"They didn't go there to die, but to flee. And to survive": Four years after the debacle at Kabul airport, families forever scarred

The images went viral : hundreds of people running alongside a military plane about to take off, some clinging to it. Other videos showed silhouettes breaking away from the C-17 before plummeting through the air.

One was that of Shafiullah Hotak.

At 18, he dreamed of becoming a doctor but, lacking money for his studies, was forced to do day labor.

On August 16, 2021, the day after the Taliban captured Kabul, he was carried away by rumors: the Americans, after 20 years of war, were taking Afghans with them in a hurry to leave.

"I'm going to the United States!" he told his parents at dawn, a simple 50 Afghani note (less than one euro) in his pocket.

The airport is stormed by families who come with the smallest piece of paper that, they dream, will allow them to leave.

"Shafiullah had hope. He said that if he came to the United States, I could stop working, that he would repay us for what we had done for him," said his mother, Zar Bibi Hotak.

"I gave him his ID card and he left. Then we learned he was dead."

Fell on a roof

More than 120,000 people were evacuated by NATO countries in August 2021 , including 2,000 who had worked directly against the Taliban. Thousands more left the country in the following months.

"We were told stories from the previous Taliban regime (1996-2001), that even flour was hard to come by. With these stories in mind, we were worried. We thought there would be no more work," Intizar Hotak, 29, Shafiullah's brother, told AFP.

In their neighborhood in eastern Kabul, the only ones who survive have family abroad.

"Shafiullah said that the situation could not improve, that it was better to leave," his mother recalls, clutching a portrait of the young man.

His body fell onto the roof of a house in the north of the capital, a few kilometers from the airport, like that of Fida Mohammed Amir, 24.

He, according to his father Payanda Mohammed Ibrahimi, hated the Taliban.

That morning, he pretended to have an appointment at his clinic and left the family home in Paghman, a village near Kabul.

In the early afternoon, they received a call from a stranger who said he was at the airport: " Do you know Fida? He fell out of a plane."

The young dentist had slipped his father's number into his pocket.

"I didn't understand anything."

Zar Bibi Hotak was alerted by relatives who saw the photo of Shafiullah shared on Facebook by witnesses at the airport.

"I screamed and ran like crazy. Some neighbors were embarrassed and wondered how to react. Another grabbed me and took me home, " she says.

"I didn't understand anything, I didn't even know he had gone to the airport," recalls Intizar Hotak.

It was he who went to collect his brother's unrecognizable remains.

" I hope God never forces anyone to see such a thing ," he murmurs, his gaze shifty.

To this day, the number of victims of the evacuation remains unknown.

The US military cleared the plane's crew in 2022, who "decided to leave the airfield as quickly as possible" in view of the deteriorating security situation and "hundreds of civilians surrounding the aircraft," a spokeswoman reported.

Insufficient, judge all the families interviewed by AFP, who say their grief is aggravated by the lack of an apology.

"Nobody called us: neither the previous government, nor the Taliban, nor the Americans," Zar Bibi Hotak complains.

"The planes are equipped with cameras (...), the pilot knew what he was doing, that it was dangerous, he could have stopped," accuses Zakir Anwari, whose brother Zaki was crushed by the plane on the tarmac.

Nightmares

A 17-year-old football prospect, Zaki went to the airport out of curiosity with one of his other brothers. He then decided to try his luck, believes Zakir Anwari.

"Perhaps he was afraid the Taliban would ban football," he suggests.

Under their first regime, the Taliban banned almost all forms of entertainment and instilled a climate of terror. Since 2021, they have gradually introduced repressive laws, particularly targeting women.

"Everyone wondered how Zaki, so intelligent, took such a risk. But he wasn't the only one: I met a father of six at the airport who proudly said he had tried three times to hang onto a plane," continues Zakir Anwari.

From the airport where he rushed to try to find his brother, he remembers bodies piled into a pickup truck, blood on the ground and being beaten by a Taliban.

"I had nightmares for a year. I couldn't forget them," he confesses.

Payanda Ibrahimi hesitates to talk about his son again, seeing it as a way of "reopening the wound" .

"Nobody cares and nobody can understand," he said, his eyes broken by pain.

"Fida didn't mean any harm. Like him, there were thousands of families at the airport," he argues.

"They didn't go there to die, but to escape. And to survive."