They raced against time and won
The story of how 148 Afghan female students of a university in Bangladesh managed to flee the Taliban-controlled Kabul can be used as the plot of a Hollywood thriller.
The students of Chattogram's Asian University for Women AUW had been in Afghanistan amid the pandemic. But as the Taliban took over the country in mid-August, their return to Bangladesh became uncertain.
Students, alumnae members, and donors have been raising funds for their evacuation.
AUW student Sepehra Azami led six other students to contact everyone and asked them to be at designated locations from where they could be picked up, said a newsletter of the university.
They also arranged buses that would pick up the students and take them to Hamid Karzai International Airport.
They used WhatsApp to communicate with each other. Each contingent of students were asked to quickly go to the designated locations to board their assigned bus.
A total of seven buses were used. Each bus was staffed by an unarmed security person as well as a driver who was to negotiate at the checkpoints to secure clearance, said AUW sources, adding that the buses were stocked with water and food and power banks.
Sepehra in consultation with her six-member leadership team -- Frough, Batool, Sabira, Humaira, Niab and Samira -- was making the on-spot decisions.
After five days of repeated unsuccessful attempts to get through all the checkpoints into Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport, which saw huge crowds fleeing the country, the students eventually made it to the airport.
To make things worse, three students were detached from the group amidst the crowd at the airport. Failing to communicate with the others instantly, the three women found a room where they could charge their phones.
"As the phones were being charged, the exhausted girls fell asleep. And alas! Amidst the rush and confusions, the other 145 students of the team departed the airport without them for an unannounced US airbase in the Middle East," said the source.
Panic seized them when they woke up and found out what had happened. Terrified, they communicated with the team leaders through WhatsApp. Finally, a volunteer friend from Direct Relief (which is helping the AUW students with a shipment of Covid-19 supplies) could communicate and reach the stranded students at the airport. Later the three students could catch the next Milair flight to Doha last week.
"When they reached Doha, they kept searching for the others but there was nobody else there because the other 145 students had all gone to Riyadh," the source said.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Kamal Ahmad, founder and trustee of AUW, in an open letter at the AUW webpage, said, "Our students and alumnae have been evacuated in US military planes out of Kabul. They have now safely reached bases in the Middle East where they will be processed for their onward journeys."
He said an extraordinary group of people helped them pull off this miracle. Those contributions will be appropriately acknowledged at a later date.
"This ordeal succeeded only after two grueling but failed attempts with our students huddled in a convoy of seven buses for forty straight hours.
"Our Afghan student leader and six others who supported her in the overall coordination and communication, showed a measure of competence, tenacity, and what Ernest Hemingway described as grace under pressure that I have not seen before, even myself as a child of a civil war of our own in Bangladesh. My deep gratitude to each of them.
"We pledge to continue to support that vision of another Afghanistan that has eluded us till now but inshallah will one day be realised. It is because of these women, like Sepehra and the others whom AUW has helped educate over the years, that that day must come and shall come."
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