As US completes withdrawal from Afghanistan, it will host a virtual meeting to discuss approach for the coming days where Qatar will participate.

Qatar has played a significant role in US efforts to evacuate.

Advertisement

The meeting will also include Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, Turkey, the European Union and NATO.

Qatar has also reportedly been asked by the Taliban to provide civilian technical assistance at Kabul’s international airport, once the U.S. military withdrawal is complete on Tuesday. Authorities in Qatar have not commented on the reports.

Meanwhile, international U.N. agencies are asking Qatar for help and support in delivering aid to Afghanistan.

In the end, nearly 40 per cent of all evacuees were moved out via Qatar, winning its leadership heaps of praise from Washington.

International media outlets also leaned on Qatar for their own staff evacuations.

Qatar’s role in the evacuations reflects its position as host of the Middle East’s biggest U.S. military base, but also its decision years ago to host the Taliban’s political leadership in exile, giving it some sway with the militant group. Qatar also hosted U.S.-Taliban peace talks.

Assistant Qatari Foreign Minister Lolwa al-Khater acknowledged the political gains scored by Qatar in the past weeks, but rebuffed any suggestion that Qatar’s efforts were purely strategic.

“If anyone assumes that it’s only about political gains, believe me, there are ways to do PR that are way easier than risking our people there on the ground,” she said.

For some of the most sensitive rescue efforts in Afghanistan, Qatar conducted the operation with just a few hundred troops and its own military aircraft.
Qatar evacuated a girls’ boarding school, an all-girls robotics team and journalists working for international media, among others.

Qatar’s ambassador accompanied convoys of buses through a gauntlet of Taliban checkpoints in Kabul and past various Western military checkpoints at the airport, where massive crowds had gathered, desperate to flee.

In all, al-Khater said Qatar secured passage to the airport for some 3,000 people and airlifted as many as 1,500 after receiving requests from international organizations and vetting their names.

“What many people don’t realize is that this trip is not a phone call to Taliban,” she said. “You have checkpoints by the U.S. side, by the British side, by the NATO side, by the Turkish side … and we have to juggle with all of these variables and factors.”

The hangars at al-Udeid were so crammed that the United States halted flights from Kabul for several hours during the peak of evacuation efforts on Aug. 20. Nearby countries, like Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, accepted several thousand evacuees to alleviate pressure on the American base.

At al-Udeid, Afghan families evacuated by the U.S. waited for hours in poorly ventilated, humid hangars in the middle of the desert with inadequate cooling.
Qatar built an emergency field hospital, additional shelters and portable washrooms to help plug the gaps. In addition, the Qatari military is handing out 50,000 meals a day.

Around 20,000 evacuees remain in Qatar, some expecting to leave in a matter of weeks and others in months to come as they await resettlement elsewhere. Seven Afghan women have delivered babies since their arrival in Qatar.

Qatar is absorbing only a very small number of evacuees, among them a group of female students who will be offered scholarships to continue their education in Doha.

Qatar is also hosting some evacuees in furnished apartment facilities built for the FIFA World Cup.

The White House says President Joe Biden personally expressed his appreciation to Qatar’s 41-year-old Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani by phone and noted that the US-led airlift would not have been possible without Qatar’s support facilitating the transfer of thousands of people daily.