A week of The Taliban recapturing Afghanistan has led to tragic visuals from the country surfacing on social media as residents try to flee the country. One of these many visuals was a heart-breaking video showing a US Marine lifting a baby over a razor wire-topped wall at Kabul’s airport that caught global attention on Friday, amid the chaos of thousands trying to flee Afghanistan newly controlled by the Taliban. The video, which shows the infant, its diaper slipping off, being pulled up by one arm high above a crowd of Afghans seeking to enter the airport, took over social media nearly one week into the airlift to evacuate foreigners and Afghans from the war-torn country. It put a tender edge on the tense evacuation, in which nearly 6,000 heavily armed US troops have taken control of the airport, while their long-time foe the Taliban patrol the streets outside and begin to exercise what many fear will be a harsh and anti-American rule.
According to Forbes, the Department of Defense explained the child needed medical care but has since been safely reunited with its father. The baby is now “safe at the airport” behind the U.S. military’s perimeter, Marine Corps spokesperson Jim Stenger told Forbes. Forbes also reported that neither of the spokespersons offersed any details on whether the baby and father will leave Afghanistan, or if any other family members made it into the airport.
“It was an act of compassion because there was concern about the baby," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby had told AFP.
While the video of that act appeared to be independently filmed, the US military released several other officially approved photographs of soldiers helping out children of people hoping to escape Afghanistan. In one, a soldier in his combat gear sits with a blanketed baby in his arms, smiling at the child like the father of a newborn, while his fellow soldiers stand nearby on alert.
In another, two female American soldiers hold babies in their arms.
Still another depicts one of the US troops giving water to a little boy.
“This is the America we need to be," said US congressman and military veteran Peter Meijer on Twitter of the images.
The official Pentagon images stood out amid a stark lack of independently taken pictures from inside the airport, where thousands of people waited Friday amid difficult conditions to board US C-17 cargo aircraft bound for Qatar. In the Gulf state, they will still face days of waiting to be cleared by US immigration officials.
(With inputs from AFP)
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