“In Afghanistan, nothing is guaranteed; not my life,” Rohullah Sadat, 28, told told The Post’s Kirsten Fleming from Doha. “The Taliban — not all, but most — are really cruel. They are uneducated. They shot people like birds. In Western countries, you don’t even treat birds the way they treat people. We live by chance.”
Sadat, who helped America as a translator, is one of the lucky ones who got out, managing to board a Kam Air flight to Qatar, all the while praying he was truly free. But up to 100,000 others remain, including US citizens and green-card holders.
It took him multiple tries to get out, turned away once by the Taliban and once by a US soldier. And he narrowly missed the suicide bombing right outside Kabul airport.
As of last week, the State Department confirmed that at least 85 American citizens and 79 permanent residents have evacuated since President Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal in August, mostly on flights pulled off by Qatar Airlines, which so far has managed to do what Biden promised he’d do: get hostages out of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
“We are thankful to Qatari authorities, who continue to coordinate these flights with the Taliban,” State spokesman Ned Price said, adding that Biden is still working on getting American citizens and allies out.
But Sadat is only one of those getting out without the help of the US government. Mohammad Wali, a US citizen and a New Yorker, successfully got his wife and three children out of Kabul with the help of Allied Airlift 21, a group of veterans working to evacuate Americans and those with US family ties.
Mohammad Afzal Afzali, an Afghan interpreter, managed to not just escape himself but also to help four young siblings reunite with their mother in Albany; the mother had been trying to bring her kids to America since her 2018 move.
Tens of thousands of Afghans are still stranded behind enemy lines. The US government keeps insisting that only 100 Americans are left, even as it’s now claiming to have gotten nearly that many out. And the State Department is only now noting that while it doesn’t track US green-card holders, several thousand of them are still trapped.
The horrors they all face are atrocious.
Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, one of the founders of the Taliban and the chief enforcer of its harsh interpretation of Islamic law, told The Associated Press that executions and amputations of hands will once again be carried out: “No one will tell us what our laws should be. We will follow Islam and we will make our laws on the Quran.”
Prominent women also fear the Taliban’s retribution. Nabila, a 31-year-old judge who used to grant divorces to the wives of militants while their husbands were imprisoned, is now in hiding, The Wall Street Journal reported. “They’ve promised to kill me,” she said. “My husband and I now change our house every four days.”
Last month, Afghan folk singer Fawad Andarabi was shot in the head, just days after the Taliban declared that music was forbidden.
Despite all this, Biden still insists his pullout was a success. What a slap in the face of those who remain stuck under the Taliban’s bloody and tyrannical rule.