Baby lost during Kabul Airport evacuations found

AFGHANISTAN: An infant boy handed in desperation to a soldier across an airport wall in the chaos of the American evacuation of Afghanistan has been found and was reunited with his relatives in Kabul on Saturday.

The baby, Sohail Ahmadi, was just two months old when he went missing on August 19 as thousands of people rushed to leave Afghanistan as it fell to the Taliban.

Following an exclusive story published in November with his pictures, the baby was located in Kabul where a 29-year-old taxi driver named Hamid Safi had found him in the airport and took him home to raise as his own.

After more than seven weeks of negotiations and pleas, and ultimately a brief detention by Taliban police, Safi finally handed the child back to his jubilant grandfather and other relatives still in Kabul.

They said they would now seek to have him reunited with his parents and siblings who were evacuated months ago to the United States. During the tumultuous Afghan evacuation over the summer, Mirza Ali Ahmadi-the boy’s father who had worked as a security guard at the U.S. embassy. Meanwhile, Women and girls without a close male relative accompanying them were banned from entering coffee shops in Afghanistan’s Herat province, Raha Press reported.

Sheikh Azizi ur Rahman Al-Mohajer, the head of virtue and vice of the Taliban office in Herat, said from now on playing music and women and girls without a ‘mahram’ (relative) are forbidden, the report said.

He said criminals are also not allowed in coffee shops. According to him, most insecurities, kidnappings, robberies and destructive actions can be planned in such coffee shops.

According to him, these coffee shops serve as a convenient place for most of the moral corruption something has misled the youths in Herat. He emphasised any decree on closing all coffee shops in Herat can be issued from Kabul.

– THE HINDUSTAN TIMES, THE PIONEER