‘Every

Sayed* cannot forget the chaos of his final hours at Kabul airport – the surging masses of people trying to board any flight they could, his own desperate, unsuccessful pleading to board an Australian flight – showing the 449 visa he’d been hastily granted to enter the country.

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A year later, still clinging to that 449 visa, he is yet to find a way to Australia. He is stranded in a refugee camp in the Netherlands, his family remain in hiding in Afghanistan, fearful of the Taliban insurgents hunting him.

He is one of hundreds of Afghan nationals bearing visas for Australia for whom the harried escape from a collapsing republican Afghanistan has descended into a grinding, uncertain wait to find a way, finally, to Australia.

Many are stranded in the neighbouring countries of Pakistan and Iran, semi-legal and fearful, eking out a penurious existence on the margins. Waiting.

But the number of Afghans seeking to come to Australia far outstrips the humanitarian places. The government has pleaded for “patience”, and for people to remain safe.

‘We relied on each other’

The Taliban came, Sayed says, with astonishing swiftness.

The night the Taliban swept into Kandahar, violently retaking control of the city they regard as their spiritual home, Sayed was just minutes ahead of them.

As rumours spread that the Taliban were resurgent and would ultimately win the months-long battle for the city, Sayed scrambled aboard a bus to Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital and the city supposedly most impregnable to the Taliban’s sweep north.

A year since fleeing Kabul: ‘Now my children can grow up in peace’Read more

It would prove to be false hope. Within days, Kabul would also fall.

On the journey north, Sayed carried with him items that were deeply compromising: the “night letters” left by the Taliban warning he would be killed for his work on behalf of the foreign “infidels”; his identity papers; and documents detailing his service for the Australian military.

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These were vital for securing whatever sort of future he could, but also potentially incriminating. They were, Sayed says, a risk worth taking.

Sayed had spent three years – between 2010 and 2013 – working alongside Australian troops, an interpreter on their frontlines, serving on combat missions in the dust of Uruzgan, before a decade serving the broader coalition mission, working at Kandahar’s sprawling military airfield.

He carries the certificates of appreciation, signed by his commanders, lauding his “first-rate skills”, and describing him as “an example for your fellow countrymen”.

day I am fearful’: Afghans with Australian visas wait in limbo a year after the fall of Kabul