Thursday August 26, 2021
I've Been Thinking:

The Shai Fund in Israel is organizing planes to airlift people out of Afghanistan.

Charmaine Hedding is the president of the fund and she works out of her home in the coastal Israeli town of Zichron Yaakov. Hedding is working feverishly to help extract thousands of people desperate to leave Afghanistan.

Hedding is an emergency response specialist and the Shai Fund is a humanitarian organization based in Israel and registered in the United States.

She revealed that her organization is heading up logistics, in coordination with the U.S. military, on a pending series of private flights that are set to swoop in and out of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, in order to evacuate high-risk human rights defenders and other activists, including some high-profile personnel, who are direct targets of the Taliban, the Islamist group that has rapidly retaken control of the country upon the withdrawal of US and international forces, two decades after being overthrown.

I’m quoting: “We formed a coalition because, of course, this is a huge operation.
We have private charter flights. So, this is a civil society, grassroots initiative, run by NGOs (non-government organizations) like mine. We have raised the funds to get the flights in. So we have our first flight arriving. And these flights can take up to 300 people.”

“We’ve got 10 flights, back-to-back potentially, but there’s no point if we land in
Kabul airport and they can’t get through the gates because the Taliban are controlling the gates to the airport. And so, we have to break that open and negotiate where we come in, and we establish this humanitarian corridor so that we can evacuate our people out.”

The humanitarian aid the Shai Fund can offer is desperately needed. Hopefully, they will find a way.

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