Aug 27, 2021: An Afghan employee of a German NGO says her hopes of being airlifted are fading as the deadline set for evacuation of civilians working for foreign employers in Afghanistan approaches with no rescue plans for workers like her on the horizon.
According to the employee, she should at this time have been in Germany in safety that her last employer GIZ, a state-funded development agency German Corporation for International Cooperation, which was promised to her in her contract.
“German soldiers going to the airport refuse to pick up GIZ’s local staff. They only take those with German passports or visas. And our organisation did not process any visas for us,” she says, adding, “The German staff was evacuated immediately.”
Not all foreign employers are willing to protect their staff. According to the female employee, a civil society adviser with GIZ, the organization has released about 2,500 local workers in Afghanistan who have been attacked by the Taliban.
The employee told Al Jazeera news, “When Kabul fell, they started planning our evacuation, but it never happened. I left my hometown Mazar-e-Sharif a week ago because we had a program in Kabul. The other comrades were flown to Kabul on a charter flight but were told that the fare would be deducted from their salaries. GIZ had said that they were in talks with the Taliban to find a safe way for us to the airport. But yesterday [Tuesday], they said they could not evacuate us until the end of August and that they would take us to safety later on commercial flights. And that could take months.”
As the Taliban showed signs of gaining control of Afghanistan in the first weeks of August, foreign governments have begun efforts to expedite the evacuation of their citizens and vulnerable Afghans. The deadline for the withdrawal is the same as that given by US President Joe Biden to withdraw foreign troops from Afghanistan 20 years after the Taliban were ousted in a military strike.
It’s unclear whether any commercial flights will continue operating after the August 31 deadline.
Local UN staff can’t expect much help either. According to a Politico report, while some 720 foreign workers have been offered to leave, 3,000 Afghans working for the United Nations have been left without help.
With less than a week to go before the August 31 deadline, the evacuation window is slowly closing and Afghans are facing increasing obstacles to reaching the airport amid threats from armed groups.
Other European countries, including Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Norway and Greece, were sending Afghan refugees back to war-torn Afghanistan until July 8 this year, when they stopped following an official request from the Afghan government.
Now, the same countries expect a rapid influx of refugees, and many of them are unwilling to provide safe havens to Afghans who have worked with them for many years. The Dutch and Swedish embassies fired their staff without informing their local staff.
Journalists who have worked with foreign media on an independent basis and freelancers for foreign organisations like the USAID in Afghanistan are also less likely to get out.
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