'An incredibly sad time,' says journalist reporting on Afghans fleeing country

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Lyse Doucet had just landed in Kabul on Sunday to report on the Taliban's sudden takeover of Afghanistan when she spotted her longtime friend and fellow journalist, Bilal Sarwary, in a line to leave to the country.

Doucet, the BBC's chief international correspondent, was startled to see that even he was leaving the country.

"He was the most patriotic Afghan journalist that I know," she said. 

Scenes of chaos at the airport have been broadcast around the world, as Afghans who helped foreign forces and fear Taliban reprisal try to escape before U.S. forces fully withdraw from the country.

The U.S. still holds the airport, but the Taliban hold the rest of the territory outside of it. On Monday, a gunfight broke out at one of the airport gates, leaving one Afghan soldier dead. 

The lines of people waiting to get out "look like they have no end," Doucet told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann from Kabul. Here is part of their conversation.

Lyse, how would you describe the scene that you've witnessed at the airport in Kabul today?

When I stepped out of the mouth of one of those hulking military transport planes and walked onto the tarmac, it just hit me like a brick. The intensity, the enormity, the darkness. Standing there all across the tarmac in every direction, every corner of the airfield were these hulking, grey military transport planes from the United States, from Germany, from Britain, from other countries.

There were helicopters in the sky buzzing overhead. But most of all, in every direction, there were these long queues, very orderly queues of Afghans. And the queues looked like they had no end. And the people in the queues were silent and everyone was carrying one bit of luggage, one purse; that was all they were allowed to leave [with].

We know there was a firefight earlier today. An Afghan guard was killed in the incident. It sounds chaotic. Can you tell us anything about that incident and what's going on around the perimeter?

I'm getting like almost now on the hour, sometimes minute by minute, S.O.S. messages:

"Are you at the airport? My friend has a child and the child hasn't had any water for days."

"Are you close to the airport? My friend has all of the papers and he just needs to get to the front of the queue. He's been waiting for days."

"Lyse, can you help us? We've got the money together for a private charter, we're going to take out Afghan women journalists. Can you help us?"

I'm just one person. And if I'm getting all those message[s], so many others are getting those messages.

Now, you mentioned, of course, the firing incident. That's just one incident. I didn't see it, but I heard it because I slept at the airfield last night. And about two in the morning, I heard the rat-a tat-tat-tat-tat of small arms fire. And it went on for a long time, so I sat there in the darkness listening and I thought, what is happening now on the airfield? How close are some of those families that I know are on the tarmac waiting to board another flight?

And then in the broad light of day, we [received] a message from the German defence ministry saying that there had been some kind of an exchange of fire, some hostile attacker, as they put it, and they had engaged.

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The texts and the emails and the calls you have described, they're just heartbreaking, particularly for those, I guess, who have no links to Western governments, to any of the forces that were on the ground there. In terms of your experience over the last 48 hours, is there a conversation, an incident, a scene that particularly sticks with you?

I was, you know, exchanging WhatsApp messages, you know, trying to help friends. And one of them is Bilal Sarwary, who I have known since he was a scraggly, young 20-something Afghan who'd been working at [an] antique shop in the northern city of Peshawar.

And he came with journalists to Kabul as the Taliban were on the run. And he started working for us at the BBC. And by sheer force of personality, he got himself to university in the United States. He developed a book of contacts that would be the envy of any journalist. And he became in recent years the most prominent journalist telling the story of Afghanistan in English.

But because he was so prominent, many of us wondered whether or not he'd be able to stay. And so I was discussing how to help Bilal as I was flying to Kabul. And as we got off the plane, we then saw the queue, the long line of people to get on the plane, and there was Bilal. And I didn't expect him. And all of a sudden I said, "Bilal, you know, you were always the one who said, I will never leave Afghanistan."

... He said, you know, "We have this fatal love affair with Afghanistan." In other words, it's so deadly, but we will keep coming back to Afghanistan. And when I put the photograph of Bilal and I, when I put the interview on social media, there was such a big reaction because he really has struck a chord around the world, the way he has talked about Afghanistan.

We spoke with Bilal on the program last week. Do you know if he's safe now?

He's safe, but, you know, there's the war on the ground and then there's the war in people's minds. People like Bilal, they're the 9/11 generation; they came of age after the Taliban were ousted. They grabbed the opportunities, this window of international engagement, getting the best education they could find, getting opportunities, developing themselves. They are among the best and the brightest. And their identity has been forged in Afghan soil with their feet firmly on the ground. And now that ground has been ripped away from them.

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As someone who has covered Afghanistan so closely over so many key moments, what is it like for you to witness what's happening now?

You know, my pain, my emotion doesn't matter as a person. I mean, it matters to me personally. It matters to my friendships and the friendships matter. As a journalist, I don't believe the listeners and viewers want my emotion, but I think they want my empathy, my understanding. Not just mine, but anyone who is trying to tell Afghanistan's story, most of all Afghans, because they must be the one to tell their stories.

And I think I've always said that, you know, people talk about Afghanistan, people became tired of Afghanistan, people think of Afghanistan as a place of endless war and conflict. It is. But it's also a place of people who are no different from you or I, who had their dreams, who had their beliefs, who had their joys, who had their sadnesses. And it's an incredibly sad time right now.

Written by Andrea Bellemare with files from the Associated Press. Produced by Jeanne Armstrong. Q&A edited for length and clarity.