Taliban to allow 200 foreigners to fly out of Kabul
No Afghans without foreign citizenship are expected to be allowed on the flight to Qatar.
Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities are allowing some 200 foreign citizens to leave the country on a flight to Qatar scheduled for Thursday night, the first such departure by air since US forces withdrew last month.
The expected flight by a Qatar Airways Boeing 777 would mark the resumption of international passenger operations at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, and is expected to be followed by daily air links to foreign countries, a senior Qatari official said on Thursday.
The Qatari official said it wasn’t an evacuation flight as all the passengers held proper foreign passports and, if required, visas to their destinations, and had been ticketed by the airline.
Qatar is facilitating the movement to the airport in a convoy of minibuses that were parked on Thursday morning in a Kabul hotel, one of them with a bullet hole through the windshield. Most of the foreign citizens still in Afghanistan are dual nationals.
The Taliban has consistently pledged to allow foreigners to leave unimpeded. At Tuesday’s press conference announcing the formation of the new government of their Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the movement’s spokesman and new deputy information minister Zabiullah Mujahid said problems with international travel would be resolved soon.
“When Afghans and foreigners want to leave Afghanistan, they should do it lawfully, having a passport and visa,” he said.
US forces rendered the radar and other equipment at the Kabul airport inoperable as they left on August 30, concluding an emergency airlift that transported some 120,000 foreigners and Afghans who had helped the West during the 20-year war. Since then, Qatar sent a team of technicians to restore some flight-control capabilities, and Ariana Afghan Airlines resumed flight-by-sight domestic connections to the cities of Mazar-e-Sharif, Kandahar and Herat on Saturday.
The flight planned for Thursday night doesn’t address the issue of tens of thousands of Afghans at risk who haven’t been able to leave the country during the US-led airlift. The US has estimated that the majority of Afghans who qualify for the Special Immigrant Visa because of having helped American military and civilian efforts remain stranded in Afghanistan.
While Washington said in August that it had received commitments from the Taliban to allow Afghans with clearance to enter foreign nations to fly out, the country’s new authorities desperately want to prevent a brain drain that would undermine any effort to stave off economic collapse. At meetings on Sunday with the UN undersecretary-general and emergency relief co-ordinator Martin Griffiths, Taliban leaders were “furious with the evacuation of skilled and educated people, who are greatly needed to rebuild the country”, according to an internal UN readout of the conversations.
The Taliban leaders “urged that no further people flee, and help facilitate also conditions for return, and their return,” it said.
For more than a week, about 100 Americans and hundreds of at-risk Afghans looking to flee the country have been waiting in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif on a deal to allow them to fly out on charter flights. Mazar-e-Sharif’s international airport hasn’t been damaged. These negotiations have been bogged down, thwarting the efforts.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken pressed the Taliban on Wednesday to allow people to leave. “The Taliban are not permitting the charter flights to depart. They claim that some of the passengers do not have the required documentation, ” he said at a press conference with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas at Ramstein Air Base, where thousands of Afghans who fled the country are staying while Western governments try to work on resettlement plans. “We’ve made clear to all parties — we’ve made it clear to the Taliban — that these charters need to be able to depart.”
On Wednesday, Taliban officials told organisers working on the charter flights that they would allow Americans and others with valid passports and visas to fly out of Kabul, but not from Mazar-e-Sharif. At the same time, US officials started calling Americans waiting in Mazar-e-Sharif for flights and told them to come to Kabul. It remained unclear how many Americans in Mazar-e-Sharif could make it back to Kabul for Thursday night’s flight.
US officials have vowed to help all Afghans who worked with America over the past two decades that want to leave.
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