New York: Sohail Ali Ahmadi, the Afghan baby who was handed to the US soldieries by his parents during the Kabul airport chaos is still missing as per report in NDTV .
It was on August 19, that the Afghani couple Mirza Ali Ahmadi and Suraya found themselves and their five children in a chaotic situation between a helpless crowd outside the gates of the Kabul airport in Afghanistan when a U.S. soldier, asked if they needed help.
Fearing that their two-month old baby boy Sohail would get harmed in chaos, the couple handed him to the soldier, thinking they would soon find a way to the entrance, which was only about 5 metres away.
However at that moment, Ali said, the Taliban - which had quickly taken over the control of the country after the U.S. troops withdrew - began pushing back hundreds of Afghanis at the airport and It took the rest of his family more than a half hour to get to the other side of the airport fence.
Once they were inside, their baby boy was nowhere to be found.
Ali, who said he served at the U.S embassy for 10 years as a security guard desperately began asking every official that came his way about his baby's whereabouts.
He then said a military commander told him the airport was an extremely dangerous place for a baby and that he might have been taken to a special place for children. But when they got there it was empty.
"He walked with me all around the airport to search everywhere," Ali said in an interview through a translator. He said he couldn't pick the commander's name, as he didn't know English and was taking help from Afghan colleagues from the embassy to communicate. Three days went by.
"I spoke to maybe more than 20 people," he said. "Every officer - military or civilian - I came across I was asking about my baby."
Ali said one of the civilian officials he spoke to told him the baby might have been evacuated by himself. "They said 'we don't have resources to keep the baby here.'"
Ali, 35, Suraya, 32, and their other children, 17, 9, 6 and 3 years old, were placed in an evacuation flight to Qatar and then to Germany as they eventually landed in the United States. The Ali's are now at Fort Bliss in the state of Texas with other Afghan refugees waiting to be resettled somewhere in the country. They have no relatives here.
Ever since Sohail went missing dates are a blur, Ali said. He tells every person he encounters - aid workers, U.S. officials - about his baby. "Everyone promises they will do their best, but they are just promises," he said.
An Afghan refugee support group also made a "Missing Baby" sign carrying Sohail's image on it and are spreading it among their networks, hoping that someone will recognize him.
An official at the U.S. government familiar with the development said the case had been marked for all the agencies involved, including the U.S. bases and foreign locations. The baby was last seen being given to a U.S. soldier during the melee at the Kabul airport but "unfortunately no one can find the child," the official said.
A spokesperson from the Department of Defense and a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which is supervising resettlement efforts, referred queries on the situation to the State Department, as the separation happened overseas.
A spokesperson of State Department said the government is working with the international community and international partners "to explore every avenue to locate the child, which includes an international amber alert that was issued through the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children."
Suraya, who also spoke with the help of a translator, said she cries most of the time and that her other children are in distress.
"All I am doing is thinking about my child," Suraya said. "Everyone that is calling me, my mother, my father, my sister, they all comfort me and say 'don't worry, God is kind, your son will be found.'"
