How to get 120 Afghans out of Kabul

The question flashed up on my screen early on the morning of August 26th: “Do we have to get into the water?” The message was from an Afghan television host – I’ll call him Rahim – who was outside Kabul airport. I’ve used a pseudonym here, but Rahim’s real name is known all over Afghanistan: he’s the Afghan equivalent of Jon Stewart and people in the street regularly ask him for selfies. On that summer’s day, however, he found himself asking a stranger on WhatsApp if he had to climb into a ditch of stinking sewage.

“Yes,” I texted back. “I am afraid you have to get wet.” Rahim was with a group of eight others, most of them TV journalists. The high-walled canal they had to enter ran along the airport perimeter, the final staging post on their dangerous journey as they tried to flee Kabul. Once in they would wait for an elite French police unit, which patrolled the airport entrance just above the canal, to come and get them. They had fought their way through a vast crowd to get to this point, leaving their families in the dead of night to slip past Taliban checkpoints unnoticed.

I was the one guiding them. Yet I was thousands of miles away, in my home in Tbilisi, Georgia. The night before I had explained the route to them and showed them photos of landmarks they’d pass, images that had originally been sent to me by people in Afghanistan. I told them to leave most of their possessions behind to improve their chances of making it through the crowds at the airport. “Only small backpacks or shoulder bags so you have hands free! No suitcases!”

At around 5am in Kabul, Rahim confirmed that everyone was in the ditch. My next step was to text an acquaintance and his sister in Paris, who then messaged the elite police unit inside the airport to say that Rahim’s group was ready to be picked up.

By the time Rahim and his party were wading into the canal, our ad-hoc team had already helped more than 100 Afghans out of the country. Rahim’s group now stood knee-deep in sewage, holding their phones tightly, waiting.

It was a mix of chance and algorithms that turned me into a remote evacuation officer. Since early August my phone had been lighting up with messages from Afghans trying to get out. I’ve been going to Afghanistan as a reporter since the early 2000s, and like many foreigners with a connection to the country, I became a last-ditch helpline as the Taliban closed in. Afghans with links to big organisations were better placed to find a way to escape the reprisals they feared. But many had no such institutional backing, and sent out pleas in the dark to people like me.

It was a mixture of chance and algorithms that turned me into a remote evacuation officer

The Biden administration now emphasises the “logistical success” of evacuating some 120,000 people in the two weeks after the Taliban takeover this summer. But thousands more Afghans who were afraid of what would happen to them under Taliban rule could find no way to leave. That a former BBC journalist based in Tbilisi came to represent some people’s best hope of escape speaks volumes about the rushed and ill-planned manner of America’s exit.

I tried to respond to all the messages, but I could act only as an information clearing-house, directing people to various countries’ resettlement programmes, which were already overwhelmed. I wasn’t really helping anyone.

The email that changed everything came from Shafi Karimi, a young TV reporter I had met while running a training course a few years earlier. Karimi himself had already left Afghanistan: he used to work for an American-funded radio network, and when he’d received a death threat earlier in the year he and his wife had fled, eventually ending up in Paris, where they sought asylum.

After the Taliban seized Kabul in August, they were terrified their families would be attacked because of Karimi’s past employment; a Taliban unit went looking for Karimi at his parents’ home in west Kabul. When Karimi first contacted me, I tried getting in touch with some Americans who I thought might help, emphasising his ties to the country through his previous employer. That got us nowhere.

The other obvious place to try was France, because Karimi already had an asylum claim pending there. I had few contacts in Paris officialdom, but then the opaque workings of Facebook’s newsfeed threw up another possibility. I had recently posted a story about Afghanistan, which happened to be seen by a well-connected French energy consultant called Pierre Bonnard, whom I had met in 2011 while reporting in Libya. We hadn’t spoken in years, but when I saw that he had commented on my Facebook post, I was sure he’d be able to help Karimi’s family.

It turned out that Bonnard was already in touch with the French authorities on behalf of another journalist – a friend of a friend – who was also trying to flee. “It is a moral obligation that we all have,” Bonnard said in a text message. I sent him the asylum documents of Karimi and his wife, and other official paperwork that showed their links to France. Bonnard agreed to get in touch with his French government contacts to lobby for the rescue of their families.

By that point it wasn’t clear that even getting Karimi’s family on the list would be enough. The crowd of desperate people camping out at Kabul airport had turned into a frenzied riot. At least ten people, including children, had already been trampled to death. To get someone out you needed not just a country willing to put them on an evacuation flight, but a way to get them through that deadly crush and into the airport.

He found himself asking a stranger on WhatsApp if he had to climb into a ditch of stinking sewage

Then we got another lucky break: Bonnard’s sister Pascale, who had been trying to help one of her employees stuck in Afghanistan, had established a link with an elite French police unit at Kabul airport, known as RAID (which stands for Recherche, Assistance, Intervention, Dissuasion). The employee had been given the unit’s number, but only French nationals were allowed to talk to RAID troops. Pascale Bonnard co-ordinated with the RAID team, eventually guiding her employee into their arms and away to safety. We now had a direct line to a group of people in Afghanistan who could actually help evacuees get into the airport.

Karimi meanwhile was getting increasingly anxious about his family. “Any news from the French, dear Andrew?” he texted me. On August 20th, four days after Bonnard’s chance comment on my Facebook page, the French embassy cell inside Kabul airport emailed Karimi’s family members a letter, inviting them to come inside.

The letter didn’t say how the family was supposed to get there. As the person who had initiated all this, I realised that I was going to have to act as the digital bridge between the Bonnard siblings in Paris, the Karimi family in Kabul and their would-be rescuers at the airport.

There were eight people in the Karimi family evacuation party, including Karimi’s 60-year-old grandmother and his nine-year-old brother. I briefed them by phone about the journey, with visual aids sent by the RAID unit: a photo of the guard tower at the pick-up point, and a map of a route from the outskirts of the airport to its inner perimeter that should avoid the worst of the crowds. I asked the younger Karimi children to draw French flags on paper, a makeshift way to identify themselves to the RAID team.

The family set off just hours after getting the letter, and found the crowd at the airport more intense than they’d been expecting. I tried to encourage them, texting Karimi’s brother, Tamim: “Keep going. You’re doing well.” Then the signal died.

For the next hour or so, we had no contact. I started to worry. Then Karimi texted from France, saying that his family had been forced back by the violent crush and was going home. His grandmother had nearly suffocated and his father had been badly beaten by a Taliban guard. “They are all very scared,” Karimi’s message said. “Everyone is crying.”

It was around 2.30am in Georgia when I told Bonnard the news, deflated. There would be other evacuation flights, but getting into the airport was probably only going to get harder. The next evening, the Karimi family decided to try again. This time, I could track their progress on my screen using the GPS function on Tamim’s phone.

According to RAID’s instructions, the family was supposed to go round the back of a compound to reach an entrance to the airport known as Abbey Gate. The tracker on my screen showed that they’d gone straight past the turn. For a moment I panicked, then I managed to get Tamim on the phone. “Turn round,” I shouted against the noise of the crowd around him. “Then take the first turn on the right.”

It took them three hours to reach the canal they were supposed to be in. I asked Tamim to send a photo of the flood-lit guard tower from their position. I forwarded it to the Bonnards in Paris who passed it to the RAID commander back in Kabul, helping the extraction team to work out exactly where the family would be. “Stay where you are,” I said. “The French are coming.”

The odds of the Karimis and the RAID team finding each other still seemed daunting. It was dark and there were hundreds of other people around the Abbey Gate. The Karimis couldn’t tell if the various armed and helmeted personnel posted on the canal wall above them were French, so they waved their flags in vain several times. An hour passed. “It’s so difficult for my grandmother in this water,” Tamim said. “When are our French friends coming?”

At 10pm, I got another text from Tamim in Afghanistan.

Tamim: Ok they pick up us

Andrew: They got you??!!

Tamim: Yes

Andrew: All of you?

Tamim: Yes

Less than 24 hours later, a plane with all members of the Karimi family on board touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.

There wasn’t time for celebration. With Karimi’s family safe, there were others who urgently needed our help. The next day we repeated the nail-biting process, guiding 20 more people into the airport, including the journalist whom Bonnard had initially been trying to help. Then came Karimi’s wife’s family. Pascale Bonnard’s employee was now safely in Paris, and had joined in the evacuation effort, briefing each group as they made their way to Abbey Gate.

“Keep going, you’re doing well.” Then the signal died

Requests for assistance continued to flood in, many from people with whom I had only a slight connection. “Do you remember you were in our office in Kabul in 2019?” read one. Most of them had no links to France, so I wasn’t sure I could help them use the route that had worked for Karimi’s family. But as August 31st approached – the deadline for withdrawing international forces from Afghanistan – an informal message filtered back from Paris: they would consider applications from anyone who had a valid Afghan ID.

The handful of cases I was dealing with turned into scores. I spent my daytime hours gathering documents and building up the arguments for why each individual deserved a spot on a French evacuation list. During the nights I would guide the next group in. I was conscious that I was taking part in a moment of collective panic that was emptying Afghanistan of its youth, professionals and talent. But I wasn’t sure what else these people were supposed to do; there was little evidence that the Taliban had really changed, especially when it came to the treatment of women.

The gates were closing and there was little time to sleep. So many people were terrified about the future. A text from me – or its absence – could change someone’s life in a moment. This strange combination of power and powerlessness really hit me on the morning of August 25th, when extra space became available at the last minute on that day’s flight to France.

There was already a family with small children in the evacuation party, and they were going to need help getting through the crowds at the airport. Casting around for whom to choose, I decided the space should go to someone young, strong and single. The person who best fitted that description was a former employee of the American embassy in Kabul, who had been texting me in despair. He’d received a threatening letter from the Taliban, but the US authorities hadn’t responded to his pleas for evacuation. He needed to escape but I knew he wasn’t ready to leave at such short notice.

“I’m offering you the chance to get out, but you will have to be outside the airport in the next two hours,” I told him. He was up for it, he said. But an hour later, he texted again: “Andrew, I couldn’t leave.” He attached a blurred photo of his mother sprawled on a chair. She was so shocked when he told her he was going that she started to hyperventilate, then collapsed.

It was the morning after that, on August 26th, that I talked Rahim into the canal. We had nine groups lined up for evacuation that day, 100 people in total, including film-makers, teachers, lawyers, gay and transgender people, artists, former civil servants, even a wildlife-conservation expert.

By then, we had come up with a system to help people identify themselves to the French unit at the airport. We assigned each group a name consisting of a city in France and a colour: Rahim’s was Toulouse-Jaune. They moved faster than the other groups, reaching the canal by Abbey Gate when it was still dark. By the time the sun rose, they’d been in the water for over an hour and were getting impatient. The RAID unit had acknowledged Pascale Bonnard’s message saying that Rahim’s group were there, but there was no word on when any operatives would arrive to extract them.

“We worked hard, we studied hard...now we live in the corner of an empty room with fear and terror”

I asked Rahim to take a group selfie so that the police team could see where they were and what they were wearing. “Smile for a better future,” joked Karimi, who was also on the chat, now helping his fellow journalists from Paris.

Just then, Pascale Bonnard forwarded a message from RAID: because of a security alert, they wouldn’t come out to get anyone. The airport was locking down. I had no choice but to tell Rahim and his friends in the canal to turn back. “Dear friends,” I wrote in a message to all the groups, “we have to suspend our movements into the airport today because security forces inside have closed off the perimeter.” I told them to go home and rest.

There was silence at first, followed by terse but poignant acknowledgments. “Ok no problem,” said one. “Thanking all of you for efforts you have done.”

A few hours later a suicide-bomber detonated his explosives pack in the same spot outside Abbey Gate from which we had been evacuating people, killing more than 150 people. Many of those died in the very stretch of canal in which Rahim and his friends had been waiting earlier that day. There were still four days left until the official end of the evacuation period but in practice, it was already over.

The few who made it to France are now trying to build new lives from scratch. The Bonnards and I are back at our day jobs. Those who didn’t make it out are in hiding, at friends’ houses or in empty buildings. Mostly, they’re staring at their phones, hoping desperately for an update. “We worked hard, we studied hard,” said Rahim when we spoke recently. “Now we live in the corner of an empty room with fear and terror.” ■

Andrew North is a journalist covering Afghanistan. He was previously based in Kabul with the BBC

PHOTOGRAPHS: ANDREW QUILTY/Agence VU’