'The Taliban are here’: The inside story of one woman’s escape from Kabul - BBC Newsnight

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGKlxCkdwZk"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]when when kabul fell we were all scrambling to speak to people in the city and find out what was going on and an mp here put me in touch with a friend of hers she's a prominent journalist a former afghan mp herself and she was stranded at the airport so i sent her a message saying are you safe is it okay to talk and she wrote back saying no i'm not safe and it's not okay to talk but she then started sending me a series of increasingly frantic messages she said she was on the list of british evacuees but she couldn't contact any british officials to to find out how to actually get on that plane and so for over the course of the next week she was basically messaging me constantly mostly by text and voice messages we couldn't broadcast them at the time for her safety but we can do now and it is really an extraordinary story of high stakes of one woman's race to try and get on a plane before those doors slammed shut evading taliban checkpoints and negotiating british bureaucracy for shukria barak zai prominent feminist former member of the afghan parliament sunday the 15th of august began unremarkably i was planning before to go uh turkey so i was on my way to the airport to be honest everything was just been scheduled like a normal day for me she and her husband were inside the terminal building when the news came the taliban were at the city gates kabul had fallen now everyone was rushing to get a flight shukri managed to board her plane it looked like she was going to make it out just in time i was trying to just be normal but suddenly things changed you know with a like a finger snap um another crowd get into the airplane they don't have passports or tickets or boarding pass or anything else and the captain announced that since there are people with the gun they cannot take off and finally the captain switched off the ventilation and the lights and he didn't disappear and that was the nightmare start with taliban fighters roaming the city shukria decided to spend the night on board the stranded plane i was inside of the plane that my one of my friends she sent me a photo and said shakira i thought the airport is the safest place which is unfortunately i was absolutely wrong by morning the taliban had taken over the main terminal shukria decided to try to make it to safety on the military side where u.s forces were still in control but it was chaos and the americans would not allow them in it was clear that no one is care about that crowd no one is scared about the documents or visas or anything no one is ready to listen and that's when she realized the taliban were looking for her and i saw as i mentioned to you the taliban like a kind of undercover without gun and i realized that it's a taliban are here to find and identify probably the faces they were looking for me i could realize the way they were speaking in the way they were like staring you know they just want to make sure this is me had good reason to be fearful a powerful woman and outspoken critic of the taliban in 2014 a suicide bomber attacked her car she was nearly killed as kabul airport descended into chaos shukria began messaging anyone and everyone who might help get her out i tried my contact with the u.s embassy but unfortunately all of them was filled so the only person that successfully always been in contact there was debbie so this this one is at uh 10 10 30. so we're surrounded by talibans please madame debbie they will kill shot create these help help us debbie abraham mp for oldham east and saddleworth is a friend i messaged her from to her local number and she rang me and her husband and we we spoke probably every few minutes with her mother and four children in the uk shakrir and her husband were sending increasingly frantic voice messages gabby please help us madam madam please help us we want to go towards the british british officials just please inform the u.s army so that they can let us go inside the taliban over here please i'm in the washroom please madam please you could hear um gunfire in the in the background i think it's better for me to go myself to there and give myself to the taliban this is the last challenge i had through the crowd shukria saw taliban fighters coming towards her and her husband they came and they start they prepared to shoot and first they beat they beat him and they beat me we just run we just run it was a very long way we run it was extreme dark but i can just only see the red bullets was been exchanged between both sides so finally the dark help us that without any kind of recognition we get out of the airport in between the calls i'd managed to i made the official informal application to both of the foreign office the home office and the mod all the different email addresses that we had because there was nothing in place at that time nobody knew none of my mp colleagues none of us knew who was coordinating what and where to put the inquiry into so i just contacted everybody i knew through formal mp channels and then i used my unofficial networks just to to to try and so i could find out what was was going on debbie abraham's contacts were good ones among them lord ahmed foreign office minister with responsibility for south asia and he wasted no time so middle of afternoon on on monday he messaged back said she's she's on the list not on a manifest yet but i i i see it is as imminent but evacuation was not imminent for days calls were being made i was trying to find out what was going on debbie abrahams was sending messages so was tariq ahmed the foreign office minister in order to get on a flight shukria or indeed anyone needed two things an official letter from the foreign office and some kind of message telling them where to go and crucially how to get there safely and nobody seemed to have any answers [Music] meanwhile shukria and her husband were hiding in the city moving from house to house as the taliban continued to track them this was wednesday hi debbie sorry to bother you again when i will be able to get to the british camp or shelter safe shelter because i'm afraid i may not have any shelter for tonight and nowhere is safer for me to go the following night was even more precarious sorry i'm just talking very slow because it's a small little window just only when i'm standing here the network is working and beside of that as i told you the other house just in a couple of meters away was been occupied by taliban i don't want them to recognize my voice message again to tariq and he said i'll update you as soon as i can um and kept on doing that i mean literally every few hours and tarik's a very loyal government minister but i could sense his frustration as as well i couldn't identify where the blockage was and who was issuing it was it home office was it foreign office eventually on thursday three days after her name was added to the list of urgent evacuees shukria got a call yeah someone called by the name of james from a foreign office so we got a call in they say they will contact me again but there was confusion the foreign office thought she was a british citizen and still no one could provide any details on how and when she might get out no email no number no contact okay if i go to the airport to whom i should contact who will come and help me with that who will give me that okay yes your name is on that list you know without without any contact it's impossible in the end it was another mp who broke the deadlock while following shukri's story i learned that tom tougenhart was also working behind the scenes chair of the foreign affairs select committee he'd served in afghanistan and was trying to get others out too tom tougenart gave me the number of a former british soldier who was coordinating rescue efforts on the ground and access into the airport i messaged him and he told me it's carnage at the gate people are getting crushed to death i can facilitate her through our system it's not protocol but i will do this as a favor it was late on saturday night that shukria got the call uh hi i just got a call from the guy and he said that we should go to certain address close to the airport although it's a night curfew but they say that we should ignore that and we should start moving gabriel brother uh we're just moving towards the airport and the guy he just passed our number to one of his colleagues he was an afghan and he did take our information of the vehicle so we will try our best to get to the gate it was extremely scary especially in the midnight extreme scary the taliban checkpoint also stopped us like in three places i i was fully covered completely the operation involved british american and afghan soldiers in the end just after midnight on sunday morning nearly a week after kabul fell debbie abraham's got the message she'd been waiting for hi debbie finally we are in the airport thank you so much thanks we are safe we are safe that's the most important it should not be down to informal networks to enable people to pursu to escape persecution and that's what it's it's come down to that is my that's my belief i don't think shukri would have got out unless i used all the contacts that i had to to help her escape and i can't thank them enough i really can't thank them enough but there are so many others that are going to be left and there will be thousands left and i think we've let them down dreadfully if there was a plan in place why did it miserably shukria barak zai arrived safely in the uk in the early hours of monday she's now quarantining in a hotel near bryce norton where she landed the window for evacuations is rapidly closing hard times lie ahead for those who are left behind but exile is also no easy prospect um from one side i feel oh i can breathe but on the other side uh i was been thinking what happened what's going on what's going on with me with my country with my people my heart was crying if i will be able to come back i will be able to to see this country again i can i can be back home after 23 years hard work lots of hope and we start everything back from scratch i lift my piece of heart [Music] but i feel safe and somewhere else well we contacted the foreign office who told us the scale of the kabul evacuation effort is huge and we've now helped more than 12 200 people to leave afghanistan since the 14th of august we will continue to do all we can to deliver on our obligation to get british nationals and eligible afghans out of the country while the security situation allows<br><!-- wp:image {"id":1776,"sizeSlug":"large","linkDestination":"none"} -->rn<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img class="wp-image-1776" src="https://en.videoencontexto.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/The_Taliban_are_here_The_inside_story_of_one_womans_escape_from_Kabul__BBC_Newsn_uGKlxCkdwZk.jpg" alt="\'The Taliban are here’: The inside story of one woman’s escape from Kabul - BBC Newsnight" /></figure>rn<!-- /wp:image -->[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]