France has carried out an evacuation mission in Af-ghanistan, taking 258 Afghans as well as 11 French, some 60 Dutch nationals and an un-specified number of people linked to them out of the coun-try, a French foreign ministry spokeswoman said on Friday.
The operation was organised with help from Qatar, a minis-try statement said.
Evacuees included Afghans who were at risk, such as journalists and people with links to France, including civil-ian workers employed by the French army.
Since September 10, at least 110 French people and 396 Afghans have been evacuated from Afghanistan on 10 flights organised with the help of Qatar, the statement added.
France and Qatar jointly oper-ated a humanitarian mission on Thursday, delivering medi-cal equipment, food and win-ter supplies to international organisations operating in the country with a Qatari military plane, the French foreign min-istry spokeswoman said.
The United Nations Develop-ment Programme (UNDP) this week described an “alarming” socioeconomic outlook for Af-ghanistan for the next 13 months.
Afghanistan is struggling with a sharp drop in international development aid after the Taliban seized power in Au-gust, and the UNDP has pro-jected that poverty may be-come nearly universal by mid-2022.— Agencies
