NEW DELHI: India on Tuesday said it will evacuate its ambassador to Afghanistan Rudrendra Tandon and others in the embassy immediately, given the volatile situation in the country after the withdrawal of the US forces and the susquent collapse of the Afghan government headed by former president Ashraf Ghani.
“In view of the prevailing circumstances, it has been decided that our Ambassador in Kabul and his Indian staff will move to India immediately,” Indian foreign ministry spokesman Arindam Bagchi said in a Twitter post.
The diplomats are to be flown back to India in a Indian Air Force C-17 aircraft, a person familiar with the matter said. According to news reports, a C-17 reached Kabul late Monday.
The moves follow the Taliban taking over Kabul on Sunday and president Asharf Ghani who was backed by India resigning and leaving the country.
The Taliban is seen as backed by Pakistan, India’s arch rival, and is also held responsible for many attacks targeting the Indian embassy and Indian consulates in Jalalabad and Herat. The attack on the Indian embassy in July 2008 was seen as the most devastating, killing two Indian diplomats and two Indo-Tibetan Border Police personnel who were guarding the embassy. An Afghan driver who was ferrying the two diplomats to the embassy was also killed in the suicide car bomb attack which claimed the lives of scores of Afghans on the morning of 7 July, 2008.
Many Indians working in Afghanistan have been killed or kidnapped in the country by groups linked to the Taliban.
The evacuation of the Indian mission in Kabul – the last to be open after India evacuated personnel from Kandahar and Mazar-e-Sharif in recent weeks – shutters all Indian diplomatic operations in Afghanistan. India had last year closed its consulates in Herat and Jalalabad. It also points to the fact that contacts with the Taliban that New Delhi had established in Doha have not been very successful.
