DM Monitoring
KABUL: The first international commercial plane has departed from Kabul airport since Western countries finished evacuations from Afghanistan 10 days ago, with a top Qatari official saying the airport is “fully up and running”. The airport is “about 90 per cent ready for operations but its reopening is planned gradually, Mutlaq al-Qahtani, Qatar’s special envoy to Afghanistan, said on Thursday speaking from the tarmac.
“This is a historic day in the history of Afghanistan as Kabul airport is fully operational. We have been faced by huge challenges but we can now say that the airport is fit for navigation,” he said.
The Qatar Airways plane had arrived in Kabul earlier on Thursday carrying aid. It departed for Doha, Qatar with passengers, including a large group of foreigners on board.
Qatari officials earlier said that Afghanistan’s Taliban government would allow between 100 and 150 Westerners, including Americans, to fly out from Kabul in the coming hours.
Qatari and Turkish technical teams have helped restore operations at the airport, which was damaged during the chaotic evacuations of tens of thousands of people to meet the US troop withdrawal deadline of August 31. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid thanked Qatar for its assistance in making the airport operational and for humanitarian aid to Afghanistan.
“In the very near future, the airport will be ready for all sorts of flights including commercial flights,” he said, standing beside Qatari officials at the airport tarmac.
Al-Qahtani earlier said the Qatar Airways plane would be the first international commercial flight from Kabul airport since American forces left at the end of August. “Call it what you want, a charter or a commercial flight, everyone has tickets and boarding passes,” al-Qahtani said from the tarmac, adding that another flight would take off on Friday. “Hopefully, life is becoming normal in Afghanistan.”
Alex Macheras, aviation analyst, told Al Jazeera that it was a charter flight. “This is not a commercial flight whereby the airline is selling tickets to inaudible paying passengers as part of a schedule,” he said,
“Instead the airline has been paid by the government, which in coordination with other governments, offers almost rescue tickets if you like, to those who are stuck by operating individual, one-off special, charter flights. We see this all around the world when there is bad weather in places, when airlines go bust, and so on.”
The departure of a large group of Americans, a first since the US withdrawal, would also signal that US officials have come to an arrangement with the new Taliban rulers. In recent days, there had been a standoff between the Taliban and organisers of several charter planes who had hoped to evacuate Americans and at-risk Afghans from an airport in the northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif.
The Taliban has said it would let passengers with valid travel documents leave, but that many of those at the airport in northern Afghanistan did not have such papers.
Following the evacuation of more than 100,000 people from the country in the wake of the troop withdrawal, extensive damage at Kabul airport raised questions over how soon the transport hub could resume for commercial flights.
