An Afghan girl is reunited with her family in Doha after a year and a half of separation

Separated from her parents, who died in an explosion at Kabul airport during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, an Afghan girl is finally reunited with her brothers and uncle in Qatar on Monday.

Fighting back tears, Bar Muhammad Niazi held his niece, Eliza, in his arms. He had last seen her a year and a half ago.

And on August 26, 2021, Elisa’s parents, Muhammad and Samira Niazi, took their children to Kabul airport in the hope of escaping on one of the evacuation flights after the United States withdrew from the country and the Taliban seized power, but an explosion took their lives while the children survived.

The US military has left behind thousands who wanted to flee, many of them America’s allies who aided the war effort for 20 years, and the Biden administration says reuniting Afghan families is among its top priorities, as US officials continue to negotiate evacuations from Afghanistan, though Although there is no diplomatic or military representation there.

Aliza narrowly escaped the suicide bombing at Kabul airport that killed at least 169 Afghans and 13 American soldiers.

She was only a month old at the time, and she recently got an American-Qatari evacuation flight. She was separated from her siblings, but their uncle found them through social media.

After her arrival in Doha, the child was transferred to the “Dreama” center for orphan care in the city, where she was given the name “Maryam”. The Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs coordinated with the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to find her family, and when they found her family, they sent a DNA test to Kabul to confirm the kinship.

According to an official who was familiar with the case, the procedures for obtaining the family’s passports to bring them to Doha began at the time, and Alisa’s two sisters and brother, in addition to her uncle and aunts, came successively on Monday.

The family will visit Eliza regularly at the center for a week, in order to get to know each other, before starting the procedures for leaving the country, as the family hopes to go to the United States of America, to Britain, or after that.

Elisa is the last minor without a foster family to be reunited with his family in Qatar.

The Dreama Foundation, located in the center of Doha, provides its services from a humanitarian standpoint to everyone who lives on the land of Qatar, regardless of their nationality, religion or race.

As for those who are covered by this care, they are: those whose parents are unknown, whose father is unknown only, children whose parents have died, and victims of family rift, and they are those whom social research proves the impossibility of living among their families, such as the homeless, children of prisoners, and the mentally ill.