Jesuits pray for Afghanistan, stranded confreres

By Matters India Reporter

New Delhi: Two Jesuits stranded in strife-torn Afghanistan have sought prayers as the Taliban militants took control of the mountainous landlocked country.

“Thank you for your continuous prayers for our safety. The way situation is changing in the country, it is anyone’s imagination … safety does not make sense here. It is a chaotic situation,” Father Jerome Sequeira, the country head of the Jesuit mission in Afghanistan, says in a letter to his friends and colleagues.

Uncertainty reigned Afghanistan on August 16 a day after its president fled and the Taliban installed themselves in the presidential palace. With thousands desperate to flee the country, airport in the capital city of Kabul was a scene of chaos.

Afghanistan fell to the Taliban after the United States ended its 20 years of operations there.

Father Sequeira had gone to the Kabul airport to take the 10:45 flight to India. “The resembled a chaotic railway station,” he told Matters India August 16 evening from “a secure place” in the city.

“I came to this country in 2006. I have never such a breakdown of system in the past 15 years,” he added.

In his letter to friends, he narrated how he had to drag his luggage as large crowd and vehicles filled the road.

“Thousands of people are trying to flee. I managed to reach the second gate but then Taliban were shooting in the air and trying to control the crowd. Before, my reaching, thousands of people had managed to enter the airport building but entire airport staff had abandoned the place. Without any security check and boarding passes people had gone into the flight,” Father Sequeira continued.

He referred images in social media platforms showing people sitting on the wings of the aircraft. “In this chaotic situation no flight will land at the moment. Seeing this senseless situation, no country will dare to fly to Kabul at the moment. It was a terrifying experience,” said the Jesuit priest who works for the Jesuit Refugee Service.

The other Jesuit Father Robert Rodrigues from Karnataka is stuck in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan. He had got into Bamiyan airport August 15 evening, checked in and waiting for the UN flight to land. The flight from Bamiyan to Kabul takes only 25 minutes.

“The situation changed so dramatically, the entire airport security personnel just abandoned the airport. We made sure the safety of Robert and today he is much better and relaxed. We seeking possible ways to evacuate him from Bamiyan to Kabul through the help of UN agencies,” Father Sequeira said.

According to him, the Taliban is busy in occupying government systems and putting their own persons. “They are not harming the civilians at the moment but it will come once they have fully captured all the systems of the country. They have the list of all organizations and profile too. In some places they have started door-to-door enquiries about the personnel of the organization,” Father Sequeira’s letter explains.

He said the Jesuit Refugee Service has indefinitely suspended its activities in Afghanistan “and all are hibernating in their homes or communities.”

“All flights care cancelled and it all depends on the agreement between UN bodies and the Taliban. The entire JRS body is putting all efforts for evacuating me and Robert. At the moment, I am safe,” Father Sequeira writes.

Did the international community invested so much and established so much in the past 20 years, to handover to the Taliban in a matter of days? “Beyond my imagination to believe,” says the Jesuit priest.

Father Sequeira says nobody was prepared for the Taliban takeover of Kabul. “With the way the Taliban took over provinces, all thought it would take some 90 days for them to reach Kabul. But they swept over the capital in ten days,” he adds.

According to him, the Taliban militants have taken control of 33 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.

The Jesuits came to Afghanistan in 2004 to help the Afghan people rebuild their war-ravaged nation through education.

The JRS launched programs to educate the youth, especially the internally displaced persons, returnees from neighboring countries and other vulnerable sections.

The Jesuits have trained more than 300 young teachers and through them were educating more than 25,000 children in four provinces.

Young girls were major beneficiaries of the Jesuit mission in a country still haunted by memories of the Taliban’s misogynist rule before it was toppled in 2001,

The Indian Jesuits were also involved in livelihood interventions.

The Jesuits had their troubles too. On June 2, 2014, suspected Taliban fighters abducted Father Alexis Prem Kumar, who was serving as the JRS director, while visiting a school in Herat province. He was released in February 2015 after the Indian government intervened.