Canada will 'exhaust every effort' to get people out of Kabul, says minister

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Canada's Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship says the country will try to get as many people out of Afghanistan as quickly as it can, but didn't provide details on what exactly that process might look like. 

"We are working tirelessly with our coalition partners to resume flights, we'll keep running them for as long as we can, we'll get as many out as we possibly can, as safely as we can," said Minister Marco Mendicino.

He said Canada is trying to remove as many people as possible, "focusing on the locally engaged staff, the interpreters and Afghans who supported the Canadian mission."

Mendicino told The Current's guest host Nora Young that Canada has been able to get 1,000 people out of the country, but said getting more out is challenging. 

People have been trying to flee the country since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, and President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.

"We want to evacuate more, but we also have to acknowledge that the situation on the ground is precarious at any given moment in time," said Mendicino.

"We worry about the security of our Canadian officials and particularly the armed forces who are moving flights in and out."

Communication needed

Retired general Dennis Thompson is part of a group of veterans helping get Afghan interpreters and their families out of the country. He is a 39-year veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces and served as a NATO commander in Kandahar. 

Thompson said Canada likely has only until coalition forces leave at the end of the month to get people out.

He said there are about 800 people he's hoping to help leave. But he says he wants more communication from the government. 

"We provided a number of lists of names, but we don't get any feedback," said Thompson.

"We're not really sure who's actually on their vetted list, which is critical because we don't want to give out false hope to families that are trying to make their way here to Canada."

Mendicino said his department has been communicating with the Department of National Defence, which has been communicating with volunteers like Thompson. When asked, he didn't say if Canada would be able to extricate the people on Thompson's list. 

Help for Hazara

Ali Mazard, who lives in Ottawa but was born in Afghanistan, still has family in the war-torn nation. He's Hazara, an ethnic minority group that has been targeted by the Taliban. 

"It's frightening," said Mazard. He said it brings back trauma from the '90s, when Hazara were killed by the Taliban. 

"People are still living with the trauma of that experience, and now [the Taliban] are back and people are stuck there." 

When asked, minister Mendicino wouldn't say whether Hazara were a specific part of the evacuation plan, but in a news release from Aug. 13, Canada committed to implementing, "special immigration program for Afghans who contributed to Canada's efforts in Afghanistan."

The release also said the government would introduce a special program to "focus on particularly vulnerable groups that are already welcomed to Canada through existing resettlement streams, including women leaders, human rights defenders, journalists, persecuted religious minorities, LGBTI individuals, and family members of previously resettled interpreters."

Mendicino said there will also be a lot of refugees who have already made it out of Afghanistan who will need homes, and Canada will focus on finding them a place. 

"We were the first country to launch a program to welcome up to 20,000 Afghan refugees who fled and are in third countries, focussing on women, girls and targeted minorities, including Hazaras and Sikhs and others," said Mendicino.

"And we're going to move heaven and earth to help them. We know that there is a need."

Written by Philip Drost. Produced by Alex Zabjek, Kaity Brady, and Ashley Fraser.