Men, women and children are in hiding, fearing for their lives somewhere in Taliban-controlled Kabul.
“Our children are sick. We have nothing - no food, no water,” one woman said.
“I have developed PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder]. At night-time, I shiver,” a man added.
Sunday has chosen not to identify those involved to protect them.
They once worked alongside Kiwis trying to rebuild war-torn Afghanistan.
“Everyone that has worked for a foreign military is being hunted down,” a former captain in the New Zealand Army, Ellen Nelson, told Sunday,
“They are on a hit list.”
New Zealand was in Afghanistan for 20 years after the Taliban was overthrown. Around $300 million was spent and the lives of 10 soldiers were lost in an attempt to help rebuild the war-torn country.
“I wanted to do something that had meaning, I wanted to do something that could help people, and I wanted to be proud to serve our country,” Nelson said.
“I really felt like our team and I were making a difference.”
Nelson served in Bamyan province in 2010 as the Engineer Officer in the New Zealand Defence Force’s provincial reconstruction team.
Together, the team of five soldiers and 15 locals helped rebuild roads, orphanages and schools.
“We would hang out. We would laugh together, we would exchange photos of our families. We would talk about our lives in our respective homes - they were very much a part of our team and we formed very close connections with them,” she recalled.
Despite their camaraderie, the New Zealand soldiers were “basically considered infidels and they worked with us”, she said.
“That is a huge risk that they took to do that, but they did it because they believed in what we were doing. They believed in a better future for their country and they wanted to be part of that.”
“Some of the work that they did for us was actually saving our life. We were responsible for the perimeter security structures and my team helped build those structures.”
The people of Bamyan are Hazaras, an ethnic minority in Afghanistan. They are Shia, who follow a different strand of Islam to the Taliban and suffered brutal persecution and massacres under their previous rule.
One interpreter came to New Zealand eight years ago but remains terrified to reveal his face to this day.
“One day they [the Taliban] kill[ed] 500 people,” he said, “I lost my uncle and my cousin at that time.”
They were fatally shot, he said, for belonging to a “different religion, different ethnicity”.
When he was 14, he and his family spent 10 months hiding from the Taliban in the mountains.
“Sometime my dad try to go into the village to get some food from village. And also I remember that sometime, we eat the grass, so we didn’t have anything,” he said.
For two decades, the Taliban was largely kept at bay by foreign armies, but the departure of foreign troops allowed them to gain control. In August, the Taliban took Kabul and with it, Afghanistan.
Falodi Amir and his family immediately went into hiding.
“No one actually expected that something happened so dramatically,” Amir said.
“Lost all of hopes, every day we’re just waiting when someone comes and search us and find out.”
Amir is not only Hazar, but he had also worked closely with the New Zealand Government to develop an eco tourism project in Bamyan.
“I was hiding at home. Every night, my children were asking what will happen to us, if something happens to you,” he said.
The New Zealand Government mobilised in response, with Kiwi forces joining an international mission to extricate those threatened by the Taliban.
“They actually fundamentally kept us safe and so New Zealand, we owe it to them to keep them safe,” Nelson said.
By then, Nelson had left the army, completed a PhD and was raising a young family in Manawatū, but she never forgot the people of Bamyan - and they hadn’t forgotten her.
Families needed help getting an emergency New Zealand visa to leave the country. On the other side of the world, Nelson went to work.
“I kind of found myself in the middle of the situation calling MFAT [The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade], calling Immigration, trying to find out what was going on with these visas because without them, none of these people could have gotten out,” she said.
“It was one family, then it grew to seven, then it was 17, and then it was all 43 families.”
The families, making up 282 people in total, have since become known as Ellen’s List.
“Almost 200 of them are children and so these faces of little kids who are the same age as my one-year-old and my four-year-old, you know and similar. Their faces are burnt in my mind and it’s really hard,” she said.
Amir said the days after the Taliban seized Kabul were utter chaos.
“We went to the airport around six in the morning, there were thousands of people rushing and with us there were kids, there was many families,” he said.
With targets on their backs, Amir and his family were issued emergency visas to New Zealand.
“I was crying. Suddenly, you leave everything behind with a backpack,” he said.
But they also knew many had been left behind at Kabul Airport.
“If some suicide attacks or some explosion happens, there will be hundreds of people to be killed,” he said.
Just 24 hours later, in the same spot where he and his family queued to get into the airport, an IS-aligned suicide bomber detonated, killing 170 people - 13 of them US troops.
The New Zealand evacuation flights were immediately suspended.
“The future evacuation will look different than it has to date and it will be difficult and be longer but we are not giving up,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said following the incident.
Nelson said none of the families on her list were able to leave prior to the suspension.
“I have 43 families, 282 people. Not a single one of them got out.”
Nelson went into overdrive, a “tricky, kind of tedious, time-consuming process” to ensure all her families had Kiwi visas.
All 282 people on her list have now been issued the visas they need to leave.
“I care about these people - they were in my team, they worked for me. The thought of not doing this for them is just not something I couldn’t consider.”
The problem is there is now no way to get them out after leaving Banyam for Kabul.
One man hiding from the Taliban with his young daughter told Sunday from his hideout, there are around three families - consisting of 10 people each - staying in three small rooms.
“It’s really hard for us. We are so scared about this. She is just three years old,” he said.
Women disguised under burka are sent out to get supplies, but money for food is running out.
Three of the people in the group gave birth in the last month, Nelson said, which she called “unfathomable to a New Zealander”.
While the Taliban says it has changed, recent images of a brutal public hanging from Harat, Afghanistan’s third largest city, tell a different story.
Former SAS commander and Deputy Chief of the New Zealand Army, Chris Parsons, has completed two tours of duty in Afghanistan.
While Parsons is now a civilian, he volunteered to help after learning of Ellen’s List.
“They served with us, they helped us keep us safe. They are welcome in New Zealand - the Prime Minister’s said that. We’ve given them visas; we now need to keep our promise and get them home,” he said.
And it needs to happen soon. Just this week, a man who worked alongside the New Zealand Defence Force was shot and killed in Bamyan by the Taliban.
Parsons and Nelson have since joined forces with a group of former military veterans to hatch an extraction plan.
“One of our team members got help to get 46 young Afghan women out and one of our teammates got 20 people out across the border,” he said.
“It’s really important that these potential extraction methods are not made public because the last thing we want to do is then jeopardise the success of these extraction plans."
However, they can only do so much on their own. They now need the diplomatic heft of the Government to come on board.
“The Government by itself will struggle to solve this rather tricky problem. We by ourselves can’t solve it either, but together maybe we can,” Parsons said.
For six weeks now, Nelson has been attempting to speak to Government ministers. This week, Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta sent an email.
“ I would like to believe that Ellen and the Government is able to work together under these really challenging times,” she said.
A special representative to Afghanistan to support those who wish to leave was also announced this week.
Mahuta told Sunday MFAT is “engaged with Ellen [Nelson] and the cases that she has brought to their attention”.
“We want to ensure that we can facilitate the safe pathway of those eligible to come back to New Zealand. That is my focus. We remain vigilant and live to the fact that we couldn't get everybody out.
“We're doing as much as we can.”
The Government is ruling out a charter flight at this stage. It’s feared it may take weeks or even months until the special representative is on the ground.
“One of my families has been beaten to critical condition and lucky to escape with his life in the last month. Already seen family members of these family members being taken away for questioning,” Nelson said.
Families stuck in Afghanistan have but a simple plea for the Government.
“Please, we work hard for the New Zealand troops that was in Bamyan, we support them, so now we need your support,” the man with the young daughter said.
“Please help us, our life is in danger. We don’t want to lose any of our family members.”
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