Rush of Afghan evacuees to Qatar leaves many crammed in hot hangar

DOHA, Qatar — The crush of civilians fleeing Afghanistan has threatened to overwhelm the air base here where most have been flown, leaving many evacuees crammed in a sweltering hangar without adequate toilets and showers as U. S. officials scramble to expand capacity and open new receiving points in the Middle East and Europe. The military temporarily halted flights from the still-chaotic Kabul airport Friday when conditions at the Qatari base threatened to reach dangerous levels. Civilians inside the base said some people had been moved to trailers and tents in other parts of the facility and others boarded onward flights to processing facilities in the United States and elsewhere. Flights to Doha had resumed by Friday night.“I haven’t slept for four days and four nights,” said Sayed Harris Khelwati, 31, who arrived Wednesday night on an American C-17. “There aren’t cots for everybody. You just lay down where you can.”Khelwati, who was reached by phone Saturday, said conditions had grown more dire as arrivals poured in faster than officials could move them through. He posted a video showing nearly every square foot of the massive structure packed with people sitting, squatting and laying among their plastic bags and luggage. At various times, some evacuees tried to rush to the front of processing lines as military personnel struggled to maintain order with megaphones, he said. At the peak of crowding Friday night, when it was still 94 degrees outside the metal hangar, some evacuees held up signs reading “I can’t breathe,” he said.“We’re really grateful to the soldiers,” Khelwati said. “But there’s just a lot of frustration. You lose your country, and some people got here without even a backpack. We don’t have any information about where we’re going or when.”Conditions had eased slightly Saturday, he said, seemingly from a combination of faster processing and the slowed flow in new arrivals. A U. S. government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer specifics, said the military has increased the number of portable toilets for evacuees and ordered 175 more, increased the number of beds in air-conditioned space to 3,000, and increased the delivery of water bottles. The chaos reflects the degree to which the American government was caught flat-footed by an operation that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley described this week as one the largest civilian evacuations in U. S. military history. President Biden said Friday that some 13,000 people have been airlifted from Afghanistan since Aug. 14, on top of 5,000 in the two previous weeks as Taliban forces carried out their lightning takeover of the country. The flow is expected to continue for weeks. Officials are straining to beef up capacity of all stages of the evacuee processing system, looking for additional places to land the Afghans they fly out of Kabul, personnel to process them and then secondary locations to take them to. Bill Urban, a spokesman for U. S.


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