Afghan baby lost during Kabul airlift reunited with his relatives

An Afghan baby who was separated from his parents during the Kabul evacuation has finally been reunited with his relatives in Kabul, his family members told dpa on Sunday.
Sohail Ahmadi was just 2 months old when he went missing on August 19 as he was handed to a US soldier over a fence to avoid him being crushed in the huge crowd, according to his father Mirza Ali Ahmadi, who spoke with dpa via the internet.
Once the family entered the airport they couldn't find their baby boy any more.
The baby's parents and another four siblings were airlifted to Qatar, then to a US military base in Germany, and finally to Michigan in the United States.
Ahmadi, who had worked as a security guard at the US embassy, said that the family had no idea about their baby for months.
"We experienced bad days, crying all day and night," Ahmadi told dpa about their long ordeal. "We always thought he had been evacuated to a foreign country."
But thanks to media reports on the family's search for the missing baby, Sohail was eventually located with a taxi driver named Hamid.
On November 29, Hamid told a popular morning show on Afghanistan's TOLO TV that he found Sohail at the airport crying on the ground and took him home after he couldn't find his relatives after hours of searching.
Hamid said there were scratches on the baby's chest when he found him so he took him to the doctor and kept him as his own baby until he found the contact number of his father via a friend.
Ahmadi said that Hamid initially refused to hand over Sohail because he wanted to be evacuated to the US together with the baby.
Ahmadi had to contact his relatives in Afghanistan to negotiate with Hamid. The baby was finally handed back to his grandfather at a ceremony on Saturday after a Taliban intervention.
"Everyone was happy when he gave us the child. The relatives played music and danced," his grandfather Mirza Mohammad Qasim Razawi said happily.
Ahmadi's family is now calling on the United States and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) - which works in war zones to reunite families torn apart by conflict - to help them reunite in the US.