The Strange Fate of the Baby Handed Over Kabul Airport Wall

Little Sohail Ahmadi spent months with a stranger before being reunited with his grandfather
By Liz MacGahan,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 9, 2022 7:15 PM CST
Family Locates Baby Lost in Kabul Airport Chaos
In this image from video provided by Omar Haidari and taken on Thursday, Aug. 19, 2021 which shows a baby being lifted across a wall at Kabul Airport in Afghanistan by US soldiers.   (Omar Haidari via AP)

Desperate parents handed their baby handed over a barbed-wire topped wall to a soldier during the fall of Kabul Aug. 19, 2021, and couldn’t find him afterward. Finally, they know where he is. Sohail Ahmadi’s parents handed their 2-month-old infant over out of fear he would be crushed in the chaos at the Kabul airport. But when they finally made it inside the walls, they couldn’t find him anywhere. Meanwhile, Hamid Safi, 29, a taxi driver, found himself inside the airport walls after dropping off relatives who were being evacuated and found the baby, CNN reports. Safi says after he gave up looking for the infant’s parents, he took him home to his own wife and kids to raise as his own—at least until the family was located.

Mirza Ali Ahmadi, a US embassy security guard, and his wife, Suraya, were evacuated to the US. They searched for their son, Sohail, for months. Safi’s neighbors solved the mystery, noting the resemblance the sudden addition to the Safi family held to the missing child. Safi had renamed Sohail, calling him Mohammed, and was reluctant to part with him. Some of the delay came from Safi asking for his family to be evacuated, too, per the BBC. Local Taliban police brokered a deal compensating Safi for looking after the baby, and reunited him with his grandfather, still in Afghanistan. The next step, according to Mohammad Qasem Razawi, the overjoyed grandfather, is to get Sohail to Michigan, where his parents have settled. "We need to get the baby back to his mother and father. This is my only responsibility," Razawi said, per USA Today. (More Kabul stories.)

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