TOPLINE Several deaths were reported amid chaotic scenes at the Afghan airport as U.S. forces resorted to aerial firing and using low-flying helicopters to disperse thousands of Afghan nationals who had crowded the tarmac in a desperate attempt to catch a flight out of the country, just a day after the Taliban assumed control of Afghanistan’s capital.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">KEY FACTS</h2>



Local media reports&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/TOLOnews/status/1427204278695997442" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">showed</a>&nbsp;people running alongside and clinging on to the side of a departing U.S. Air Force C-17 plane as it took off from the runway only to&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/trbrtc/status/1427190555184877574" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">plunge</a>&nbsp;to their deaths after the aircraft gained altitude, according to&nbsp;New York Times&nbsp;journalist Christiaan Triebert.



Earlier in the day, witnesses&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/least-five-killed-kabul-airport-witnesses-2021-08-16/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">told</a>&nbsp;Reuters that at least five people were killed in Kabul Airport, but it’s unclear if these deaths are the result of stampede-like conditions or aerial firing by U.S. forces.



All commercial flights have been suspended from Kabul airport with only military aircraft being allowed to operate, according to a&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/AdityaRajKaul/status/1427156067205611524" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">notice</a>&nbsp;issued by U.S. officials.



Thousands of Afghan people entered the airport premises on Sunday evening, desperately hoping to catch a flight out of the country and&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/ahmermkhan/status/1427126954415648769" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">videos</a>&nbsp;from Monday morning showed hundreds trying to enter a plane by climbing the ladder on the side of a jet bridge.



U.S. state department spokesperson Ned Price confirmed that all U.S. Embassy staff have been evacuated to Kabul airport, the perimeter of which is secured by U.S. forces.



Earlier in the day, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/USEmbassyKabul/status/1427105342949842948" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tweeted</a>&nbsp;that the situation in the city was unsafe as it urged American citizens and Afghan nationals to not travel to the airport until notified.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">KEY BACKGROUND</h2>



The Taliban swept into Kabul on Sunday, facing zero resistance after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. The speed of the Taliban’s military blitz caught the U.S. and many of its allies off guard as they attempted to evacuate their embassy staff and other officials from the country. Earlier U.S.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/08/12/kabul-could-fall-to-the-taliban-within-90-days-us-intelligence-warns/?sh=640411ed626c">intelligence reports</a>&nbsp;suggested that the western trained Afghan Army may be able to hold up the advancing Taliban forces from taking Kabul for another 90 days, well after the Biden administration’s August 31 deadline to evacuate all U.S. military presence from Afghanistan. On Sunday night, Washington deployed an additional 1,000 U.S. service personnel to support the 5,000 troops already mobilized in Kabul to assist the evacuation of Americans. The sudden exit of Western diplomats and personnel appears to have triggered panic among Afghan nationals, especially those who worked with foreign troops or embassies, who now fear relation from the Taliban. After taking power, the militant group has attempted to&nbsp;<a href="https://apnews.com/article/evacuations-taliban-784681c4400b097cf73b93cec34c5c61" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">project calm</a>&nbsp;by circulating videos showing quiet city streets. But&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/jaglancy/status/1426878440838508547" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reports</a>&nbsp;of Taliban reprisals against former Afghan government troops have begun to crop up on social media and many Afghans have publicly expressed fear for their lives. With the Taliban controlling all land crossings out of Afghanistan, Kabul airport remains the only way out of the country.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">FURTHER READING</h2>



<a href="https://apnews.com/article/evacuations-taliban-784681c4400b097cf73b93cec34c5c61" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Taliban seek to project calm as US speeds chaotic evacuation</a>&nbsp;(Associated Press)



<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/talibans-rapid-advance-across-afghanistan-2021-08-10/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Afghanistan is peaceful, Taliban say, chaos engulfs airport</a>&nbsp;(Reuters)



<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/least-five-killed-kabul-airport-witnesses-2021-08-16/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">At least five killed at Kabul airport &#8211; witnesses</a>&nbsp;(Reuters)



<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/08/15/saigon-fall-kabul-taliban/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The fall of Saigon: As Taliban seizes Kabul, the Vietnam War’s final days remembered</a>&nbsp;(Washington Post)



By Siladitya Ray, Forbes Staff

TOPSHOT-AFGHANISTAN-CONFLICT

Several Deaths Reported At Kabul Airport As Afghans Try To Cling On To Departing U.S. Jet

You may not recognize her name, but you’ll know her photographs. Jodi Bieber won the prestigious World Press Photo of the Year, in 2010, for the photograph of a violated young woman in a refugee camp in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The picture captured the 19-year-old Bibi Aisha who was dragged by her angry in-laws to a mountain where her Taliban soldier husband cut off her nose and ears. She was left for dead as punishment for running from her marriage to escape years of abuse. Aisha survived and ended up in the refugee camp where Bieber found her in 2010.
“It took the photograph in a very plain room. When I created the picture I asked Bibi through an interpreter to close her eyes and think about her inner beauty and her inner power and look at me. She did that and I took the photo. That’s the photograph they used. But I was very worried because I took her very empowered photograph. I thought I had failed because TIME would want something more vulnerable. TIME said it was the most iconic photograph they had seen. And it went on to win the award,” says Bieber.
Bieber cut her teeth in the dangerous days leading up to South Africa’s first democratic elections on April 27, 1994. As a rookie photographer, she was sent to Ulundi, in KwaZulu–Natal, a warzone for the African National Congress and Inkatha Freedom Party.
“I definitely knew I was not the war photographer because we witnessed quite a few violent situations in Ulundi. At one time we slept on the floor of our hotel, we thought we might be assassinated,” says Bieber, the then freelance photographer at The Star, in Johannesburg.
Bieber was born in 1966, in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. She grew up in a segregated South Africa and went to all-white schools. The system fostered rebellion in her soul.
“I don’t think art was embraced when I was growing up but I used to question things. I had a history teacher, who I am friends with now. He opened our eyes to what was happening in South Africa at the time. Remember, 1976 was when we first got television. It was a completely different time, but I remember seeing those yellow nyalas (a military vehicle), I knew something was not right in our society. So, I was very rebellious at high school. I had an opinion and I had voice, I was not just following the crowd,” she says.
“All my work deals with issues relating to broader society and a lot of it challenges the stereotypes that exist in the media,” says Bieber.
For two decades Bieber’s work changed lives around the world and she vows to document the injustices – her camera and her soul agree.

The soul behind the camera who captured inner beauty and power

The night Private Johan Botha died was actually meant to be his last on active service in Afghanistan’s turbulent Helmand province. His battalion, A (Grenadier) Company, was making its way out of the province on orders to push Taliban insurgent forces towards Pakistan. In the morning, another unit, the Grenadier Guards, would take over, allowing Botha and his company to head north to Camp Bastion, the main British base in Helmand, where they would catch the next flight home.
But a midnight ambush changed all that. It was like World War One; A Company was dug into a trench, and a few meters away, on the other side of no man’s land, was the Taliban.
In the darkness, machine gun fire shattered the silence as Taliban fighters launched their attack firing rocket-propelled grenades. The bursts of sand and smoke blinded and trapped the British. Seven men bore the brunt. Botha was one of them. He was wounded but no one could find him. His last words came across another soldier’s radio. He was shouting through the chaos in his heavy Afrikaans accent: “Boss, please don’t leave me.”
Botha was 25 and left a wife and young daughter.
Botha, of the Mercian Regiment (Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters), was a South African, one of thousands of Africans fighting for the British. He enlisted in Pretoria, as a Commonwealth soldier, in 2005; his tour of duty in Helmand was his first and he carried it out while a South African citizen.
British soldiers from Africa are not new. Infantrymen like Botha have been fighting under the Union Flag for hundreds of years. The two World Wars saw British dominions, like South Africa and Canada, raising their own armies, under British command, fully integrated into the British fighting forces. In World War One, more than 74,000 South Africans fought for the Queen and someone else&#8217;s country.
They are fewer today; about 660 British soldiers are South African – among the African majority of 6,400 Commonwealth fighters, according to Ministry of Defence (MOD) figures. African soldiers from Swaziland to Kenya have taken the Queen’s shilling with large enlistments from Ghana, Gambia and Zimbabwe.
In July last year, the British government suspended direct recruitment from the Commonwealth as part of a bid to cut the Armed Forces by a fifth. That year, it axed more than 5,000 soldiers from the ranks.
Yet, this year, young African men are still knocking at the gates of the British Defence Attache in Pretoria. They are trying to follow in the footsteps of men like Kieran Burke, a South African who joined the colors in 2005 and served with Botha. He says it was a career move.
“I wanted to eventually, once I got military experience, join the UN.”
Burke insists most Africans join for more than a red passport.
“With young guys coming in from Africa, it was a means to an end.”
The men he served with, from the continent, just wanted to be professional soldiers, he says. The British Army was organized, well-equipped and moneyed.
“The South Africans, Ghanaians and Fijians were the cream of the crop [and] we [lose] these guys to a foreign army. In some ways, it’s misplaced,” he says.
Burke tried to join the South African army. He had a Humanities degree but the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) wouldn’t let him enlist.
“I was informed by my own army [that] I was too old, I was 24,” he says.
So, he enlisted with the Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Wiltshire regiment instead and did six months of basic training. He excelled as a private and was in line to train as an officer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. But when he was asked to wait, in his rank, for two and half years he felt it was time to leave. He wanted to go into combat as a lieutenant, not a private.
After three months with a regiment, soldiers have to decide whether to leave or to stay. After this window, a four-year contract is signed and leaving the British Army is not an option.
“It was very difficult to get out,” remembers Burke.
But he talked his way out and is now a journalist in South Africa.
Despite his clean escape, Burke and other South Africans who have served, or are serving, in foreign armies may be skirting mercenary law back home. A piece of legislation known as the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act (FMA), passed in 1998, prohibits any South African citizen from engaging in ‘mercenary activity’ both within and outside the Republic. This means South Africans offering services as direct combatants in an international conflict for pay are committing an offense.
There is a way around this. The law can be subverted by placing a request for exemption with the National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC), based at the Department of Defence. But Burke says this was not considered by him or his countrymen who joined the British Army.
“There was no notion that you had to let the South African government know that you were in the British Army. If there was an issue, I was not aware of it,” he says.
Foreign fighters are a huge threat to South Africa’s international interests and obligations. Part of the reason the 1998 Act was drafted was because South Africa had been implicated in major, often scandalous, diplomatic embarrassments with its citizens aiding the overthrow of governments or selling arms to rebel groups across Africa.
The first FMA conviction was Richard Rouget – popularly known as Colonel Sanders – in 2005. He pled guilty to assisting the government of Ivory Coast suppress dissidents three years earlier. Rouget wasn’t born South African; he was a French military veteran who earned his citizenship through naturalization. He admitted to supplying the Ivorian government with military equipment, training and a contingent of South African pilots. The State proved that Rouget and his men were also active combatants during the Ivory Coast conflict. The men were paid €6,000 ($7,500) monthly. In addition, Rouget was paid €340,000 ($430,000) by the Ivorian authorities for military equipment.
Rouget was found guilty and slapped with a R100,000 ($9,000) fine and a suspended sentence of five years. He made an appeal for leniency and was granted a reprieve of R25,000 ($2,200) on his fine. The same year, Mark Thatcher was sentenced, under the same legislation, for his part in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea. He walked away with a R3 million ($270,000) fine and a four-year suspended sentence.
Since the FMA became law in South Africa, only a handful of cases have gone to trial. However, it does raise concerns of the legitimacy of soldiers like Botha and Burke doing battle for another nation and fighting wars as proxies.
In many ways, the story of the African foreign legion, stripped bare, is the story of the African migrant, with stars and stripes on.

Tag: Taliban

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Several Deaths Reported At Kabul Airport As Afghans Try To Cling On To Departing U.S. Jet

The soul behind the camera who captured inner beauty and power

Going To War For Money And A Passport