Where is Sohail Ahmadi? Baby still MISSING months after being handed to US soldiers
A photo of a baby being handed over to a US soldier over the fence amid chaos at the Kabul airport this August had gone viral. It's been two months since the incident and there's no word regarding the child. The baby, two-month-old, was in danger of being crushed in the crowd and his mother Suraya Ahmadi decided to hand him over to a US soldier over a tall fence who asked her family if they needed help. Suraya was at the airport with her husband Mirza Ali and their five children. Thinking that the family would get to the entrance soon which was just 16 feet away, they handed their baby, Sohail, over but it has been two months since the incident and the parents are still looking for answers regarding his whereabouts.
The Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan has resulted in many tragedies. A couple of days ago, we reported on how families are resorting to selling their daughters as young as 9 to 55-year-old men to raise funds for survival. One such child is Parwana Malik who was sold for $2,217. But her sacrifice doesn't warrant the family's long-term survival. Her father said Abdul Malik said the money he received from his 55-year-old son-in-law will only sustain his family for a few months after which he will have to find another way to raise money for his family. Ever since the takeover, the US officials at intake centers in the UAE and US have reported a spike in Afghan girls being presented as "wives" of much older men. Reports of the militant group raping corpses or performing necrophilia have also emerged.
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Where is Sohail?
Thousands of Afghanis flocked to the Kabul airport in hopes to escape the crisis-torn nation after the Taliban took over following the withdrawal of US troops. The militant group began pushing people outside the gates and it took the Mirza family more than 30 minutes to get to the other side of the airport fence. They were inside the airport but their baby Sohail was nowhere to be seen. Mirza desperately started looking for his son, asking every official he could about his baby's whereabouts. He said a military commander told him that the baby might have been taken to a special area for kids to keep them away from the chaos at the airport. However, the area was empty when he got there.
The commander accompanied Mirza everywhere around the airport. Mirza couldn't catch his name due to a language barrier and relied his Afghan colleagues to communicate with him. "I spoke to maybe more than 20 people," he said adding three days went by and every attempt to locate Sohail turned futile. "Every officer - military or civilian - I came across I was asking about my baby." Mirza said one of the civilian officials told him that Sohail might have been evacuated by himself. "They said 'we don't have resources to keep the baby here,'" he added. Mirza and Suraya with their other four children aged between 3 to 17 were put on an evacuation flight to Qatar from where they flew to Germany before finally arriving in the US. They are currently at Fort Bliss in Texas with other refugees waiting to be resettled.