As the Taliban captured Kabul in August 2021, thousands of Afghans streamed toward the airport in an attempt to get one of the scarce remaining flights out of the country. Getting into the airport was a daunting task; as essentially the last outpost of U.S. diplomatic and military presence, it was guarded by high walls, barbed wire, and U.S. and other international troops. To even reach the airport, fleeing Afghans had to navigate the surrounding roads and alleyways, patrolled by the Taliban, who determined who could and couldn’t get through.

Among those running this gantlet were five Afghan scientists and engineers, together with their family members, who were at risk of retaliation from the Taliban because they had worked with the National Academies in a U.S.-government-sponsored scientific cooperation program.

The five families — 19 people altogether — were in touch by phone and messaging apps with contacts they called Mr. Mohammed, Mr. Mazar, Mr. Zhia, and Mr. Omar, who monitored the group’s status and tried to provide guidance about points along the airport walls where it might be possible to get in.

In reality, these four guides were two senior staff members at the National Academies, Franklin Carrero-Martinez and Vaughan Turekian. Calling from the U.S., they used multiple pseudonyms to mask their true identities in case the scientists’ phones were confiscated by the Taliban. Over six weeks, Carrero-Martinez and Turekian worked with other Academies staffers to get the scientists to safety in Rwanda.

During a recent webinar produced by the Science and Entertainment Exchange, Turekian described the evacuation — an effort he called “one of the most meaningful things that I know I and a number of my colleagues have ever been a part of.”

Laying the groundwork for evacuation

In mid-August 2021, while in an airport on a layover during a work trip from Europe to the U.S., Turekian and Carrero-Martinez were notified that a number of Afghan scientists and engineers — with whom the Academies had long worked on a USAID-supported program on issues such as water and infrastructure — were potentially under significant threat from the Taliban.

“The obvious thing that we were deeply most concerned about, as we were hearing stories coming in from Afghanistan, was that these people, if they were identified as associated with the Academies or a U.S.-government program, could be at some significant risk,” said Turekian. So they immediately asked Academies communications staff to delete any identifying information about the Afghan scientists and engineers from the institution’s website.

But Carrero-Martinez realized that pages with the scientists’ names were still cached on the internet and may show up in search results. He reached out to a contact who had high-level connections at Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and the tech companies were able to update their cached information so that potentially endangering information about the scientists and engineers didn’t linger in search results.

The Academies staff then realized they would need to actively help the scientists find a way out of Afghanistan. Unlike some Afghans who were broadly recognized as being in danger and at high-priority for evacuation — those who had worked with the U.S. military and high-profile civil society activists — these scientists and engineers, though at risk, weren’t on that wider radar, Turekian said.

“None of us … had ever done evacuations,” he said. “But it was becoming increasingly clear that this risk to these scientists and engineers was such that we really did need to find a way to help them get out of Afghanistan if we could.”

Finding an exit route

The goal was to try to get the scientists and engineers and their families to a place that was not only safe but also welcoming, and where they could use their professional expertise, said Turekian. So they reached out to a colleague who was at one time a senior Rwandan official, to see if relocating the scientists in Rwanda might be an option, and the reply was encouraging.

At the colleague’s suggestion, NAS President Marcia McNutt wrote a letter to Rwandan President Paul Kagame, asking if the scientists and engineers could go to Rwanda not as refugees, but as professionals. Conveyed by the Rwandan ambassador to the U.S., President Kagame’s response to the request was clear: If they could get to Rwanda, these scholars would be welcomed.

While a safe destination now awaited the scientists and engineers, the hardest part of the evacuation lay ahead for those who had agreed to journey with their families to Rwanda. “We had solved the last-mile problem,” said Turekian. “Now, like tens of thousands of other Afghans, they needed to figure out a way to get out, and get out to safety.”

This meant getting the scientists and their families through the late-August crush of people trying to get into Kabul’s airport and onto a flight. Over the course of five days, Turekian, Carrero-Martinez, and a group of their National Academies colleagues stayed in close contact with the scientists and offered advice on when and when not to attempt trips to the airport, based on information they were hearing from contacts on the ground at the airport. They also asked these contacts to speak with soldiers along the wall or at a checkpoint, to alert them to look for the scientists and let them and their families in.

One day brought a victory: One of the scientists managed to get through security and spotted his brother, who had worked with the U.S. military. The brother got the scientist’s whole family through security and into the queue for one of the military flights that would ultimately take them to safety in America.

That same day started several harrowing reversals of fortune for an engineer named Hamid and his wife and three children. A military officer managed to get them past the wall and into line for processing — “a heartening moment,” said Turekian. But after the family spent almost 24 hours in line, making progress, Turekian got another call: They had been thrown out of the airport and into a sewage canal running in front of it. Discouraged, Hamid and his family were heading home.

It soon became clear that the family’s departure, though dismaying, also took them out of harm’s way, explained Turekian. Within hours of their leaving, a suicide bomber struck near the gate and canal where the family had entered and then been ejected from the airport. The explosion took the lives of 170 Afghan citizens and 13 U.S. service members.

To safety at last

The National Academies staff kept trying to find ways to get the families into the airport, but the attempts became riskier and riskier, and the odds of success small, Turekian said. “We were pretty dejected,” he said. “The chances of getting them out of Afghanistan just seemed to drop by the day.”

Assistance came from Transit Initiative, an ad hoc organization formed by a group of women who had formerly worked for USAID in post-conflict environments, including Afghanistan. This organization was working to get a much larger group of families out of the country and to safety. With just hours before the U.S. officially turned over Kabul Airport to the Taliban, the Transit Initiative leadership decided to evacuate their families from the chaotic capital and try to find an exit path from Mazar-e Sharif, a city in the north of Afghanistan. Given that information on the National Academies-linked scholars had been shared with the Taliban, the organization gave them priority transit on a bus north.

The bus made it safely through multiple Taliban checkpoints and arrived in Mazar-e Sharif, said Turekian, but it took a further 30 days to get the scientists and engineers out of Afghanistan. Hamid, the engineer, emerged as the informal leader of the group, and the National Academies’ main contact. “You could just hear in his texts that he was going to keep this thing together,” said Turekian. “He was going to hold together the family, he was going to hold together this group that was now in Mazar.”

Those days in Mazar-e Sharif were filled with frightening reports from different groups, said Turekian, some rumor and some truth — everything from ‘What’s App has been hacked’ to ‘Taliban death squads are going through this city and killing Afghans.’

“All of this is happening, and you feel powerless, and yet you know that you have to continue to provide the guidance to these people who have entrusted you with their lives,” he said.

One night Carrero-Martinez got a message from Transit Initiative that they had room for six people on a chartered flight out of Mazar-e Sharif, and so Hamid and his four family members were given the seats for the evacuation flight. After being briefly caught in a refugee processing center in Abu Dhabi, they made it to Rwanda. Even as Hamid and his family had gotten out, three additional families, two of them with young children, were still in Mazar and became the focus of the National Academies team. Working with different partners, they were able to get the families out of Afghanistan to neighboring countries by air and by land, and then on to Rwanda.

The Afghan scientists and engineers are now teaching and providing advice to students and to research projects at the University of Rwanda. Turekian observed that despite the different cultures, the Afghans and their Rwandan hosts felt a connection because of their countries’ troubled pasts. The vice chancellor at the University of Rwanda, who was given refuge and a place to work at a university in France during the Rwandan genocide, told Turekian and Carrero-Martinez, “We know these people. We know who they are.”

The evacuation was aided not just by Academies staff but also by many scientific colleagues in Pakistan, UAE, and other nations, as well as contacts at the State Department and elsewhere in the U.S. government, who offered advice and worked tirelessly to help, said Turekian.

The evacuation effort has evolved into a new National Academies initiative called “SEED 4 D” (Scientists and Engineers in Exile or Displaced for Development), aimed at helping displaced and exiled scholars remain connected to the global scientific community, while contributing their expertise to development challenges.

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