A new evacuation flight, carrying in particular foreigners eager to flee Afghanistan, landed Friday in Doha from Kabul, where the Taliban consolidate their hold on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks which had precipitated their fall in 2001.
Some 158 passengers, including Americans, Germans, Canadians, French, Dutch, Belgians and Mauritians landed around 8 p.m. in Qatar (11 a.m. in Quebec), according to a Qatari official.
The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported 49 French people or members of their families in this flight.
An international passenger flight had already left Kabul on Thursday, for the first time since the final withdrawal of US and NATO forces on August 30, after two very chaotic weeks at the airport in the Afghan capital.
The departure of these two close-knit flights shows that the airfield, which was sacked in late August, is close to being able to reopen to commercial flights, thanks in particular to Qatar’s efforts.
The announcement of the resumption of flights attracted a few Afghans to the vicinity of the airport on Friday. A woman, with children each carrying a backpack, pleaded with the Taliban to let her into the compound. “If I can’t leave, kill me,” she told them, according to an AFP journalist on the spot.
“She said: ‘Kill me’, but I am a Taliban, I do not kill people, I am not here for that,” responded a Taliban captain. “I don’t understand these people […] Why don’t they stay here and work? […] It’s a crazy situation. “
Thousands of Afghans, frightened by the return of the Taliban or in search of a better life in the West, had massed after mid-August around the airport in the hope of boarding one of the flights. the gigantic airlift organized by the United States and other countries, which evacuated more than 123,000 people, mainly Afghans.
The exfiltrations took place in extreme confusion and were marked by a bloody attack by the Islamic State group, which killed more than 100 people, including 13 American soldiers.
Taliban “flexibility”
Among the passengers on Thursday’s flight, an Afghan-American told AFP on condition of anonymity that he tried to leave with his family at the end of August. In vain.
“It’s mixed emotions because I’m leaving my mom and my brothers here, and they don’t feel safe either,” he said, while admitting “it’s very emotional to leave”.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said the United States would “like to see more thefts of this nature” after having left behind many Afghans who have worked for Washington for the past two decades.
The White House acknowledged Thursday that the Taliban had “shown flexibility” and had been “professional” so far on the issue.
The Taliban seek to consolidate their power, after the appointment of their government on Tuesday. Despite their promises of openness, it is mostly made up of ultra-conservative executives, from the generation that imposed a rigorous and brutal regime between 1996 and 2001, and does not include any woman.
While the protest against them seemed to be spreading, they provisionally banned public gatherings. Protests were therefore called off on Thursday and calm reigned in Kabul on Friday, the day of the weekly prayer.
Maintain the “dialogue”
The UN called on them on Friday to “immediately cease” the use of force and arbitrary detention against “those who exercise their right to protest peacefully and journalists who cover these protests.”
It is not known whether Taliban fundamentalists will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States on Saturday, which precipitated the end of their first reign.
But they approach it with the revengeful satisfaction of having regained power, from which they were ousted 20 years ago because of their refusal to hand over the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden.
In the United States, President Joe Biden is expected Saturday morning in New York, at the memorial built where the twin towers of the World Trade Center stood. A bitter-tasting commemoration for the Americans, who lost 2,500 troops and spent an estimated $ 2 trillion in Afghanistan.
The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, advocated Thursday in an interview with AFP the maintenance of “dialogue” with the Islamists, to avoid an “economic collapse” with “millions of deaths” from hunger.
Some 93% of Afghan households do not have enough food, according to a telephone survey conducted by the World Food Program (WFP) on August 21.
According to the former governor of the Afghan central bank, economic activity will suffer a severe contraction and the Taliban, already facing the freezing of the country’s reserves, will have to deal with a problem as prosaic as the printing of banknotes.
Unesco, for its part, has warned against a risk of a “generational catastrophe” in education in Afghanistan, judging that the “immense gains” made in this field since 2001 are “in danger” after the return to power of Taliban.
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