Australian advocates and lawyers have made direct appeals to the Taliban to get more than 100 former staff of Australia’s Kabul embassy out of Kabul airport.
Around 147 former embassy guards and their families are hoping to make a fourth attempt to board military evacuation flights out of the war-torn country, after previously being forced to wade through sewage at airport queues only to be rejected for boarding.t
Australians and visa holders are now being told not to travel to the airport amid credible security threats.
The Taliban are guarding checkpoints and witnesses say they are refusing to allow visa-holders and Australian citizens to move past the crowds.
In a desperate bid to appeal directly to the Taliban, Australian-based advocate Kay Danes says she contacted the Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen overnight to assist the passage of 147 embassy guards and their families.
Ms Danes said it was not something she would have envisaged doing a year ago however, the US government had been engaged with the Taliban officials over many months now.
“As a humanitarian, I have to engage with whomever I think will provide the outcome that will save lives,” she told SBS News.
Ms Danes said she also contacted Dr Abdullah Abdullah, a member of Afghanistan’s coordination council, to also help facilitate the transfer of the embassy guards.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australia has been working with international partners, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, who are engaging directly with the Taliban.
"The Taliban has made a range of undertakings. And in relation to people seeking to leave Afghanistan, including Australians and Australian visa holders, we would expect those undertakings to be met and to allow those people, our citizens and our Australian visa holders to depart safely if they wish to do so," he said.
Meanwhile, a group of former interpreters for the Australian Defence Force who are in hiding have held a gathering to urge the Australian government not to leave them behind.
While dozens of those who worked with Australian forces have been successfully evacuated out of Kabul and into Australia in recent days, SBS News understands at least 22 of the former interpreters remain in hiding in Kabul and other cities.
Fourteen of them met in Kabul on Wednesday night, calling on the government to expedite their visas or help their passage through the airport.
“We are in a very critical situation,” one interpreter says in a video obtained by SBS News.
“We have been left behind, and we are asking the Australian government and the Australian Defence Forces to save our lives.”
At least one among the group has been granted a temporary visa but cannot make his way to the airport because of the security situation, SBS News has been told.
The former interpreter, who worked with the ADF in Uruzgan over a decade ago, told SBS News he was happy to have obtained the visa but remains concerned about his prospects of getting out of the country.
The temporary visa expires in three months.
The Taliban is standing firm on its deadline for the full withdrawal of coalition troops on Tuesday 31 August.
Mr Morrison said Australia is moving to wind down the evacuation operations.
“We will be moving to a post-evacuation resettlement phase and we are already working through those plans with other partners about how that can be achieved,” he told reporters on Thursday.
“It won't be easy, but these are situations that have been faced on many other occasions where people have been seeking our humanitarian support through our formal programme.
Asked about the prospect of some people being left behind, Mr Morrison said: “I would say to Australians that when the time comes, when the operations are no longer able to be safely conducted, that we can say honestly to them that Australians have done all that we possibly could have done in these circumstances to get as many people out as safely as possible.
“And the result of that is...it will be more than 4,000 (people evacuated) by that time.”
Overnight, around 1,200 people were evacuated from Kabul on six Australian flights and one New Zealand flight, including Australians, Afghans and other nationals.
In total 4,000 people have now been evacuated on military flights since the Taliban takeover.
