Afghanistan live news: rockets fired at Kabul airport as US approaches withdrawal deadline – The Guardian
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The UK evacuation effort from Afghanistan had to focus on people already at Kabul airport meaning many cases raised by MPs and others may not have been looked at, a Foreign Office minister has said.
James Cleverly did not deny that a large numbers of emails about Afghans potentially eligible to leave the UK might still be unopened in official inboxes, as revealed by the Observer. There had been “a flood of requests” for help, Cleverly said.
“We focused on the people who were at the airport, were being processed, and who we felt we could get out through whilst we still had security of Kabul airport,” he told the BBC, though many people have told of failed attempts to be allowed into the airport despite having their UK passport and evacuation authorisation documents.
“We will of course continue to work through applications from people who have contacted us, who are still try to get out of Afghanistan,” Cleverly said.
He said it was “impossible number to put a figure on” the number of people stuck in Afghanistan who would be eligible for UK help, though Whitehall sources have suggested this number was about 9,000.
While the “vast, vast bulk” of British nationals had left Afghanistan, Cleverly added, the figures were less clear both for people who could qualify under Arap, the formal scheme for Afghan nationals who assisted UK forces, or for others potentially targeted by the Taliban.
He said: “We are going to continue working to get people out who fall into those groups – predominantly now, of course, it will be in that third group – people at risk of reprisals, whether they be high-profile individuals … religious minorities or others who may be under severe risk of reprisals from the Taliban.”
Up to 5,000 emails to the Foreign Office detailing urgent cases of Afghans seeking to escape Kabul remained unread, including those sent by MPs and charities, the Observer reported on Sunday.
It followed complaints from MPs that they and constituents who alerted officials to people inside Afghanistan needing UK assistance had received no response.
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They arrived shoeless and shivering, with some toddlers wearing the same nappies they wore when fleeing their homes days earlier. Volunteers have described the extraordinary dignity and stoicism of the Afghan refugees, including about 2,200 children, who were airlifted to the UK out of the clutches of the Taliban.
A member of Border Force staff assists a female evacuee as refugees arrive from Afghanistan at Heathrow Airport. Photograph: WPA/Getty Images
Some of the new arrivals were passing out from exhaustion in airport terminals, said Dara Leonard, a team leader for the British Red Cross. Others, including pregnant women and “the sick and incredibly frail” were rushed straight to hospital.
“These were people on the far side of exhausted,” said Leonard, who was among the first to meet the Afghan families arriving at Heathrow airport last week.
My word, they are so stoical, so dignified but they were literally putting one foot in front of the other. To see mothers pushing their children forward towards safety was quite phenomenal.
Emergency responders described scenes at British airports as “shocking” and “absolute chaos” as thousands of vulnerable people were processed before being transported to hotels sometimes more than 100 miles away, where they have to quarantine for 10 days.
As the last British military personnel returned to the UK on Sunday, the government said about 5,000 British nationals and their families had been airlifted from Kabul, alongside more than 8,000 Afghan former UK staff and their families and those considered at risk from the Taliban.
Refugees from Afghanistan wait to be processed after arriving on a evacuation flight at Heathrow Airport. Photograph: WPA/Getty Images
Dr Jennifer Wild, an Oxford academic who specialises in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), said it would be vital to break the cognitive link between the things they experienced in Afghanistan and the present, to quickly get into a stable routine and to speak to people about what they went through.
“It’ll be quite individual. It’ll be a cultural shift for Afghans that we’re bringing here – and for UK citizens coming home,” said Wild, an associate professor in experimental psychology and a consultant clinical psychologist.
Several rockets were fired at Kabul airport on Monday, less than 48 hours before the United States is due to complete its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Eyewitnesses said the rockets were launched from a car and were aimed towards the airport on Monday morning. It appears Salim Karwan, a neighbourhood adjacent to the airport, was hit in one of the blasts. No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.
Smoke could be seen rising above buildings in the north of the city, where the Hamid Karzai international airport is located, and gunfire could be heard after the explosions.
Locals reported hearing the activation of airport’s missile defence system, and pictures on social media showed shrapnel falling on to rooftops and the street, suggesting that at least one rocket had been intercepted.
Social media posts, which could not immediately be verified, also showed a vehicle in flames after being apparently struck by retaliatory fire.
In Washington, the White House issued a statement saying President Joe Biden was being briefed on “the rocket attack at Hamid Karzai international airport” in Kabul.
“The president was informed that operations continue uninterrupted at HKIA [Hamid Karzai international airport], and has reconfirmed his order that commanders redouble their efforts to prioritise doing whatever is necessary to protect our forces on the ground,” the statement said.
It followed warnings issued by Biden on Saturday that another terrorist attack in Kabul was highly likely in the next 24 to 36 hours. On Thursday, Islamic State, rivals of the Taliban, carried out a suicide bomb attack at the airport that killed more than 150 people, including 13 US troops, and IS militants pose the greatest threat to the final phase of US evacuations.
Biden has set a deadline of 31 August to withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan, drawing to a close his nation’s longest military conflict. The UK, Nato and all other western countries ended their evacuation missions over the weekend.
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James Cleverly defended the response of the UK foreign office and his boss Dominic Raab to the crisis in Afghanistan.
The foreign office minister told ITV’s Good Morning Britain:
This was, at every level – from senior ministerial level right through to the people on the ground in Afghanistan – a team effort and every bit of the team pulled out the stops.
It could never be a perfect operation because of the circumstances that we were operating in.
Stephen Kinnock accused the British government of an “unforgivable” failure to evacuate thousands of eligible Afghans.
“Government ministers have had 18 months to prepare for this. The French government started evacuating its people in May so it is utterly unforgivable that we have left so many behind,” the shadow minister,” the shadow foreign office minister told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
He said:
The efforts of our armed forces, our diplomats, our civil servants on the ground, have been incredibly impressive and we should be very proud of that.
But they have been badly let down by their political masters who have failed to prepare and therefore we are in this situation where we are leaving thousands behind.
Labour has claimed as many as 5,000 people need help to get out following the Taliban takeover and Kinnock criticised the foreign secretary for failing to facilitate overland exit routes.
He said:
It’s shocking that whilst Dominic Raab was on the sun lounger he should have been speaking with his counterparts in Pakistan and the other neighbouring countries.
Foreign office minister James Cleverly said the UK would have to work with the Taliban to help ensure the safe passage of Afghans out of the country.
“We will judge the Taliban by their actions. They have made certain commitments about not taking out reprisals on individuals, about facilitating exit,” he told Sky News.
Obviously we are sceptical about those commitments but we will continue working with them to an extent, based on their conduct, to try to facilitate that further evacuation and repatriation effort.
What we are not going to do is just assume good faith in every respect – we are going to judge them on their actions, we are going to hold them to account if they fall short of their promises and commitments.
But we are going to keep working to get people out of Afghanistan that need to leave Afghanistan.
Paul “Pen” Farthing dismissed claims that he was helped by the UK government to get into Kabul airport with his animals.
The former marine and founder of the Nowzad charity told ITV’s Good Morning Britain:
Nobody in the British government facilitated my entry into that airport – I did that with the Taliban.
I came up to the British checkpoint, that was the first time – and this is well into the airport, the Taliban and British are stood there, there’s some barbed wire separating them – that was the first time I spoke to any British people.
So whoever is making any accusations or any comments needs to actually have been stood there on the ground to see how I got into that airport.
Nobody facilitated my entry… any interpreters or anybody else, there was me and the truck full of dogs and cats, which went into a cargo hold where you cannot put people.
James Cleverly acknowledged that emails from Afghans desperate to leave the country may not have been read.
Asked if he had unread emails in his inbox, the UK foreign office minister told the BBC: “I suspect everybody has.”
The British government had received a “huge number of emails directly from Afghanistan and from third parties” after announcing it would help Afghans at risk of reprisals from the Taliban.
He said:
Obviously we had a limited time window and limited flight availability in Kabul airport. We of course were prioritising getting people who had been processed, who were at the airport, on to planes and out of the country.
We will continue to work with those Afghans in other parts of Afghanistan who had not been processed when the airport closed and we will continue working to get them out of the country.
We have been and will continue to work through the significant number of emails that we have received to try to get as many other people out of Afghanistan as possible.
A former Royal Marine said there were “several empty seats” on his evacuation flight with around 170 dogs and cats from an animal shelter in Afghanistan.
Paul “Pen” Farthing told ITV’s Good Morning Britain he was the only person on the flight.
He arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport in a privately funded charter flight at about 7.30am on Sunday, following his Operation Ark campaign to get workers and animals from the Nowzad shelter in Kabul out of the country.
He added:
I went around and they reassured me that they had enough capacity for all the people that needed to leave.
I was probably like the last person to enter that airport – it was closed. Americans, the British, had obviously stopped taking people in because there had to be a point where they stopped taking people in.
So they assured me they had enough capacity for everybody who was inside the airport.
He said emotions “got the better” of him during an expletive-laden message left for a government aide.
A recording, obtained by The Times, captured Farthing berating Peter Quentin, a special adviser to Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who he accused of “blocking” efforts to arrange the evacuation flight.
He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain:
I’m incredibly embarrassed about my language, I do apologise to everybody who’s listened to that.
I was at the lowest point I could possibly be. I understand how the world works but emotions got the better of me, so for all those who had to listen to that I do apologise for my language.
I should not have said it like that, but the sentiment, yes, I was just incredibly upset, angry, frustrated, it was the lowest point. I had no other option, I didn’t know what else to do.
So that’s why you’ve probably heard some colourful language.
James Cleverly, the UK foreign minister, said it was impossible to say how many people were left in Afghanistan who were eligible to come to the UK.
“That’s an impossible number to put a figure on,” he told Sky News.
The “vast, vast bulk” of British nationals had left Afghanistan, he said, but there were also eligible people under the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap) scheme – for people who helped UK forces – and others who could be under threat from the Taliban.
He said:
We are going to continue working to get people out who fall into those groups – predominantly now, of course, it will be in that third group – people at risk of reprisals, whether they be high-profile individuals, of religious minorities or others who may be under severe risk of reprisals from the Taliban.
