At an Islamabad hotel, Afghans who worked for Canada’s military await a new life

By Stewart Bell and Jeff Semple – Global News, October 14, 2021 — Two days before he was scheduled to board a plane for Toronto, Mohammad Ismail stood in a cramped hotel room in Islamabad, packing his belongings into a small black suitcase.

Undated photo of Gen. Jonathan Vance, Canada’s former chief of defence staff, with Mohammad “Captain Smiley” Ismail (right).

A pair of kid’s shoes were on the window ledge. Ismail bought them for his eight-year-old son, who was accompanying him to Canada, along with his wife. New shoes for a new life in a new country.

Ismail spent six years working for the Canadian Armed Forces in Kandahar, leading the security team that guarded Camp Nathan Smith. The soldiers called him Captain Smiley.

“I’m a happy man,” explained Ismail, wiry and unshaven with sunglasses perched over thick black hair. He is 35, and like many Afghans, could pass for a decade older.

But as the Afghan forces collapsed over the summer amid a U.S. military withdrawal, Taliban filled the streets, and it was hard for Ismail to stay positive.

He feared his work for the army that fought the Taliban meant he would never feel safe, so he turned to the Canadians he had once protected to see if they might return the favor.

Day after day, he stood in a filthy sewage canal outside Kabul airport, shouting out his name at the international troops, telling them he was Captain Smiley and he needed help. Nobody answered.

After escaping Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, men who worked for the Canadian Forces meet at their hotel in Islamabad. Stewart Bell/Global News

Then in late September, a network of Canadian veterans came to the rescue. The family was loaded into an SUV at night and ferried out of Kabul in a convoy.

They crossed the border into Pakistan, to an Islamabad hotel where Afghans who worked for the Canadian Forces as interpreters, plumbers, mechanics, cooks and drivers, were waiting to come to Canada.

The piano muzak pumping into the atrium echoed around marble columns and floors as Afghan men checked their phones for updates on their immigration cases.

They lingered in the lobby, their kids darting around them. They tried to imagine the Canada that awaited them. And they shared stories from home about Taliban vengeance.

Ismail said the Taliban had come to his house three times since he fled Kandahar, but the elderly woman who now lives there covered for him, saying he was in the north on business.

Because of their work for Canada, the Afghans were convinced they would not be alive had they stayed home, and they worried that, if their immigration papers didn’t come soon, they would be sent back to an Afghanistan run by militants who view them as enemy collaborators.

But they also knew they were the lucky ones.

Hundreds like them remain in Afghanistan, holed up in a handful of Kabul safe houses operated by a consortium of non-profit groups run by Canadian military veterans.

The veterans said they were in contact with more than 10,000 Afghans who had applied to come to Canada under the federal government’s special immigration program.

Since Canada ended evacuation flights in August, the veterans have been able to extract a few hundred of them, but 1,700 remain in Kabul safe houses.

“They don’t have a route out at the moment,” said Tim Laidler, who served in Afghanistan and now heads the Veterans Transition Network, one of the groups helping the Afghans.

Challenge coins that Canadian agencies gave to Mohammad Ismail when he guarded Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar. Stewart Bell/Global News

Either they lack approval from Canadian immigration authorities, or they have it but can’t leave Afghanistan because they don’t have a passport, a requirement for entry into Pakistan, he said.

“It’s been tough to get people out of the city,” said Laidler, whose organization is supported by donations.

He said the government needed to act soon.

“This is not a safe place for people to stay long term. We can’t just slowly go through a regular immigration process. We need to move very quickly while there’s an opportunity to get as many people out as possible,” he said.

“We know that people have been targeted, and every day there’s new people being killed in Afghanistan.”

The Liberal government has vowed to resettle 40,000 Afghan refugees through a special immigration program. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said it was working day and night to process applications, and 9,400 had been approved.

But only a quarter of those have made it to Canada.

“The most significant challenge is the extreme volatility of the situation on the ground, and ever-changing circumstances around documentation required at checkpoints and international crossings, which make it exceedingly difficult to get Afghan refugees safely out of the country now that it is under the control of the Taliban,” said spokesperson Peter Liang.

Several Afghans who worked for the Canadian forces told Global News their families had been targeted.

Mohammad Ismail (centre) at Camp Nathan Smith, Kandahar.

Originally published by Global News on October 14, 2021.