Thiruvananthapuram: Indians in Kabul, who were working mostly for top-rated American and British companies, are now hiding in friendly Afghani homes after the Taliban's swift ascendence. They are desperate to return to their families but are utterly clueless about how.
We talked to three Malayalis in different parts of Kabul and all of them said they felt abandoned and unprotected. They spoke in whispers and sounded paranoid. "Please don't ever mention my name," all three said.
They refused to tell us where they were in Afghanistan at the moment. One of them said he was with an Afghan family and that they have kept him safely in a room.
Another said he feared that this WhatsApp call with Onmanorama would be used against him by the Taliban. Yet another abruptly disconnected our WhatsApp call after what sounded like the creak of a door opening nearby. He did not pick up the phone again.
Indians in Afghanistan had formed WhatsApp groups and the messages circulating in these groups are frightening them. "We don't know if it is true but some of our colleagues say their mobiles were checked by Taliban soldiers and passports were confiscated. They say they are also checking our Facebook messages," one of them said.
A top source in Norka-Roots, the state institution for non-resident Keralite welfare, also told Onmanorama that Malayalis who had contacted them said that the Taliban soldiers were verifying their identity and taking away their passports and other important documents. The source said that 41 Malayalais had contacted Norka-Roots in the last two days.
"We want to know just one thing. When is our flight to Delhi? Someone, please tell us," one of them said, his voice a suppressed scream. The Indian government had given them a new mail id (situationroom@mea.gov.in) to which they could write and seek help. All the three Malayalis we spoke to said the messages sent to these emails were bouncing.
"There are a number of things that worry us. If and when there is a flight, who will escort us to the airport? Will there be emigration procedures? We have no answers," one of them said. "We cannot get out of our place of hiding without being 100 percent sure," a man said.
He said he would never forget the sight on Kabul streets the day the Taliban entered. “It was complete chaos. Men, women and children were everywhere, running helter-skelter, trying to catch anything moving - cars, buses, cycles, horses, donkeys – to just get out of Kabul. The cries of women and children mixed with the honking of vehicles. Normally, it takes just 10 minutes for me to reach the airport from my camp. But on that day, even after six hours, I could not cover even half the distance to the airport. By then it was night and I had to take refuge in a friend's house,” he said.
In hiding, he is completely in the dark about India's evacuation plan.
The Indian Embassy, too, is unresponsive, they say. "There were two numbers that we could call any time and the response was quick. Both these numbers are not working," a man said. They are unaware that India had evacuated all its embassy personnel.
Taliban evokes deep monstrous terror. "We have not forgotten the execution of Danish Siddiqui (the Pulitzer-winning Reuters photographer who was killed on July 16 this year in Afghanistan)," a man said. "Now, the Taliban seems to be making the right noises but we are not fooled. We know what they did to Afghanistan all these years," the man, who has been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade, said.
He said there were Indians in his WhatsApp group who had married Afghan women. "They know their wives will not be evacuated by India and so they have decided to stay back. It will be dangerous to leave their women alone in Afghanistan," the man said.
He said even the Afghans in Kabul were afraid to open their shops though the Taliban had declared that normal life would not be disrupted. "They know these Taliban soldiers will loot these shops," he said.
Another man we talked to was unwilling to speak against the Taliban. "Call me when I am out of this place. I will tell you everything. Not here, not now," he said, in a near-dead whisper.
One of them said that there was no point in continuing in Afghanistan even if the Taliban had changed their ways. "All embassies have shut down. Not just us, the Americans, the English and the French had also left. Whom will we turn to for help," he said.
It was also the swiftness of the Taliban's entry into Kabul that had stranded the Indians. "We knew they were taking provinces one by one. But they had also declared that they will not take Kabul by force and that they will stop at the capital's borders. So we thought we had time," a man said. "Didn't I say they cannot be trusted," he said.
Now, they are hoping the Indian government will come to their rescue. "If we are given protection and asked to gather at a single place, say a hotel or anywhere where there are toilet facilities, we will do so. If we are taken to such a place, we are willing to wait even if the flight is only two weeks later," a man said. "Now we are living at the mercy of kind-hearted but poor Afghanis. Our presence in their homes is a huge risk for them," he said.
One of the men said that the Afghan family that had given him shelter had reduced the intake of food for everyone in the family, including children, in the hope that they could provide for him for at least two more days.
The Indians hope the Modi government would do what the French government had done. The French Embassy has arranged to collect all its citizens in Afghanistan in a hotel in Kabul where they are provided with food and other facilities.
