One of the largest evacuation flights departed Kabul on Sunday with an unknown number of Americans on board and is on its way to Doha, a senior Qatari government official tells CNN.
The ninth evacuation flight from Afghanistan since August 31 is carrying 353 evacuees, including faculty, staff, and students from the American University of Afghanistan, as well as citizens from Afghanistan, the United States, the Netherlands, Denmark and Australia, among others, according to the official.
A woman airlifted out of Afghanistan with her family said the government has abandoned its responsibility to those left behind and must urgently step up efforts to get more people to the UK.
Peymana Assad, who is a Labour councillor in Harrow and the first elected official of Afghan origin in the UK, was evacuated with a family member in August after she visited the country to see relatives.
MADRID (AP) — Spain has started a new evacuation operation to extract more Afghans and their families left behind following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
Spain’s Defense Ministry said Sunday that it is working with the foreign ministry on a new evacuation mission.
Afghanistan’s junior female football team and their immediate families are to relocate to Britain from Pakistan after recently escaping their homeland, the government has said.
More than a month after the evacuation flights have begun and the resettlement efforts have ramped up in the US local news outlets report on the progress and experiences for the local population and Afghan refugees arriving in the US.
In this regular feature we will give you an overview of multiple articles and reports found in different sources.
KABUL, Oct 6 (Reuters) – Hundreds of Afghans flocked to the passport office in Kabul on Wednesday, just a day after news that it would re-open this week to issue the documents, while Taliban security men had to beat back some in the crowd in efforts to maintain order.
Taliban officials have said the service will resume from Saturday, after being suspended since their takeover and the fall of the previous government in August, which stranded many of those desperate to flee the country.
KABUL, Oct 5 (Reuters) – Afghanistan will start issuing passports to its citizens again on Tuesday, a senior official said, following months of delays that hampered attempts by those trying to flee the country after the Taliban seized control in August.
The process, which had slowed even before the Islamist militants’ return to power following the withdrawal of U.S. forces, will provide applicants with documents physically identical to those issued by the previous government, the official said.
DUBAI, Oct 3 (Reuters) – A fifth chartered flight carrying civilians from Afghanistan to Qatar since U.S. forces withdrew in August left Kabul on Sunday with 235 passengers, most of them Afghan citizens, a senior Qatari government official said.
Citizens from several other states were also on the flight, the official said, without identifying them. The passengers will be housed in a compound in Qatar that is hosting evacuees from Afghanistan until departing to their final destinations.
WASHINGTON, Sept 30 (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate narrowly defeated Republican-backed legislation on Thursday that would have curtailed assistance for thousands of Afghans evacuated last month as U.S. forces withdrew and the militant Islamist Taliban took over Afghanistan.
The measure failed on a 50-50 vote because it needed a simple majority to be included in a spending bill that must pass to keep the government open after midnight.
One digit on a single piece of paper separated Zee and his family from an uncertain fate. A month ago, the former Afghan interpreter escaped Kandahar, Afghanistan where the Taliban seized his home. They were looking for him, according to his brother who later sent him a video of several men loitering around his backyard. Zee dressed his family in worn and dirty clothes, hoping to disguise them as beggars, then boarded a bus with 50 other escapees at midnight. The bus headed toward Kabul and stopped six or seven times at Taliban checkpoints along the way. Zee said that armed men entered the bus and questioned the occupants: “What do you do? What was your job?” He sunk back into the seat with his family, hoping the disguises helped. No one questioned them.
