Doha: A Qatari orphanage has reunited a little Afghan girl with her family after she was forced onboard an evacuation flight from Kabul in 2021 after her parents were killed in a bombing.
The girl, now believed to be about 21 months old and given the name Maryam by the orphanage, saw her uncle Yaar Mohammad Niazi and her brother and two sisters again for the first time. “I didn’t know if we would ever find her again, and now I am overcome” with emotion, said Niazi, aged 40 and with four children of his own. “When I held her, I told myself she was alive.” Maryam had been the subject of a desperate search since the chaos of August 2021, when the Taliban seized over Kabul and caused a mass exodus. When Maryam's parents were killed on August 26 in an explosion and gun conflict at Kabul airport, they were among those who were attempting to evacuate with their four children.
The little girl, whose birth name was Aliza, was only weeks old at the time her mother and father died in the attack that was claimed by the local chapter of the IS group. A teenage kid reportedly grabbed her in the midst of the mayhem and carried her onto a US military plane bound for Doha with Afghans and stranded foreigners, according to a Qatari official. Her older brother and two sisters remained in Afghanistan, while she found a new home at the Dreama orphanage in Qatar.