Afghanistan: in Kabul, "the Taliban are everywhere"
At Kabul airport, many foreign nationals await their evacuation.
© RFI / Sonia Ghezali
Text by: RFI Follow
3 min
If the Taliban, in power in Afghanistan since Sunday, now control the area around Kabul airport, negotiations have cleared an access corridor from the Western embassies, allowing our correspondent, Sonia Ghezali, to join the tarmac early , this Wednesday, August 18, for his own departure.
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Kabul airport, the last exit door from the country, is still crowded with candidates for exile, eager to flee the return of the Taliban. It is also there that many foreign nationals are patient, awaiting their evacuation.
Sonia Ghezali
is on site. Our colleague, who has been covering Afghan news for RFI since 2016, had to leave the capital on board a French army plane. This is perhaps his last account from Afghanistan, necessarily delivered in a more personal form than his work over the past five years.
In the middle of the night, we all boarded several buses, which headed for the military airport in Kabul, escorted part of the way by the Taliban, who had "cleaned up" the road if we could. say, so that it is free and not engorged.
The journey went smoothly, we did not encounter any problems at all, we were not stopped, nor even checked.
We had seen in the previous days this road which leads to the airport filled with thousands of cars.
But there it was not.
Clearly, this was done with the cooperation of the Taliban, otherwise it would not have been possible at all to go so easily to the military airport without being arrested.
The Taliban are everywhere: they hold roadblocks, and occupy the place occupied by the police and the soldiers before the change of power on Sunday.
When we got to the entrance to the military airport, we had to wait about an hour.
At the entrance, we saw all these people waiting on the side, at the foot of these reinforced concrete walls that surround the entire enclosure of the installation.
We saw all these young people, especially young men, who were trying to find the slightest opportunity to be able to fit into the group and be able to get inside.
Moreover, we were several buses, we returned group by group in the military airport, and some managed to fit in with us.
They ended up being spotted, because on several occasions we were checked, once we entered the military airport.
They were spotted and then evacuated by American soldiers.
Once inside the airport, security was ensured by American and French soldiers.
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RFI Archive: 20 years ago, the Taliban took Kabul (Sonia Ghezali, 2016)
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