It marks the first anniversary of the Islamists’ seizure of Kabul and the chaotic evacuation of thousands of people from the airport
“Dearest mother! Pray for me and leave everything in the hands of God, this is a great opportunity”, were the last words Zaki Anwari, the great hope of Afghan football, said to his mother in the call he gave one year ago. ago from the runway of Kabul airport At the age of 17 he excelled in all the lower categories of the Afghan national football team and was about to make the jump to the senior team He played striker, normally wore the 10 on his back and was dubbed the ‘Afghan Messi’.
Fifteen minutes later Zaki’s phone rang again and this time his sister answered. An unknown voice on the other end asked him to send an ambulance to remove his remains. No one in the house could believe it. It was damn August 15 last year.
The Taliban have declared today a national holiday, the first anniversary of their return to power. A year ago, President Ashraf Ghani left Kabul on his private plane, leaving a capital in the hands of Islamists and tens of thousands of people desperately trying to escape.
The United States has evacuated its embassy after 20 years and lowered the flag. There was no besieging or fighting. The Taliban entered without firing a single bullet. It was a triumphant march that followed two weeks in which they had mastered all the provinces of the country. Afghan troops trained and funded by the United States and its Western allies offered little resistance, and the legendary Northern Alliance mujahideen, key to the defeat of the Taliban in 2001, fled the country.
Kabul International Airport became the symbol of national outrage and thousands of Afghans flocked to search for a plane to rescue them from the emirate. The luckiest were able to board the plane arranged by the various countries to evacuate those who had worked with them for twenty years and now feared reprisals from the Taliban. They were only a part, the vast majority remained on land and a year later the desperation remains to get a passport and leave a country in which the international vacuum for the Taliban has led to the freezing of aid and a crisis in which more than 90% of Afghans are food insecure and millions of children are acutely malnourished. The poverty that the Taliban inherited from the hands of previous corrupt governments is now misery and Afghans live from day to day, wondering if they will have a few Afghans – the country’s currency – to eat.
The iconic image of those chaotic moments of the international withdrawal was captured by the same people who were on the road with their cell phones. Hundreds of people of all ages ran across the tarmac to board a moving US C17 transport plane. They ran and ran to grab every part of the huge gray vehicle and get as far away from the Taliban as possible. Some were crushed by the wheels of the plane that was already traveling down the runway to take off. Those who managed to get to it fell into the void a few minutes later. Zaki Anwari, 17, was one of them.
A year has passed since the tragedy and Mohamed Zakir has not forgotten his little brother. He remembers being the only man in the house at the time and having to go to the airport to check whether the tragedy they had just been told over the phone was true or not. “The city was empty. The taxis charged 1,200 Afghans (13 euros) for a 100 (one euro) ride and shouted that they could take you to the United States and Canada. When I got to the door, I saw that there were there were all kinds of people, with and without documentation. It was a chaos of people willing to travel, even if it cost them their lives. There were Taliban, Afghan and American special forces and everyone was firing, especially if someone tried to crossing the road, the lives of all those people meant nothing to them,” Zakir recalls very excitedly.
He speaks from his belly, with watery eyes, but no tears fall. The videos of the Afghans running alongside the C17 and then falling from the height shortly after the device was turned off went viral on social networks. “I asked everyone around me if anyone had seen my brother. He was a famous person. At the back of the terminal was a van with several bodies shot in the head and chest, but Zaki was not there. Next to the vehicle was a person who had pictures of other dead people and he showed them to me until I saw him. It was him. His skull was shattered and barely recognizable, but I knew right away that it was his hair. I fainted. I still have nightmares of that image.
That same day, the mortuary of the central hospital in Kabul received 18 bodies arriving from the airport.
Zaki’s grave is located in a modest cemetery in the Qaalai Waahed neighborhood of Kabul, where the family comes from. Every two days someone from the house comes by “because it is something that comforts us, the void it leaves us is enormous. In the beginning we got a lot of phone calls, even a person close to FIFA asked us to send him our documents to be evacuated, but he never contacted us again. Now nobody from FIFA even responds to our messages,” complains Zakir as he pours water on the two stones that identify the place where his brother rests.
That oblivion that the Anwari family feels is felt by millions of Afghans, who for two decades lived under the fiction created by the United States and its allies, only to come face to face with the reality of the emirate for two decades.
Zaki represented an entire generation of young Afghans born after the 2001 invasion, full of hopes and plans for the future on and off the football field. “If anything symbolizes my brother’s death, it is the Afghans’ hatred and fear of living under the Taliban, that desperation was the engine that caused his accident,” Zakir thinks.
A hatred that pushed the young promise of Afghan football to not even fear a C17 plane on the move. Zakir prays and looks up at the sky with all his might.
Source: La Verdad
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