MADRID (AP) – Until last week, Shabeer Ahmadi was busy covering the news in Afghanistan. But after a hasty and intriguing decision to leave his Taliban-controlled country for an uncertain future in Spain, he is hooked on the news of his mobile phone, following every turn of the dramatic end to the Afghan evacuation of Kabul. .
The 29-year-old journalist and nine close relatives managed to board one of the evacuation planes and are now going through the long asylum process as they begin a new life in a city in northern Spain. But the future of thousands of Afghans who have been unable to escape, including members of their own family, is now the focus of their fears, Ahmadi said.
“There is a sense of despair in Afghanistan,” he said. “Imagine that if I had built a building twenty years ago, this building would be destroyed and I would not be able to leave this building. It feels really bad. Our education, our hopes in ourselves, in our children, in our future, in our country, are destroyed ”.
Tolo News, the Afghan private dam where Ahmadi worked as a news chief, has been a target for the Taliban. But not only did he feel threatened in his immediate circle: Ahmadi’s mother is a lawyer. His father, a former journalist. And his brother, an engineer, was working on the generation of hydraulic power, a crucial infrastructure for the functioning of the country worn by the conflict.
Earlier this month, as the Taliban siege in Kabul closed, the family began applying for emergency visas in several countries. Spain was the first to react thanks to the mediation of a Spanish journalist with whom Ahmadi had befriended in Kabul.
Ahmad and his family spent a challenging day amid crowds crowding at Kabul airport (and another inside, sleeping among hundreds on the ground) before the ten were allowed to leave, though that some of them lacked passports.
“When I got on the plane, I thought that finally, thank God, I am safe. But what about the other people staying in Afghanistan? “he asked, speaking by videoconference from Huesca, where the group moved on Thursday, a day after landing in Madrid.
“There are people who call me saying that now there is no salary for the government or the Taliban. And the banks are closed and they cannot allow the evacuation of their families, ”the journalist said.
He explained that as foreign troops are withdrawing from Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, many of his acquaintances are looking for alternatives to leave Afghanistan via Iran and Pakistan.
The former correspondent believes Afghanistan’s future is bleak. It is largely the fault of the US administration of Joe Biden to move forward with the decision to retire.
“Because I couldn’t negotiate a good deal with the Taliban, the U.S. handed us over to the Taliban, a group that has links to so many terrorist groups around the world,” he said. “They left the new generation of Afghanistan.”
He fears a “very bloody war” will break out between the Taliban and ISIS in the coming months and years, attracting foreign extremist fighters and leaving millions of innocent lives trapped in the conflict.
That’s why leaving Afghanistan, he said, “hurts every moment.” But he could not work for the future of his country while his life was at stake, he added. However, if things calm down to some extent, if a government is formed that guarantees certain conditions, even while the Taliban continue to control, it is thinking of returning home.
“I always tell my friends that any strong country is strong because of the people who work there, so we can’t leave our country forever,” Ahmadi said.
“We are a generation that has not seen a day without war in Afghanistan, but if you want our future generations to see that day, we must work for our country.”