New Delhi: A Woman evacuated from Afghanistan by India thanked the Government of India for evacuating her and his children.
A woman expressed pain she faced in Afghanistan and said “her daughter and her two grandchildren had been forced to flee after the Taliban burnt down my house. The situation was deteriorating in Afghanistan, so I came here with my daughter and two grandchildren. Our Indian brothers and sisters came to our rescue. The Taliban burnt down my house. I thank India for helping us.”
168 people, including 107 Indians, 24 Afghan Sikhs, and two Afghan senators, were on board an Air Force transport aircraft that landed safely at the Hindon airbase in Ghaziabad near Delhi.
The evacuees included some Indian Sikhs who had taken refugee at a Kabul Gurudwara.
All evacuees will be given an RT-PCR test in view of the Covid pandemic and Afghan nationals will also be vaccinated against polio, the government has said.
India has been allowed to operate two flights per day from Kabul to evacuate its citizens and those of other countries stranded in Afghanistan.
Foreign Minister S Jaishankar this week said the government is “very carefully” monitoring the situation in Kabul and Afghanistan, but that the immediate focus is on safely evacuating all citizens.
The Taliban took effective control of Afghanistan last Sunday after President Ashraf Ghani fled and the group walked into capital Kabul with no opposition. This was after a staggeringly fast rout of major cities following two decades of war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.