Left for Dead

Left Behind: Afghans who worked for Dutch-funded NGOs were told they’d be evacuated to safety, but a shift in policy left them to face the wrath of the Taliban – with consequences that have proven deadly

When Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August 2021, Amir* was terrified but hopeful. The father-of-eight had worked for a local charity in Kabul on a programme funded by the Dutch embassy which focused on women’s rights. He knew this would place him at high risk of Taliban retaliation, but he hoped the Dutch government would recognise this and evacuate him as soon as possible.

Amir’s hope of a way out increased when a few days after the fall of Kabul, the Dutch parliament voted to expand the protection policy for local personnel in Afghanistan. While previously it applied only to interpreters, now it would also include other threatened groups such as human rights defenders, journalists, fixers and “employees of Dutch development projects”, such as Amir.

However, it was not to be. Just over a week after expanding the policy, the Netherlands stopped evacuations from Afghanistan following warnings from the US military of an imminent terrorist attack on Kabul’s airport which later came to bear, killing about 180 people. Only a small number of NGO workers had managed to escape – and most of those who didn’t make it onto a flight never would. The Dutch government narrowed down the eligibility criteria considerably. It would now only apply to employees who had been working for at least a year from 2018 and held a “public, visible position”.

Amir was among those left behind and excluded from the criteria. Just over a year later he would be abducted in his own home by masked men his family say were undoubtedly members of the Taliban – and killed.

METHODS

There have been countless reported cases of abductions and deaths at the hands of the Taliban since they took power, but the security risks make them difficult to investigate and verify.

After we obtained Amir’s identity documents, as well as the correspondence showing he had tried to get onto the Dutch evacuation list, we had to do more research to understand what happened to him between his abduction and his death.

We were able to obtain information on the hospital and doctor who treated Amir, as well as a death certificate with a date and cause of death. We also got independent confirmation that Amir was not on the normal registry for patients, and was checked in “outside hospital hours”.

We also obtained internal emails corroborating claims made by Afghan employees of another Dutch NGO, Cordaid, that there was a lack of transparency and consistency in the evacuation process.

STORYLINES

It was already dark when the four men appeared at the door. Amir and his wife Zahra were still awake, sitting in the front room of their Kabul home with some of their daughters, when they were startled by the loud banging on the front door. “It was a nasty sound,” Zahra recalls the incident on the phone a few months later. “Very penetrating.”

When she opened the door, the men – dressed in black and with their faces covered – rushed in and dragged Amir outside. They told him to shut up when he asked why and said they were taking him to the Police District, then drove away

Amir had feared that this day would come for some time, says Zahra. Given his work for a women’s rights charity, funded by the Netherlands, he knew he was a target. Relatives and friends from his home region constantly warned him not to return because Taliban fighters had said they would kill him.

Sayed, Amir’s brother, remembers how previously a local Taliban leader had shown up at his door to announce that he knew his brother worked for an NGO in Kabul. “He said there were rumours going around that he was an infidel, a Christian and a spy for the foreigners.”

Hours after Amir’s abduction, Zahra received a phone call asking her to go to the hospital. She arrived and was taken to a room. There lay Amir’s lifeless body.

When she looked at him, she saw dark spots on his chest and noticed that his nose was strangely crooked on one side. She didn’t know whether they were traces of torture, but she didn’t dare to ask, afraid that the Taliban would do something to her and her children.

The four men did not say they were from the Taliban, but Zahra is certain they were behind it. “He had been threatened by the Taliban for some time because of his work,” she says. “He was a good man, he had no personal enemies. I am 100 per cent sure that they are responsible.”

Hundreds of employees of Dutch-funded charity organisations in Afghanistan feel they are in danger because of the roles they occupied. They report being regularly arrested and their homes repeatedly searched by authorities.

Several employees of Dutch NGO Cordaid told us they felt abandoned by their management, who refused to put them on the list for evacuation even though they claim they met the Dutch eligibility criteria.

They were not put on the evacuation list by their management on the grounds that their position was not “visible”. One employee said: “We were outside all day and introduced ourselves to people as Cordaid employees. In a year we met hundreds, perhaps a thousand new people. Just calculate how ‘visible’ we were.”

Anne Kwakkenbos, who was involved in the evacuations for Cordaid, is aware that some staff feel abandoned. She admits there were internal shortcomings: “I get it, if I were them I would be furious too. And believe me, some things have angered me too. But in the end we didn’t make up those rules.”

Meanwhile Amir’s family has received no support from the Dutch government. His wife Zahra is still hiding in Afghanistan: “I hope that an evacuation will be possible for us one day. I have lost my husband, my children have lost their joy.

“I don’t have the money to take care of them. I tell my children – especially my daughters – to stay indoors, as if they were prisoners. I don’t want the Taliban to do anything to them”

* Names have been changed to protect identities