The president of the American University of Afghanistan told Newsweek that over 1,000 other students, staff and their relatives are trying to get out.
Almost 150 students of the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) have made it out of the country in recent days, the university’s president told Newsweek. It comes after a report by The New York Times revealed hundreds of current and former students were turned away from Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport after seven hours of waiting for security clearance on Sunday. The massive U.S.-led evacuation of the country ended with the last U.S. soldiers flying out of the airport just before midnight on Monday. AUAF President Dr. Ian Bickford said university officials have been trying to get 1,200 students, staff and relatives out of the country since the Taliban swept into Kabul last month. The campus shut down on August 14 while the Taliban were still on the outskirts of the capital, and Bickford and other foreign staff fled the country. „We have been trying for two weeks to get our students safe passage into the airport to relocate them to other sites—both branches that we are developing and partner universities, where we can reconvene as a community and start to rebuild and help them recover from the experience that they’ve had,“ Bickford told Newsweek.
