After Harrowing Taliban Experience, 168 Reach India In Air Force Flight

Afghanistan-Taliban Crisis: India has evacuated all embassy staff but an estimated 1,000 citizens remain in several Afghan cities.

A special repatriation flight by the Indian Air Force – carrying 168 passengers, including 107 Indians – landed this morning at the Hindon air base near Delhi from Kabul. There were two Afghan senators and 24 Afghan sikhs among the evacuees.

Here are top 10 updates on this big story:

1. All evacuees will be moved to the Bangla Sahib Gurdwara next. Many of the evacuees are from a Gurdwara in Kabul, where they have been staying for days.
2. This evacuation comes almost a week after the last batch of Indians – the staff at the Indian Embassy in Kabul – reached Gujarat’s Jamnagar.
3. “I feel like crying…Everything that was built in the last 20 years is now finished. It’s zero now,” a visibly emotional Afghanistan’s senator Narender Singh Khalsa told news agency ANI upon landing in Delhi.
4. Also, three other flights – Air India, IndiGo and Vistara – also carrying Indians evacuated from Kabul landed in the national capital from Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe and Qatar’s Doha earlier in the day.
5. India has been allowed to operate two flights per day from Kabul to evacuate its nationals stranded in Afghanistan, the news agency ANI reported quoting government sources.
6. The permission was granted by American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces which have been controlling operations of the Hamid Karzai International Airport after the Afghan capital fell to the Taliban on August 15.
7. In a string of tweets, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi posted details of the evacuation efforts by Air India and IndiGo flights. He also posted a short video clip where the evacuees can be seen chanting “Bharat Mata Ki Jai”, adding more evacuation flights will follow.
8. All passengers were seen undergoing an RT-PCR test upon landing.
9. Earlier, Indian citizens waiting outside Kabul airport for evacuation flights were taken to a nearby police station for questioning and checking of travel documents, a top government source said, amid worrying reports from local media that they had been abducted by the Taliban, which took control of the capital city last Sunday after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.
10. The Taliban’s ‘picking up’ of Indian citizens comes hours after an Air Force transport aircraft managed to evacuate around 85 Indians from Kabul.