The first Afghans exfiltrated from Kabul by France arrived in Paris

Published on : 08/19/2021 – 01:35

The first Afghans brought to safety by France after the fall of the country at the hands of the Taliban arrived Wednesday August 18 at the Parisian airport of Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle.

An Air Force plane carrying more than 200 passengers, including 25 French and a large majority of Afghans, including a significant number of women and children, landed shortly before 19 h GMT.

This is the second arrival in Paris of a flight from the airlift set up by France to evacuate French and Afghans from the country fallen into the hands of the Taliban. An operation that could last several more days. A first flight on Monday carried mainly French people.

President Emmanuel Macron welcomed their arrival in a tweet. “We owe it to you. Welcome,” he wrote.

On their arrival, the exfiltrated Afghans will be taken care of by the French Office for Immigration and Integration (Ofii) and the France Terre d’Asile association, both of which refused to provide details of their whereabouts. accommodation.

Vaccination

Arrivals not vaccinated against Covid will be subject to screening tests and will have to respect a 10-day quarantine, the authorities said. In addition, they will be offered vaccination.

These exfiltrators were escorted Wednesday at the end of a delicate operation conducted by French forces from the French embassy in Kabul to the airport where they took place in an A400M plane to the French military base in the United Arab Emirates. Base that they left during the day aboard another plane to arrive in France in the evening.

These are people “who were threatened and whose commitment deserved France to offer them asylum,” Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on BFMTV.

To these are added 25 French, that is to say “a large part of the people, of French nationality as Afghan, who had taken refuge within the building of the French embassy in Kabul”, had specified the head of diplomacy. French earlier today.

“To our armies, police officers and diplomatic teams who organize these sensitive operations, thank you. We continue,” Emmanuel Macron tweeted during the day.

Several more days

And the French airlift continues to operate, with a new flight between the Emirates and France scheduled for Thursday, with 120 people on board, again mainly Afghans, according to a diplomatic source.

“And we will continue as much as possible”, declared Jean-Yves Le Drian, stressing the French desire to allow the maximum number of Afghans committed in favor of rights and civil society to be able to leave the country and evoking a horizon of several days.

“This operation which allows the protection of Afghans who it was imperative to protect is the success of an important collective work”, rejoiced the head of French diplomacy.

Operation Apagan

But the file immediately resumed a political aspect, with offensive statements by the socialist mayor of Lille, Martine Aubry, who claimed to have worked with the Ministry of Culture to establish lists of Afghan personalities to be repatriated.

On Tuesday, 41 French and foreign nationals had already been exfiltrated from Kabul by France, thanks to the airlift put in place after the takeover by the Taliban on Sunday. They arrived at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle at the end of the afternoon, in an army A310.

The exfiltration operation, called Apagan, mobilizes two Air Force planes on the Emirates-Kabul section and two others for flights between the Emirates and France.

According to the Élysée, nearly 800 Afghans were welcomed on French soil as part of the “duty” of protection, between 2001 and 2014. In addition, between May and July 2021, 625 people who worked for the French embassy in Kabul (employees and families included) arrived in France, according to the same source.

With AFP