DOHA: An Afghan toddler who was bundled onto an evacuation flight from Kabul in 2021 after her mother and father died in a bomb blast has been reunited with family at a Qatar orphanage.
The little woman, now believed to be about 21 months outdated and given the identify Maryam by the orphanage, noticed her uncle Yaar Mohammad Niazi and her brother and two sisters once more for the primary time.
“I didn’t know if we’d ever discover her once more, and now I’m overcome” with emotion, mentioned Niazi, aged about 40 and with 4 kids of his personal. “After I held her, I simply informed myself ‘she is alive’.”
The tearful reunion ended a determined seek for Maryam because the chaotic days of August 2021 when the Taliban took management of the Afghan capital, sparking a panicked mass flight.
Maryam’s mother and father had been amongst these making an attempt to flee with their 4 kids after they had been killed in an enormous bomb blast and gun battle at Kabul airport that claimed 183 lives on August 26.
The little woman, whose beginning identify was Aliza, was solely weeks outdated on the time her mom and father died within the assault that was claimed by the native chapter of the Islamic State group.
Amid the carnage, a teenage boy grabbed her and carried her onto a US navy flight taking Afghans and stranded expatriates to Doha, a Qatari official mentioned.
She discovered a brand new house in Qatar’s Dreama orphanage, whereas her elder brother and two sisters stayed again in Afghanistan.
Maryam was the youngest of about 200 Afghan kids to be evacuated alone on the flights that carried tens of hundreds out of Afghanistan.
“We took them in and gave them specialised care,” mentioned the Qatari official, talking on situation of not being recognized.
“We labored with UNICEF to see if there have been any relations.”
The UN kids’s company was rapidly besieged with frantic requests from households again in Afghanistan searching for lacking family.
DNA exams
Niazi and the opposite three orphaned kids had been again in Afghanistan, the place the Taliban put in a authorities for what they named the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
Six weeks after the large Kabul bomb blast, UN sleuths thought they’d the newborn’s id.
“They contacted us to hold out DNA exams,” the Qatari official mentioned.
Transporting the genetic take a look at outcomes between Doha and Kabul to hunt a match took extra time, as Niazi waited for months to get a passport from the brand new Taliban authorities so he might get his household to Qatar.
Now arrived within the Gulf state, Niazi mentioned he would begin the method of transferring to the US, collectively along with his spouse and the whole of eight kids now of their care.
“We simply need to be someplace secure,” he informed AFP.
Social employees will give him and the siblings progressively elevated entry to Maryam, to allow them to slowly get to know one another.
Niazi mentioned the little woman will maintain her new identify as a result of it’s the one she solutions to.
Different kids on the Qatar orphanage have additionally been reunited with relations.
A 3-year-old boy there has joined his father in Canada after a Qatari diplomat recognised him from a missing-child photograph.
A lot of the different kids had been aged no less than eight, and plenty of have now both joined family or been adopted by households in the US, Canada or Europe.
At one stage hundreds of Afghans had been in short-term shelters in Doha ready for international locations to take them. Now there are solely about 15 left, the Qatari official mentioned.
Tons of extra Afghans are nonetheless at a US navy base in Qatar, lots of them newer arrivals, nonetheless awaiting the possibility to seek out new houses overseas.