, a former interpreter who was resettled in New Zealand in 2013, said he knew and was in contact with much of the group, and they were in a “very dark situation”.
“It's also not safe for them because a lot of there's a number of Taliban members in Kabul, so if they catch them with the documents that's given to them by New Zealand Government, the visas ... Then they might face serious consequences.”
But they could not return to their home province, Bamyan, where the PRT served for a decade, because “they will be targetted”. The Taliban hated Bamyan and its Hazara people, he said.
“If they go back to Bamyan, they can easily be identified by even by the villagers, they will be pointed out ... and that will be it for them,” Atayee said. “Life is not normal there, in Bamyan, any more, because living under the Taliban you’re pretty much hostage. There's not much you can do. There's no independence, there's no schools, there's no jobs. There’s going to be a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.”
Dr Anna Powles, a security studies expert at Massey University, said Afghanistan was facing a “significant humanitarian tragedy” and New Zealand had a moral obligation to respond due to deploying troops to the country for two decades.
Prior to the Taliban’s takeover, Afghans faced a “triple threat” of crises: Decades of conflict, a severe drought, and the Covid-19 pandemic.
There were already 500,000 displaced people in the country, and this was number growing due to the “dramatically heightened insecurity as a consequence of US and coalition forces’ departure”, Powles said.
“The aid agencies don't have sufficient funds, we have a banking sector which has been largely frozen and a currency which has dropped. Against the backdrop of a novice and factionalised Taliban government,” she said.
The Government last week promised $3 million in aid to the Red Cross and United Nations Refugee Agency.
“That would suggest to me to be a point of leverage,” Powles said.
“New Zealand cannot trust the Taliban and should be very careful about seeking to work with them, but New Zealand can and should ... keep the pressure in the pressure on the international community to keep attention on Afghanistan.”
As well as humanitarian aid, Powles said New Zealand needed to increase its refugee quota, to take more Afghan refugees. Both Canada and the United Kingdom have promised to take in 20,000 Afghans each, and the United States was reportedly considering taking in 50,000 refugees.
Ardern said Cabinet would consider “what contribution we can continue to make”, but did not indicate when any decisions would be made.
