Safely out of Afghanistan after harrowing trip

A Seattle man is still waiting for his family to come back tonight, but at least he knows they are safely out of Afghanistan.

This Seattle man again asked us to conceal his identity, as his wife’s family still remains in Afghanistan and those who helped her get out are still at risk.

“They tried so many times to get through those gates and couldn’t,” he said

But his wife, their daughter and other family members finally made it onto a flight.  He got a phone call from his wife on Thursday night.

“The sense and the feeling that came over my body of thank goodness, you know, it was an incredible feeling,” he said.

But with the chaos outside, how did they safely get inside? We asked if soldiers went outside the airport to retrieve them.

“Yeah, exactly. Right. There were people out there to help them,” he responded.

The Army’s 82nd Airborne released  pictures of people whom troops retrieved by using their Chinook helicopters to pick them up far from the airport chaos. The man we talked with would not say if his family got to the airport this way.

His wife describes a grueling journey, landing in Qatar and taking off for Bahrain because Qatar was too crowded. Then they landed back in Qatar and spent 16 hours inside the plane on the ground before they could step outside.

“They spent a very long time in a plane, very long time on the tarmac. But, at the end of the day, they are in safe hands,” the man said.

Having escaped the danger of Afghanistan, his family is now at Ramstein Air Force base in Germany. There’s no word yet on when his wife and the others will get home to Seattle.

“She’s just, you know, ready to continue the journey to get home. Right. She just wants to, you know, she’s just, for some reason still scared. She just wants to be able to be on U.S. soil,” he said.

©2021 Cox Media Group