The New York Times :
On Saturday morning, a former interpreter for a US company in Kabul, Afghanistan, plunged into a mass of humanity outside a gate at the Kabul airport with her family in tow.
Even as she was jostled and elbowed by people in the throng, she pushed ahead, desperate to secure a flight out of the country for everyone accompanying her – her husband, 2-year-old daughter, disabled parents, three sisters and a cousin.
Then the crowd surged. The entire family was slammed to the ground. People trampled them where they lay, the woman recalled just hours later. She remembered someone smashing her cellphone and someone else kicking her in the head. She could not breathe, so she tried to tear off her abaya, a robelike dress.
As she struggled to her feet, she said, she searched for her toddler. The girl was dead, trampled to death by the mob. “I felt pure terror,” the woman said in a telephone interview from Kabul. “I couldn’t save her.”
In the six days since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, Afghans have negotiated a terrifying new reality after enduring 20 years of war and suicide bombings. Their world has been upended, and something as prosaic as a trip to the airport now inspires terror. Just stepping outside the front door can be jarring and disorienting.
With the situation increasingly chaotic, the US Embassy warned American citizens to stay away from the airport, citing “potential security threats outside the gates.” Across the country, Afghans who served the US military effort in Afghanistan or the US-backed former government are in hiding, many of them threatened with death by the Taliban. Gunmen have gone door to door, searching for “collaborators” and threatening their family members, according to human rights groups. A 39-year-old former interpreter for the US military and Western aid groups was hiding Saturday inside a home in Kabul with his wife and two children. He said the Taliban had telephoned, telling him, “Face the consequences – we will kill you.”
The interpreter, whose identity was shielded like others in this article for safety concerns, said he had given up trying to secure a flight after a harrowing and ultimately futile attempt to force his way past Taliban gunmen and unruly mobs at the airport the day before. He has been spending his time calling and texting American soldiers and officers in the United States who are struggling to find ways to rescue him and his family. “I’m losing hope,” he said by telephone. “I think maybe I will have to accept the consequences.” Another former interpreter for the US military was also in hiding in Kabul Saturday. He, too, said he had abandoned any hope of getting a flight for him, his wife and young son after two terrifying forays to the airport.
