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Hundreds queue for passports in Kabul in bid to leave

KABUL • Hundreds of people braved sub-zero temperatures in Afghanistan’s capital to queue outside the passport office early yesterday, a day after the Taliban government announced it would resume issuing travel documents.

Many began their wait the previous night and most stood patiently in a single file – some desperate to leave the country for medical treatment, others to escape the Islamists’ renewed rule.

Tense Taliban personnel periodically charged at crowds that formed at the front of the queue and at a nearby roadblock.

The local branch of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria terror group – the Taliban’s principal enemy – killed more than 150 people in late August when people massed at Kabul airport in a desperate bid to leave during the early days of the new regime.

“Our responsibility here is to protect people,” Mr Toofan added calmly, his gun pointed towards the ground. “But the people are not cooperating.”

Among those in the queue was Mr Mohammed Osman Akbari, 60, who was urgently trying to reach Pakistan because dilapidated hospitals at home were unable to complete his heart surgery. Medics “put springs in my heart”, he said, referring to a stent. “They need to be removed and it’s not possible here.”

The Taliban initially stopped issuing passports shortly after its return to power, which came as the previous Western-backed regime imploded in the final stages of a United States military withdrawal.

In October, the authorities reopened the passport office in Kabul, only to suspend work days later as a flood of applications caused the biometric equipment to break down.

The office said the issue has been resolved and those whose applications were already being processed can now get their documents.

Ms Mursal Rasooli, 26, was happy to hear the news. “The situation here is not peaceful,” she said, hugging her two-year-old daughter Bibi Hawa close in the biting cold. “If the situation gets worse than this, then we have the passport” and can flee, she added. Her husband is in Iran as he could not find work in Afghanistan.

Issuing passports – and allowing people to leave amid a humanitarian crisis that the United Nations has called an “avalanche of hunger” – is seen as a test of the Taliban’s commitment to the international community.

Meanwhile, the Taliban is pressing donors to restore billions of dollars in aid that was suspended when it came to power.

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