Dire words amid Afghan nightmare

Heartbreaking cries for help from those desperate to flee country are getting lost in a maddening tangle of red tape as clock ticks down to Aug. 31 deadline

The diplomat from Kabul was thinking about baby formula when the Taliban called.

“You can’t hide forever,” said the caller, who said he was an officer of the “New Islamic Emirate.”

The diplomat had just moved to his second location in as many days with two young children, his wife and his mother.

They were running out of options — and milk for his two-year-old.

“I’m going to go out (to get supplies) in the cover of the night,” he texted me.

“I am sure the Taliban have accessed our biometrics database.”

He is not wrong. In the days since taking over Kabul, there are UN and Amnesty International reports of door-to-door searches, of government workers and diplomats being hunted down, of violence in the other fallen provinces.

The Taliban are looking for the diplomat, whom I won’t name for his safety.

Neighbours have told him the Taliban have visited his house twice, that they have taken his government-issued armoured vehicle, and that they have his number.

I have been introduced to him through a common contact after years of reporting in that region for the BBC. For days, a group of us have been looking for some way to get him out of the country. The case has been escalated to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, to veterans helping on the ground, to Ottawa. It should not be this hard.

Already, the world is turning away.

Within a few days of the U.S. and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban began taking over one province after another, forcing thousands of terrified Afghans to flee their homes, and to head for what they thought would be the safety of the capital. Then Kabul fell, too.

The fact that thousands of vul- nerable and at-risk Afghans would need to be evacuated should not have been the surprise it appeared to be from the chaos on ground.

According to the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, 250,000 Afghans have fled their homes since the U.S. troop withdrawal and fighting began.

Heartbreaking cries for help are getting lost in the shuffle of paperwork, red tape and exhausting demands made by foreign governments as the clock ticks down.

On Tuesday, the Taliban insisted there would be no extension to the Aug. 31 deadline the U.S. has set for its troop withdrawal — meaning the potential end of evacuation flights on that date.

Last week, we all saw the searing images of Afghans falling from the sky and out of planes as they tried to fly on the wings of the promises made to them that were never kept. On social media, there was video of a young girl holding onto the locked gates of Kabul airport, crying “Help, help, Taliban coming for me.” American soldiers looked on mutely from the other side.

For many, Kabul airport became the last refuge.

And yet plane after plane departed, carrying U.S., Canadian and British staff, among others. Those Afghans lucky enough to fall into the narrow definition of having “worked for” Canada, or who were able to somehow prove a “special relationship” got on board some of the flights.

For those of us who have worked on the ground, it is hard to fit these definitions into narrow categories. There is a dire need for the current conversation to include journalists, aid workers and government officials who were allies, who painstakingly helped build up their nation — a narrative that was then used by coalition countries to justify the invasion of Afghanistan.

I ask the diplomat for specifics of a Canadian connection to help his case. He tells me he helped Canadian journalists with access, visas, security on the ground. He has done tax assumptions for the Canadian military, does any of that count? He has developed a stutter. His blood pressure keeps fluctuating as he hovers on the edge of panic, and he is also taking care of the logistics of keeping his family safe.

“My mind is totally broken,” he texts me, “but I trust you.”

Even as Canada’s announcement that it would try to bring in 20,000 refugees has been widely covered, we are all finding out that optics can be very different from what is actually happening on the ground.

Organizations and volunteers working to rescue thousands of panicking Afghans tell a story of chaos and confusion and of an immigration system that is difficult to navigate even in the best of times, let alone with the Taliban closing in.

“We are hearing from women that the Taliban are knocking on their door in the middle of the night,” said Vancouverbased Kiran Nazish, the founding director of the Coalition for Women in Journalism (CFWIJ).

“We are speaking to entire teams of newsrooms and NGOs where women are now being told not to go to their office.”

The organization is among several groups and private volunteers trying to step in and fill the gaps left by the departing coalition forces.

The CFWIJ says it’s trying to process more than 2,000 cases of Afghan female journalists, activists and aid workers. There are layers to the difficulties, starting from helping with the extensive documentation required to getting people to the airport, past Taliban checkpoints and onto the right plane.

People trying to get to Canada are being asked to navigate various streams within the special programs for vulnerable Afghans, all asking for one thing: proof of a strong Canadian connection.

How does someone with limited access to even basic essentials, while in survival mode and running for their life in the middle of a war zone do that? Some don’t even know what venues of escape are available to them.

“We and other organizations are still unclear about exactly what’s being offered and how to apply,” says Nazish, “How do we expect people who are in peril and trauma right now to go through this tedious process?”

With patchy internet and electricity outages, the only forms of communication are sporadic texts and voice notes for Afghans trying to reach out to overseas contacts for help.

But one by one, I see the display pictures of women I have been communicating with go dark, go offline.

“My apologies for being unresponsive,” one texts me, “my location was disclosed and I had to be relocated.”

Farrah, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, was a senior official in the Afghan Foreign Ministry, in the department of women’s rights. She is terrified that Taliban repercussions are coming.

She and her sister, a doctor who worked with NATO forces, know their way around the system. They applied through the Canadian programs, but have been left in limbo.

After some Canadian journalists escalated the case, she was asked to reapply, which is an onerous process.

When I told her, she became very quiet. I could hear the tiredness in her voice. Then her display picture went blank.

Bureaucracy cannot be navigated in the fog of war.

I don’t often put myself in the story. But this feels personal. I have been here. Having been constantly harassed, threatened and under surveillance in Pakistan for my reporting and not knowing if I would survive to tell another story or become one.

I know how difficult it is to sort through paperwork, answer endless questions when memory is hazy. Trauma tricks you, and strips you of the words to your own story. I made it out because I had international support, I knew the language and “looked the part” that suits the story Canada likes to tell itself.

In my part of the world, there are layers of privilege to even pain.

Just like the displaced Afghans who even have a chance to get on one of the planes are luckier than the ones with no way out.

Like the previous waves of refugees in the 1990s and 2000s, most will travel across the southern Torkham and Chaman borders to Pakistan.

They will be forced to live in slums, be racially profiled as criminals or terrorists with no hope for citizenship, leading to generations of refugees.

They might go through waves of so-called “voluntary” repatriation, with bulldozers razing their refugee camps.

As we see haunting images of women throwing babies over razor wire fences in desperate hopes to save them, I know that this is not the first time.

I still remember reporting on yet another “voluntary repatriation” in Pakistan’s northwestern frontier province, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in 2008.

Afghans were loading their entire world onto a truck, including the bricks and debris of their bulldozed homes, because who knew what they would need in their home province, scarred by U.S. airstrikes and terrible violence by militias.

A young man was pushing a small bundle in my hands. “She will not survive this; she will not live,” he kept saying.

The bundle was his 40-dayold baby daughter.

Heartbreaking cries for help are getting lost in the shuffle of paperwork, red tape and exhausting demands made by foreign governments

Last week, the diplomat from Kabul sent me a text. “I have decided to surrender (to the Taliban),” he wrote. “For the safety of my children and my mother.”

My thumbs keep hovering over the touchscreen, my side of the conversation window remains blank. There is nothing left to say.