A 2-month-old child who was seen being handed to a United States soldier over the barbed wire fence at Kabul’s airport during the frantic evacuations in August “is still missing,” the US government has acknowledged.
The baby boy named Sohail Ahmadi has been missing since 19 August and the Afghan refugee family that was relocated to Texas is distraught.
The family was put on a plane bound for Qatar to the US and has not yet been reunited with their child.
On 19 August, after the Taliban took over and U.S troops were evacuating persons, Mirza Ali Ahmadi and his wife Suraya along with their five children were in a chaotic crowd outside the gates of the Kabul airport in Afghanistan.
Afraid that their two-month old baby Sohail would get crushed, they handed him to a U.S soldier over the fence. They hoped to get him once they reached the entrance which was only a few feet away but it took them a while to reach the other side of the airport fence. By then, Sohail was nowhere to be found.
Mirza Ali, who worked as a security guard at the U.S embassy for 10 years, desperately asked all the officials about his baby and was told that the child was probably taken to a safe area. But even after three days, they couldn't find their child.
In an interview that he gave via a translator, the father stated the his child may have been flown out of the country in one of the aircrafts all by himself, although this could not be established by the family independently.
All the agencies involved, including the US bases and overseas locations have been informed of the situation. A State Department representative told Reuters that the government is working with international partners “to explore every avenue to locate the child, which includes an international Amber Alert that was issued through the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children".
The couple and their other children were put on an evacuation flight to Qatar and then to Germany and eventually landed in the United States. The family is now at Fort Bliss in Texas with other Afghan refugees waiting to be resettled.
(With inputs from Reuters)
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