The Foreign Service Journal, March 2022

58 MARCH 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL U.S.ARMY Captain Scott Henkel (at center) and Ahmad Khalid Siddiqi (at left) talking with a village elder in Mizan District of Zabul province, 2006. with NATO leaders. You are putting my life at risk. You cannot leave me like this.” My military friends were contacting U.S. Congress people, saying, “You can- not leave that guy behind.” It didn’t work. Finally, on Aug. 22, a Special Forces unit that I worked with in 2006 contacted me through WhatsApp, and told their people inside the airport to go get me. They told me to go to a different gate. There was a huge human sewage canal. They told me, “You have to go through this sewage canal.” It was 9 o’clock in the evening. I gave my phone to an American Marine on the other side of the sewage canal, and I begged him, “Please, take my phone. Talk to this unit. He is your superior.” So after a lot of talking, he took my phone. After 40 minutes, he came back and said, “Where’s your family?” I said, “They are 200 meters away from here. Thousands of people are stuck over there.” He said, “Go get your family.” I have a 9-year-old daughter, an 8-year-old son, a 4-year-old daughter and an 18-month-old daughter. Pushing them through the crowd, my 9-year-old was crying. She said, “Dad, people are pushing and my chest is hurting.” I did not want one day to be blamed by my kids, have them say: “Dad, you worked with the U.S. government, and now we’re being killed here. We can’t go to school here.” I had to wade through that sewage canal—it was two meters high—carry- ing my kids on my shoulder, handing them one by one to the U.S. Army on the other side, then going back for the next one. I gave my third kid, my fourth kid, then I had to get my wife to jump into that sewage canal, walk through it all the way. The soldier pulled her up, and then I pulled myself out. We went to the line, they searched us, and they let us in. We stayed at the airport that night. In the morning, we hopped on an Army airplane. We ended up in Qatar. There, my kids were in a very bad situation. With all the other Afghans, with 10,000 people, the 18-month-old had heatstroke. After four days, a lot of back and forth, they put us on a plane. We didn’t know where we were going. During the seven-hour flight, we were squished in. The kids were on my lap, on their mom’s legs. We finally made it … to Sicily, Italy. It was another huge garage. Thousands of people were there, and we were left for days. I was helping people with food distri- Crowds of Afghans trying to flee Kabul gathered outside the gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport, August 2021. COURTESYOFAHMADKHALIDSIDDIQI