Inside the purgatory where Afghans are trying to take the longest three steps in the world
It’s only a gate. A big, reinforced iron gate protected by paratroopers, but nevertheless it is just a gate.
On one side a rocky drive leads to a complex of apartments and offices and tree-lined streets filled with evacuees.
On the other side, it is a vision of misery.
There is a dusty, rubbish strewn street filled with thousands of people desperate to take the three steps needed to cross the threshold to the Hamid Karzai International Airport and sanctuary.
Right now it’s the longest three steps in the world.
The evacuation effort from Kabul airport is now a multinational nightmare, not just for the US and Britain
For the hopeful they are stuck in a sort of purgatory.
Day, night, it makes no difference – in their thousands they have to wait, sleeping rough and hoping for news.
Hoping they can get into the system, a system that can get them out of Afghanistan.
The truth is most of them probably won’t because they don’t have the right paperwork.
At night we walk past thousands of children, parents and grandparents grabbing sleep where they can or basically passing out from exhaustion. The struggle never stops.
The soldiers do their best to help, but there is no food out here and little water.
Children, parents and grandparents are among those stuck in purgatory while they wait for processing
Thankfully, it is cooler at night. But when the sun comes up the true horror of the conditions these people are living in is obvious, and it is absolutely dreadful.
In the American section of the processing chain, they are penned in behind cement road blocks and guarded by hundreds of armed, sunglass-wearing US Marines.
The heightened security threat alert identified by the Americans means there’s no movement allowed at all.
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Taliban crowd help making ‘big difference’ – minister
There is no shade here, only what can be fashioned from scarves and plastic bags.
Soldiers are slowly trying to work through paperwork belonging to thousands of people but the conditions of entry to the United States are getting stricter and more and more are failing the eligibility test.
Even those who have been contacted by the State Department to go to the airport for a flight out have been denied.
We met one woman, a worker for USAID, who struggled through the crowds for a day with her family and elderly mother.
She got through the gate, had her documents checked by multiple US soldiers, spent the night outside sleeping without any food or water, and once she got to the final step, was told the flight was only for American passport holders.
Instead of putting her family in a separate section of the crowd, the American soldiers threw them out of the airport complex.
They now have to run the gauntlet – again – if they can bear to.
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Kabul evacuation ‘calmer, but that could change’
At the British end of the process, the paratrooper and Taliban cooperation is actually working quite well. They are at least communicating.
You couldn’t make it up – Taliban fighters oversee the crowds from sea containers the paras put in a couple of days ago to create a screening barrier.
Containing the crowds is vital here and clearing up this evacuation mess requires some pretty lateral thinking and that means working with the “enemy”.
Obviously after 20 years of fighting this is something of a culture shock for the soldiers but also the Taliban.
The commanding officer of 3 Para, who have been brought in to assist in the crisis, said it was a simple fact that if the paratroopers weren’t there to do it “nobody else would”.
“The main thing for us is to make sure that we have a smooth system to get those entitled people through,” Lt Col Will Hunt told us.
Lt Col Will Hunt said soldiers have put thoughts of ‘previous tours aside’ to work with the Taliban on restoring order
Soldiers are slowly trying to work through paperwork belonging to thousands of people
“At the moment that involves an element of the Taliban being here alongside us as you would’ve seen while you’ve been here – and also we have to put our thoughts of previous tours aside because obviously everyone’s trying to get the safest situation here, which is to avoid a humanitarian crisis and bring those people through who need to.”
This airlift is now a multinational nightmare, not just for the US and Britain.
In the crowds they try to identify themselves to the soldiers and foreign services of countries they have links to.
One group are wearing T-shirts with Finland and the country’s flag drawn on it.
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But there are plenty of other countries as well: Spain, Poland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Germany, Austria… the list goes on.
Their days are spent hoping someone will spot them and take them out of this hellhole and put them on a plane.
The wait is often days and days.
In the horrendous rush to get here families have been split. We saw posters for missing children dotted among the crowds.
People search for their loved ones in a daze of panic – but this is a tough environment and only a few will make the flights.
Only some will go as a complete family, and nobody knows how long they have left before the flights stop. It is purgatory.
World
IS flag linked to deadly New Orleans attack is stark reminder dangerous extremist Islamist ideology never went away
An Islamic State flag attached to the pickup truck used to kill and injure dozens of people in New Orleans is a grim reminder of the persistent threat posed by Islamist extremism.
Investigators are rushing to understand why Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, the US citizen and army veteran who is suspected of carrying out the atrocity in the early hours of New Year’s Day, appears to have been inspired by the terrorist group, also known as ISIS.
A key question will be establishing whether he was self-radicalised by the terrorist group’s extreme ideology – or whether there was any kind of direction or enabling from actual IS members or other radicalised individuals.
The FBI initially said they did not believe the man, who was killed in a shootout with police after ploughing his rental truck into his victims in one of the United States’ worst acts of terrorism, had acted alone.
Latest updates on New Orleans attack
But President Joe Biden later said that the “situation is very fluid”, and with the investigation continuing, “no one should jump to conclusions”.
He also revealed that the suspect had posted videos on social media mere hours before the attack indicating that he “was inspired by ISIS”.
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President Joe Biden said Jabbar was ‘inspired by ISIS’
Whatever caused Jabbar to commit such carnage, his murderous rampage and the use of the IS flag underline the danger still posed by extremist Islamist ideology five years after the physical dismantling of Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar. Pic: FBI
Read more:
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President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly described how his administration “defeated ISIS” during his first term as president.
It is true that the US-led coalition against Islamic State helped Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish forces recapture swathes of territory that had fallen under IS control.
The US military also carried out a raid in October 2019 that killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the then head of Islamic State.
Pic: AP
But his extremist ideology that drove tens of thousands of fighters to pledge their allegiance to Islamic State – carrying out horrific acts of murder, torture and kidnap of anyone who did not follow their warped interpretation of Sunni Islam – has never gone away.
Many of the group’s fighters have been captured and are held in camps and detention centres in northern Syria, but their fate is looking increasingly uncertain following the collapse of the regime of Bashar al-Assad at the hands of another Sunni Islamist militant group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which was once aligned with Islamic State.
Ahmed al-Sharaa, the HTS leader turned de facto ruler of Syria, has sought to distance his group from their past links with Islamist extremism.
But HTS is still considered a terrorist entity by the UK, the US and other western powers.
Experts fear that events in Syria may inspire sympathisers and supporters of Islamic State across the world to carry out new attacks.
It is far too soon to link specific events like the toppling of the Assad regime to the bloodshed on the streets of New Orleans.
But security officials, including the head of MI5, have long been warning about a resurgent threat from Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
In a speech in October, Ken McCallum spelt out the terrorist trend that concerns him most: “The worsening threat from al-Qaeda and in particular from Islamic State”.
A Holocaust survivor and the oldest living Olympic medal winner has died at the age of 103.
Agnes Keleti died on Thursday morning in Budapest after she was hospitalised with pneumonia on Christmas Day, the Hungarian state news agency reported.
Regarded as one of the most successful Jewish Olympic athletes, Ms Keleti won 10 medals in gymnastics, including five golds, for Hungary at the 1952 Helsinki Games and the 1956 Melbourne Games.
When celebrating her 100th birthday, she said: “These 100 years felt to me like 60. I live well. And I love life. It’s great that I’m still healthy.”
Ms Keleti celebrating her 100th birthday. Pic: AP
Born Agnes Klein in 1921 in Budapest, her career was interrupted by the Second World War and the cancellation of the 1940 and 1944 Olympics.
Ms Keleti was forced off her gymnastics team in 1941 due to her Jewish ancestry.
She later went into hiding in the Hungarian countryside, where she survived the Holocaust by assuming a false identity and working as a maid.
Her mother and sister survived the war with the help of famed Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, but her father and other relatives died at Auschwitz concentration camp.
More than half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered in Nazi death camps and by Hungarian Nazi collaborators during the war.
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Two children among 12 killed in shootout after bar fight
Ms Keleti with her five gold medals. Pic: AP
After the war, Ms Keleti was unable to compete in the 1948 London Olympics due to an ankle injury.
She eventually made her Olympic debut at the 1952 Helsinki Games at the age of 31, winning a gold medal in the floor exercise as well as a silver and two bronzes.
In 1956, she became the most successful athlete at the Melbourne Olympics, winning four gold and two silver medals.
Ms Keleti at the age of 99 with her son, Rafael. Pic: AP
While she was becoming the oldest gold medallist in gymnastics history at age 35 in Melbourne, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary following an unsuccessful anti-Soviet uprising.
Ms Keleti remained in Australia and sought political asylum.
She then immigrated to Israel the following year and went on to train and coach the Israeli Olympic gymnastics team until the 1990s.
Two children are among 12 people killed after a gunman opened fire in western Montenegro following a bar brawl, officials have said.
Montenegro’s interior minister Danilo Saranovic said at least four people were wounded in the attack in the town of Cetinje.
The suspect was identified as 45-year-old Aleksandar Martinovic.
Mr Saranovic said Martinovic killed the owner of the bar, the bar owner’s children and his own family members, before going on the run.
Police dispatched a special unit to search for the attacker in the town. All the roads in and out of the city were blocked as officers swarmed the streets.
The interior minister later said that the gunman had died after taking his own life near his home in Cetinje, which is about 18 miles northwest of the capital Podgorica.
Police investigators at the scene of the mass shooting. Pic: AP
Mr Saranovic told state broadcaster RTCG that Martinovic died while he was being transported to hospital.
Police told the broadcaster that he had suffered a head wound.
Vanja Popovic, the cousin of one of those who died and of another injured person, said: “[The] son of my aunt is among the dead… we are all shocked.”
‘Gripped by sadness’
President Jakov Milatovic said in a post on X that he was “shocked and stunned” by the mass shooting.
He wrote: “Instead of holiday joy… we have been gripped by sadness over the loss of innocent lives.”
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Milojko Spajic went to the hospital where the wounded were being treated and announced three days of mourning.
“This is a terrible tragedy that has affected us all,” said Mr Spajic. “All police teams are out.”
Police and security personnel at the scene where several people were shot. Pic: Reuters
Police commissioner Lazar Scepanovic said Martinovic was at the bar throughout the day with other guests when the brawl erupted.
He said the suspect then went home, brought back a weapon and opened fire at around 5.30pm. The police chief said he killed four people at the bar and then continued shooting at three more locations.
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The suspect is believed to have been handed a suspended sentence in 2005 for violent behaviour and had appealed his latest conviction for illegal weapons possession.
RTCG reported that he was known for erratic and violent behaviour.
Montenegro, which has a population of 620,000 people, is known for gun culture and many people traditionally have weapons.
Wednesday’s gun attack is the second shooting rampage over the past three years in Cetinje, Montenegro’s former royal capital.
An attacker also killed 10 people, including two children, in August 2022 before he was shot and killed by a passerby.
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