Thousands of terrified families fear for their lives and no longer see Afghanistan as their home
The desperation of those in Afghanistan is heart-rending.
It’s in the faces of those who sit for hours with their children and their suitcases outside the building where one of the few airlifts is being organised.
It’s contained in the dozens of emails sent to me: “You are a journalist. I am too. Please help me. You are my only hope. If I die, tell the UK government that there was a girl that was killed by the Taliban just because of doing something for her people and her country.”
It’s in the multiple texts from human rights defenders who tell me the Taliban are knocking on their door and they don’t want to die.
“Please will anyone help us?”
It’s in the tears of a young journalist who silently shows us a video of himself where he’s being beaten by a Talib.
The Talib is using the butt of his weapon to hit his legs and back. He then ties the reporter’s hands and drags him along by rope that he’s attached to the back of his motorbike.
The torture and humiliation went on for two days before he escaped. The video is a few years old but the trauma is very present day – and back then, the Taliban were not in charge.
Now they are holding the guns and the levers of power. “If they catch me again, they will kill me,” the journalist says. This desperation is everywhere.
The Taliban claim they have changed
The state of Qatar is one of only two nations trying to operate airlifts. Pakistan is the other. But this involves careful and challenging negotiations with the Taliban who go through every flight list and examine every name on it.
The evacuation may be officially over. (It ended with the pull out of the foreign troops at the end of August).
But there are still thousands of terrified families who no longer see Afghanistan as their home and who fear for their lives.
Among them are those who have British and other foreign passports. We see them waving their red or new blue UK passports outside the barricaded building which is guarded by armed Talibs but which beyond, lies the route to safety and home.
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Afghanistan: Women living in fear
They’re struggling to get their names on the flight manifest and many tell us they feel abandoned by the British government.
Like many Afghans, they have large extended families often with multiple relatives employed in the same field – who once worked for the British embassy or British-funded charities or British-run projects rebuilding Afghanistan.
“My father worked for the British embassy”, one tells me. “He has a letter of commendation.” He does and it’s sent to me.
But the commendation once so proudly received is now tantamount to a Taliban death sentence.
The Taliban promised a general amnesty for those who worked with the former government they ousted and the foreign invaders they chased out – but on the ground, the reality is very different. There are scores being settled and revenge being sought.
Taliban fighters repeatedly try to stop us from filming the people trying to secure a ticket out of Afghanistan.
One keeps on hitting my colleague Richie Mockler’s camera, others put their hands in front of his lens. They pull and shove our Afghan colleague who tries to put himself between the Talibs and the Sky team.
The paperwork we have been issued by the Taliban themselves giving us permission to film in the country appears to be worthless at this point. We are repeatedly urged to show “the real image” of the Taliban – by the Taliban and constantly told they have “changed” and evolved.
But there is a real fear amongst those who worked alongside the foreigners and they are not reassured by these claims.
The Taliban don’t want people to leave the country. They don’t want images broadcast of people trying to get out. They want the foreign governments to return, set up their embassies and restart the aid which the bulk of the country has become so reliant on.
Because of this, there are strict rules about who gets on the flight list and it is restricted to those with foreign passports – not their dependants, not the Afghans who worked for the foreigners, not those now being targeted.
It’s tough for those trying to operate the flight lists and work with these conditions. We see the Qatari officials working through the night trying to juggle passports, IDs, and coordinate with multiple countries to verify people on the flight list.
“But you have no passport,” I overhear one say down the telephone. “You need to have a passport to travel – and a visa, only then we can help you.”
They are people with families themselves. They know how hard it must be to leave behind an elderly parent or a sister who is now a Taliban target – and the decision-making does not get any easier.
We meet three men in a Kabul cafe who all have British passports but large families with many relatives who do not.
“I’ve lived in Ilford for about 20 years,” one tells us. “I met Boris (Johnson) when I was a taxi driver. He asked me if he thought he could be Mayor of London. He was that uncertain. I said yes go for it. You can do it, Boris.
“But now, I’m very disappointed with him. He’s left us all here. We are British taxpayers. We don’t pay our taxes for the government to invade countries. We pay them to get their help but we aren’t getting any help for our families. My MP is trying to help us but the Foreign Office isn’t even replying to him. We are told just to wait.”
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Hospitals struggle under Taliban rule
There’s a sudden rush after waiting all day to board the convoy the Qataris have organised to take hundreds of “approved” refugees to the airport. But the Taliban have disputed the flight list that had been drawn up.
The bulk of people who were on it are now NOT on it. Only three coaches carrying about 40 people set off for the heavily guarded airport. There are dozens of armed Taliban around the perimeter wearing army fatigues and special ops goggles, flak jackets, helmets and ammunition belts, carrying brand new American weapons.
They wave the convoy through and the families heave their suitcases out of the coaches and move quickly towards the airport entrance. Qatari officials are trying to rush them through. The deadline is dusk. The plane cannot fly after dark because of security and more practically because there are no lights on the runway.
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The young mother of two toddlers weeps next to me as she lines up waiting to be patted down at airport security. But there are no women to do the physical security checks for the line of females right now. The new Taliban-controlled Afghanistan doesn’t see much of a role for females.
They’ve been told not to report for work unless they are health workers and girls have been told not to return to school “for the time being”.
“My country is gone,” the young mother tells me as she’s cradling her baby girl. “We cannot live here anymore. I don’t know if I will ever return. Everything is broken.”
A short time later, exasperated Qatari officials are returning to the queues of waiting refugees with handfuls of passports.
“The flight has been cancelled,” they say. “There’s no one at immigration.”
We hear the plane taking off – empty – and the refugees turn around to spend another night wondering if they’re going to be allowed to leave this country they don’t recognise anymore.
The Qataris again work throughout the night trying to hammer out an agreement with the Taliban to allow the plane to land in Kabul, and to decide on a flight list that is acceptable to everybody.
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How popular is the Taliban in Afghanistan?
By mid-afternoon the following day, it seems there is. Two hundred and thirty-six people are taken in a convoy to the airport this time after an official called “extensive consultation with parties on the ground”.
It’s the fourth flight Qatar has managed to organise and by far the largest passenger evacuation since 31 August when the foreign troops were still in Afghanistan and the airlifts were in full flow.
This time, the Taliban have called back the former airport staff and there are two women security workers. They tell me how their lives have changed so dramatically in such a short time.
“They tell us to wear long dresses (abaya), to cover our heads. They even tell me I must cut my nails, that they are too long.” She pulls off her plastic gloves to show me beautifully manicured nails now forbidden under the new Taliban rules.
The refugees take final pictures of their country as they board the flight to safety and a new, uncertain life. Few think they’ll be back soon – and they leave behind thousands still fearing for their lives who are trapped.
Alex Crawford reports from Kabul with cameraman Richie Mockler and producers Chris Cunningham and Mark Grant.
Additional pictures by Chris Cunningham.
World
Video emerges of aid workers being fired on in Gaza – contradicting Israeli account of deadly attack
Footage has emerged of the moment 15 aid workers were killed in Gaza last month – showing their ambulances and fire insignia were clearly visible when Israeli troops are believed to have opened fire on them.
The bodies of 15 aid workers – eight medics working for the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), six civil defence members, and one United Nations employee – were found in a “mass grave” after the incident, according to the head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Jonathan Whittall.
The Israeli military said it is investigating – claiming before the video came to light that its initial inquiry found its troops opened fire on vehicles without headlights or emergency signals, which therefore looked “suspicious”. It also says there was an evacuation order in place in the area at the time of the incident.
But video footage obtained by the PRCS – and verified by Sky News – shows ambulances and a fire vehicle clearly marked with flashing red lights.
Vehicles are seen with red flashing lights in the footage
Sky News has used aftermath video and satellite imagery to verify the location and timing of the footage.
It was filmed on 23 March north of Rafah. It shows a convoy of marked ambulances and a fire-fighting vehicle travelling south along a road towards central Rafah. All of the vehicles visible in the convoy have their flashing lights on.
It was filmed early in the morning, with a satellite image seen by Sky News taken at 9.48am local time on the same day showing a group of vehicles bunched together off the road.
The PRCS first posted about losing contact with its crews just before 7am local time.
Satellite imagery shows the area on 26 March, three days later. Tyre tracks are visible, as are groundworks likely created by military vehicles.
Pic: Planet Labs PBC
The footage is first filmed from inside a moving vehicle, through the windscreen a convoy of vehicles is visible – including ambulances and a fire truck with flashing emergency signal lights.
When the convoy stops, a vehicle is seen having veered off the road to the left-hand side.
The vehicle where the video is being filmed from stops and the aid workers get out. Intense gunfire then breaks out and continues for around five minutes.
The paramedic filming the video is heard saying in Arabic that there are Israelis present – and reciting a declaration of faith used before someone dies.
Hebrew voices are also heard in the background but it is not clear what they are saying.
The footage was filmed from a moving vehicle
Israel conducting ‘thorough examination’
In a fresh statement on Saturday, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said the incident is “under thorough examination”.
“All claims, including the documentation circulating about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation,” it added.
In its statement on Saturday, the PCRS said the clip was “found on the phone of martyred EMT Rif’at Radwan, after his body was recovered” and that it “clearly shows that the ambulances and fire trucks they were using were visibly marked, with flashing emergency lights on at the time they were attacked”.
“This video unequivocally refutes the occupation’s claims that Israeli forces did not randomly target ambulances, and that some vehicles had approached ‘suspiciously without lights or emergency markings’,” it added.
‘They should have been protected’
Speaking at the United Nations on Friday, PRCS president Dr Younis Al Khatib said the organisation has “asked for an independent investigation”.
He added: “Something I can release, I heard the voice of one of those kids. I heard the voice of one of those team members who was killed and his phone was found with his body and he recorded the whole event.
“His last words before being shot, ‘Forgive me, mom. I just wanted to help people. I wanted to save lives’.”
Pic: Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS)
Dylan Winder, permanent observer of the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) said it is “outraged at the deaths of eight medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society killed on duty in Gaza“.
“They were humanitarians. They wore emblems that should have been protected. Their ambulances were clearly marked, and they should have returned to their families. They did not,” he said.
“Even in the most complex conflict zones, there are rules. These rules of international humanitarian law could not be clearer: civilians must be protected, humanitarians must be protected, health services must be protected.”
In a statement issued before the footage of the incident emerged, the IDF said it condemned “the repeated use of civilian infrastructure by the terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip, including the use of medical facilities and ambulances for terrorist purposes”.
It claimed that several members of the militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were killed in the incident.
It did not comment directly on the deaths of the Red Crescent workers but later told the Reuters news agency it had allowed the bodies to be recovered from the area, which it described as an active combat zone.
Fifteen people died in the incident on 23 March
Bodies found in ‘mass grave’
The bodies of the missing aid workers were found in sand in the south of the Gaza Strip in what Mr Whittall, called a “mass grave”, marked with the emergency light from a crushed ambulance.
He posted pictures and video of Red Crescent teams digging in the sand for the bodies and workers laying them out on the ground, covered in plastic sheets.
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Bodies of aid workers found in Gaza
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), said that the bodies had been “discarded in shallow graves” in what he called “a profound violation of human dignity”.
According to the UN, at least 1,060 healthcare workers have been killed in the 18 months since Israel launched its offensive in Gaza after Hamas fighters stormed southern Israel on 7 October 2023.
The UN is reducing its international staff in Gaza by a third because of safety concerns.
Palestinian health authorities say more than 50,000 people have been killed since Israel launched its campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October assault, when Hamas militants crossed the border into southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people, and taking some 250 hostage.
Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.
The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.
The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.
“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”
Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.
Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.
It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.
Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.
They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.
In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.
‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’
Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.
“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”
Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.
By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.
Names were previously added to the list without verification
Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.
The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.
Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.
“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.
Read more:
Analysis: Gaza aid workers’ deaths
What happened to the ceasefire?
A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.
These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.
“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.
“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”
More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
World
Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote – and his fickleness is making the problem worse
Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.
The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.
The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.
Tariffs latest: FTSE 100 suffers biggest daily drop since COVID
Financial investors had been gradually re-calibrating their expectations of Donald Trump over the past few months.
Hopes that his actions may not match his rhetoric were dashed on Wednesday as he imposed sweeping tariffs on the US’ trading partners, ratcheting up protectionism to a level not seen in more than a century.
On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced global tariffs, ratcheting up protectionism. Pic: Reuters
Traders at the Frankfurt stock exchange watched the DAX plummet on Friday. Pic: Picture-alliance/dpa/AP
Markets were always going to respond to that but they are also battling with another problem: the lack of certainty when it comes to Trump.
He is a capricious figure and we can only guess his next move. Will he row back? How far is he willing to negotiate and offer concessions?
Read more:
No winners from Trump’s tariff gameshow
Trade war sparks ‘$2.2trn’ global sell-off
These are massive unknowns, which are piled on to uncertainty about how countries will respond.
China has already retaliated and Europe has indicated it will go further.
Vehicles destined for export, like these in Yantai in eastern China, face massive US tariffs. Pic: Chinatopix/AP
Container ports like Oakland in California might expect activity to fall. Pic: AP
That will compound the problems for the global economy and undoubtedly send shivers through the markets.
Much is yet to be determined, but if there’s one thing markets hate, it’s uncertainty.
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