As final flights leave Kabul, students stuck in country say their lives are “in grave danger”
University students in Afghanistan are desperately seeking an eleventh-hour evacuation as the clock ticks on the United States’ full withdrawal of its troops from the country on 31 August.
Days after Taliban fighters seized control of the country’s capital, Kabul, on 15 August, students and researchers are pleading for the US government and international community to help evacuate them before it is too late.
Numerous students spoke with Research Professional News about their fears of staying in Afghanistan, where they claim they are “direct targets” of the extreme militant group now in power.
A letter shared with Research Professional News revealed that “a large group of” students from the American University of Afghanistan—which is based in Kabul and offers English tuition—fear for their lives and future under the Taliban.
“There is a low possibility for us as students and alumni of AUAF to remain alive, let alone [sustain] a career in the new social, economic and political reality of Afghanistan,” said a 28 August letter signed “on behalf of AUAF students” and addressed to the US news network CNN.
The author claims that “current and former students’ lives are in grave danger”, and the “education and the future of these students are in jeopardy”.
In the letter, the students claim their campus is “under the control of the Taliban and they have extracted all the relevant data to identify us, including our contact details and perhaps living addresses”. Research Professional News has been unable to verify this independently, but we spoke to students who said they had received calls they believed to be from the Taliban. Research Professional News has contacted the university for comment.
The letter does not include names, which Research Professional News understands is due to safety concerns.
Those waiting for evacuation from the country are understood to include finalists and semi-finalists of the prestigious US-administered Fulbright research programme. Research Professional News has contacted the Fulbright programme for comment.
One AUAF student and Fulbright semi-finalist, Jamshid Mohammadi, spoke to Research Professional News from Paris, where he was recently evacuated. Mohammadi left the country with little more than a laptop and a passport, but he acknowledges he is among the lucky few.
“It is very difficult for me to talk about my family,” he says of those he left behind. He also fears for his colleagues, especially women: “A lot of my female colleagues [are] still at their houses; they haven’t been outside since the Taliban took over.”
He believes that higher education is “absolutely doomed” under the Taliban: “If you ask the Taliban to provide IT classes, science, they wouldn’t be able to do that, and without that, higher education is meaningless.”
A Taliban spokesperson recently said they will allow students to continue education, but all the students Research Professional News spoke to, including Mohammadi, said they did not believe these assurances.
“I totally disagree with this narrative of a changed Taliban,” said Mohammadi. “It’s just on paper—on the ground they are the same Taliban.”
He said he wishes for foreign governments and institutions to help in continuing the evacuation of scholars there.
“My message to these people is evacuate them, because under the rule of the Taliban, they can do nothing. They cannot study, cannot work…their lives end here.”
Fulbright researchers stuck
On 26 August, two bombs exploded at crowded Kabul airport, where people fled in attempts to leave the country. The explosions killed more than 100 people, including Afghans and US soldiers, according to some media reports.
But students remain determined to leave, saying they fear the alternative even more. Research Professional News understands a handful of Fulbright finalists due to leave the country have been unable to secure flights out, while dozens of Afghan semi-finalists are understood to have yet to receive interviews determining whether they will be accepted into the programme.
Zeinab Rezaie, a Fulbright recipient, left her country on 16 August, a day after the fall of Kabul. She spoke to Research Professional News from the US, where she has started her two-year fellowship. Rezaie urged help for those left behind. She said she knows of Fulbright recipients who have been unable to leave the country.
“I know five of them—with each day passing they are getting more hopeless,” she said.
Meanwhile, semi-finalists of the programme told Research Professional News that their education hung in limbo after their interviews, the culmination of years of work, had been postponed from June this year to September.
According to one, who is currently in Afghanistan and asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, “even now there is no assurance on what will happen” to students like her.
She said she felt “ignored and abandoned” by the programme.
Since the takeover, she and her colleagues have been sharing information along an informal network, she said.
“Most of us are stuck here; only a few [have been] evacuated. We share any resources that can give anyone a chance of getting out of here,” she said. “Everything is uncertain.”
The student urged the global higher education community to keep the spotlight on the plight of scholars there: “They shouldn’t just leave students stranded—a lot of hopes and dreams have been crushed by the Taliban.”
Government going to “extraordinary lengths”
The US government did not answer Research Professional News’s question on what actions it plans to take on the students’ situation, saying it could not comment on specific cases.
But a US State Department spokesperson said: “We are going to extraordinary lengths to facilitate safe passage for US citizens, [lawful permanent residents] and other individuals at risk.”
The spokesperson cited US Department of Defense figures showing that the US had evacuated more than 117,000 people from Afghanistan by 28 August.
He added: “We will continue that effort for as long as we can safely do so. Our commitment to at-risk Afghans does not end on any specific date.”