“We are moving on quickly,” said a diplomat on Wednesday. However, doubts are growing that as many local workers as possible can be removed from the country, those Western countries have helped and fear possible acts of revenge by the Taliban. Germany and France, however, sent more planes.
Airlift evacuation
The German Bundeswehr is planning four flights to Kabul and back for Wednesday. On Wednesday night, the first Lufthansa plane with evacuees from Afghanistan landed in Frankfurt. There were around 130 people on board. As part of an airlift and in coordination with the German federal government, further special flights from Tashkent, Doha or other neighboring countries to evacuate people from Afghanistan are to be carried out, Lufthansa announced. The German government decided on Wednesday that up to 600 Bundeswehr soldiers would be deployed until September for the evacuation operation in Kabul.
France flew another 216 people from Afghanistan’s capital Kabul on Wednesday night. On board the second French plane to the Gulf emirate Abu Dhabi were 184 Afghans and 25 French people as well as people from the Netherlands, Kenya and Ireland, as Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian announced in Paris. This succeeded in flying out a large part of the French and Afghans who had fled to the French embassy building from the militant Islamist Taliban. A first group of 41 French and other nationals landed in Paris on Tuesday afternoon.
Italy also wants to set up an airlift to evacuate people from Afghanistan. The defense ministry said the first plane with 85 people on board – including former Afghan employees and their families – will land at Rome Fiumicino Airport on Wednesday.
Chaos at the airport
However, there were again problems at the airport in Kabul. Chaos prevented Dutch local staff from leaving. “It’s terrible. Many stood with their families in front of the airport gates,” said Foreign Minister Sigrid Kaag. A military aircraft operated jointly with other northern European countries therefore had to leave Kabul almost empty.
Hundreds of people continued to wait around the airport in Kabul, reported eyewitnesses to the dpa. There were children, women and men in the streets around the airport. Many would have stayed there too. Many Afghans are currently trying to leave the country. However, the airport is only operational to a limited extent. It was unclear whether there were or should be commercial flights in addition to the evacuation flights on Wednesday.
False rumors are circulating in the city that anyone who makes it to the airport will also be evacuated. That’s why a lot of people go there. They try to get onto the site via blast protection walls or other ways. On Wednesday it was said that the US military would decide whether to open and close certain entrances to the airport, depending on the respective situation.
In the US, government officials have since questioned that up to 22,000 Afghans could be evacuated. To achieve that, “too many things would have to work one hundred percent,” said a US representative, according to the Reuters news agency. Because of the takeover of the capital Kabul by the Taliban, many Western nations are faced with the problem of how their Afghan local staff can get to the airport.
Distrust of the Taliban
The Taliban have set up checkpoints on all access routes and search people who want to get to the airport. Many Afghans fear for their lives if they are recognized by the fundamentalists as former employees of foreign organizations.
In Afghanistan, however, distrust of the new rulers persisted – despite the Taliban’s promises to refrain from acts of revenge and to respect women’s rights within Islamic law. Women’s activist Pashtana Durrani said: “You have to put your words into action. At the moment you don’t.”
The Taliban reaffirmed that they were ready to develop relationships with foreign states. A spokesman announced that their leaders would step out of the shadows and show themselves to the world.
In the past few years the leaders had acted in secret. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid had already signaled that the implementation of Islamic principles would be more cautious than in the first period of rule from 1996 to 2001. “We do not want any internal or foreign enemies,” he said. Western countries, including the USA and Germany, want to coordinate their approach at a meeting of the G7 countries next week.
The British army chief Nick Carter, meanwhile, called for patience in clarifying the relationship with the Taliban. You have to give the Islamists time to form a government, he tells the BBC. “It may be that these Taliban are different from what people remembered in the 1990s.”
