Two soldiers from the Jagdkommando walked up and down with red-white-red flags at the airport in Kabul together with a special ambassador, took the people out of the crowd and accompanied them to the aircraft. There was “extremely great chaos” and there were repeated shooting.
“It was dusty and hot,” said the commander in an online interview with Austrian media on Thursday. The airport area was full of rubbish and dirt and there were repeated shooting. Some people died when panic broke out or when they clung to departing planes and then crashed, the soldier said.
The majority of those wishing to leave the country were mixed up. Many families with children and also old people were there. Austria has brought a little more than 100 people from the crisis country, a family is still there and in daily contact with the special ambassador. Attempts are being made to get these out overland via Pakistan.
The job of the two soldiers and the ambassador was to get the Austrians out of the mass of people who were at the airport, to check their papers and to bring them to the aircraft. “The people were very creative, they made large copies of their documents so that they could be recognized from a distance or they wore T-shirts with their nationality,” said the soldier, who has to remain anonymous for security reasons.
The armed forces have cooperated very closely with Germany, Hungary and Switzerland. The reason why the cooperation worked so well is that the soldiers of the Jagdkommando are constantly practicing with special forces from other countries, are on missions with them and are therefore in good personal contact. The flights were mainly operated by Germans and Hungarians. The soldier did not want to judge whether Austria should also have sent its own plane down. That is a decision of the political leadership.
There were four lines around the airport that you had to pass to get to the planes. The first line was controlled by the Taliban (he called them “the Tali”), the second by the Americans. Then you came to the international troops and from there to the crisis support teams. Before that, you had to negotiate a two-meter-deep and two-meter-wide canal that was filled with rubbish and faeces.
There was no overriding “international command in that sense”. The airport was operated by the Americans during the evacuations, but each nation worked for itself.
The machines flew from Kabul to the Uzbek capital Tashkent, where a larger Austrian crisis team is located. Exact personal checks were then carried out there, because at the airport in Kabul they only looked at the documents and checked the backpacks. The Jagdkommando soldiers began their mission on August 17th and have been back in Austria since September 1st. You flew from Tashkent to Kabul again and again and flew back every day. He decided against it to spend the night in Kabul in the open air. Some teams from other nations would have already done that, said the soldier.
The security situation at the airport has worsened every day. “The threat level has increased steadily.” From the 26./27. August one no longer flew there and had shifted the evacuations to the overland route. “We got out in time before the attack happened.”
The soldier has been with the special forces for over 22 years and has already seen many missions. “We practice this every day.”
