Thousands turned back by Taliban guards
Turkey was asking for Afghan volunteers to help with the 7.8 and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes that struck the nation and its neighbour Syria on Monday. Here was a chance for Habib to leave Afghanistan.
Hesitant at first, the 32-year-old law graduate decided to try his luck. He called his older brother to come along.
“I knew my nephew had been trying to leave the country, so I called them and told them to grab their passports and IDs,” Habib told Middle East Eye.
Soon, the three men and several friends of theirs were off to the airport, only a 15-minute drive away, along a newly-constructed road near their house. But as they approached the final turn leading to the roundabout in front of the airport, things changed.
“There were Taliban everywhere, saying. ‘Go away, go home. Nothing is going on, why are you here?’” Habib said.
The group of seven men, ranging in age from 18 to 42, were travelling in two cars and were constantly receiving calls from their worried families at home. “My mother called me freaking out, saying, ‘Turn around, what if they send you to Syria instead?’”
Meanwhile, Taliban security forces fired shots into the air as they tried to disburse the waves of people and cars approaching the airport.
What ultimately did convince them to turn around was when a Taliban member approached their car and showed them a video from inside the airport, with empty planes sitting on a clearly inactive tarmac.
But thousands of others, mostly men, did not get the message and continued to try to head to the airport late into the evening.
Zalmai, a guard at a bank along one of the roads leading to the airport, said he saw crowds of young men coming and going until nearly midnight.
“They kept coming, 10, 15 at a time, asking which way to the airport,” he said.
Habib said there were similar crowds of people heading towards his neighborhood all through the night. “It was clear they had been driven away by the Taliban, they just kept running in this direction,” he said.
Witnesses outside the airport and the roads leading to it said the Taliban were firing into the air and even hitting people with the butts of their guns to get them to disburse.—Tolonews
