Good morning. We go inside the daring operation to rescue Afghans from the Taliban – more on that below, along with Alberta’s sputtering renewable energy sector and Canada’s sharp cuts to immigration. But first:
Today’s headlines
- A nursing company tapped into Ottawa’s Indigenous businesses program, despite not being Indigenous
- Trump’s Madison Square Garden event turns into a rally with crude and racist insults
- Patients demand action into investigation of New Brunswickers’ unexplained neurological symptoms
Naweed Haidari with his wife, Nelab, and their young children in Ottawa.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
Afghanistan
A lifeline in Kabul
In July, 2021, Janice Dickson, The Globe’s international affairs reporter, fielded a desperate e-mail from a group of Afghan drivers who’d worked for the Canadian embassy. The Taliban was about to take over their country – and the 11 drivers weren’t included in the Canadian government’s evacuation list. They shared photos with Dickson: smiling in Canada 150 T-shirts inside the embassy; holding up hockey sticks on an outdoor court. “I wrote a story about them, and they were added to the government’s list,” Dickson told me. “Then I spent years following the cases of the people who were left behind.”
This weekend, The Globe published the result of her exhaustive reporting – a tense, intimate account of Operation Abraham, the years-long rescue mission orchestrated by volunteers in Ottawa to save more than 1,500 Afghans at risk of Taliban reprisals. They were translators and journalists, human rights activists and former national police, and they all needed the same crucial item: a passport, which would have to be printed from Afghanistan’s embassy in Moscow. Dickson traces the journey of those passports across Russia, through Iran and into Kabul, where a woman named Nelab Haidari, then six months pregnant, slipped them under her burqa to escape the detection of a Taliban guard.
“There were so many aspects to this story, so many players involved, and the stakes were so high,” Dickson told me. “If just one thing went wrong, their whole operation would fall apart.” Her feature reveals the balletic co-ordination required for this international effort, and is well worth reading in full. But here’s an introduction to a few of Operation Abraham’s key players.
Farouq Samim at his home office in Ottawa.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
The conductor: Farouq Samim
Before he left Kabul 15 years ago, Samim worked as a fixer for international journalists, a job that was part reporter, part guide, part communications-in-conflict whisperer. Once he learned the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, he connected with Ottawa lawyers Lewis Retik and Jacques Shore. Together, they frantically worked the phones to help Samim’s family members and former colleagues get out. Over the next several months, their list of people to extract ballooned to include judges, teachers and diplomats.
Not everyone inside Afghanistan could access the internet to complete their passport application forms. So after wrapping up his day job in Ontario’s health ministry, Samim would retreat to his basement office and work until the early hours filling out the papers. He translated applications from Dari and Pashto into English. He gathered personal information over Whatsapp. Getting applicants’ signatures proved to be a challenge; mostly, Samim forged them. Then he sent off the applications to Retik, who would review them carefully, prepare affidavits, and forward them to Afghanistan’s embassy in Moscow.
Ahmad with an Afghan passport.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
The mover: Ahmad
A small team at the embassy, led by Ambassador Said T. Jawad, pulled equally long hours printing off passports before the Taliban could revoke their diplomatic status. But those passports still needed to make their way out of Moscow, and for that, Operation Abraham turned to the brother of one of Samim’s Afghan friends. Ahmad (a pseudonym), who’d been living in Russia, collected nearly 300 passports from the embassy and booked a midday flight to Tehran in December, 2021. From there, he would drive through the night to Mashhad, a city in northern Iran near its Afghanistan border, where he’d pay a truck driver to smuggle the passports into the country.
First, though, he had to get through airport security. He wrapped his black suitcase in thick layers of plastic, gambling that the guards wouldn’t hold up the line by asking him to unravel it. When a border official pulled him over, demanding to know about the dozens of small booklets the X-ray machine had picked up, Ahmad had an explanation ready: They were brochures for a food exhibition taking place in Tehran. He began to describe the event; the official waved him off. At 2:33 in the morning in Ottawa, Samim received a text that Ahmad was about to board his plane.
Naweed Haidari in Kabul in December, 2021, with some of the passports smuggled from Russia.Supplied
The distributors: Naweed and Nelab Haidari
The bundle of passports moved east by truck, rickshaw and bus towards Kabul, where they were to be collected by one of Samim’s nephews, Naweed Haidari. He set out with his wife, Nelab, who’d reasoned that the Taliban were less likely to search their Corolla if a woman was present inside. After they completed the handover, Nelab, a former teacher, tucked the package under her burqa and held it against her pregnant belly as they drove through Taliban checkpoints. For days after their return home, Naweed discreetly delivered the passports, some by hand and some by unsuspected bus drivers paid twice the price of a passenger ticket.
Then the Haidaris waited – and waited – for Canada’s immigration department to approve their applications, rarely leaving their house in Kabul. By the time they arrived in Ottawa in March, 2023, they had a one-year-old baby in tow. It took another 15 months for Ahmad to join them, at which point Dickson, who’d been following Operation Abraham closely, began to write about its success. “I couldn’t say anything about it until the man who undertook this daring mission made it safely to Canada,” she told me.
You can read much more about that mission in her story for The Globe.
The Shot
‘It’s not a level playing field in Alberta.’
Cattle and wind turbines in Knox County, Texas.Sandy Carson/The Globe and Mail
While oil-rich Texas has transformed into a leader in renewable energy, Alberta hit the brakes on its once-booming sector. Read more from The Globe’s Jeffrey Jones on the consequences here.
The Week
What we’re following
Today: Saskatchewan decides its next premier in an election that has centered on the province’s fractured health care system.
Today: One province over, Alberta starts its fall sitting, just days before United Conservative Party members are meant to gather in Red Deer to vote on Danielle Smith’s leadership.
Tomorrow: It’s the Bloc Québécois’ deadline for the Liberals to pass bills on seniors benefits and supply management – otherwise, Yves-François Blanchet says he’ll work with opposition parties to bring the government down.
Thursday: Statistics Canada releases its August GDP report, as some business leaders warn new immigration targets will make hiring more difficult in key industries. Immigration Minister Marc Miller spoke about those new targets with Menaka Raman-Wilms on The Decibel this morning.
Thursday: I myself will spend the night sneaking Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, but you can vote for your favourite candy in The Globe’s ultimate Halloween bracket.