Ottawa Seals Records of Crisis Response, Evacuation Operation Amid Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan

Refugees from Afghanistan and Canadian citizens board a bus after being processed at Pearson Airport in Toronto, on Aug 17, 2021, after arriving indirectly from Afghanistan. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

The federal government is sealing from the public records of its crisis response and evacuation operations in Afghanistan during the Taliban takeover last summer, said an official response to a House of Commons committee report.

“Most of the Government of Canada departments and agencies engaged in the response to the crisis in Afghanistan have undertaken various internal reviews and lessons learned exercises over the course of the past year,” the government said in an Oct. 6 submission to the House of Commons Special Committee on Afghanistan.

“The sensitive nature of some Government of Canada operations prohibits these reviews from being shared publicly at this time.”

The submission came in response to a June 2022 report released by the committee, titled “Honouring Canada’s Legacy in Afghanistan: Responding to the Humanitarian Crisis and Helping People Reach Safety,” in which MPs questioned the decision of then-Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan Reid Sirrs to close the embassy and flee Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021, when the terrorist group seized the country’s capital city.

In response, Sirrs said in the report that information he received on Aug. 12 led him to “believe that the security of the embassy and all the people who worked within its compound was at risk of attack from the Taliban.”

Sirrs has been criticized for taking time off in mid-July, when Taliban terrorists were on a rampage across the country, and allegedly leaving embassy employees in the midst of threats. After returning to Afghanistan, Sirrs was later reported to be aboard one of the only two Canadian military aircraft that fled Kabul on Aug. 15.

Evacuation operations of employees and Afghan refugees were conducted in the absence of the ambassador, with the last Canadian military flight leaving Kabul on Aug. 26.

Some military officials have told the committee that they were dissatisfied with Sirrs’s flight out of Afghanistan at a time when 1,250 Canadian citizens and thousands of Afghan allies were desperate for help, according to Blacklocks’ Reporter.

“We were the first embassy to depart,” Major-General Dean Milner, the last Canadian combat commander in the region, testified on Feb. 14. “That was very embarrassing for a lot of us on the ground.”

“There could have been a lot more people evacuated out of Afghanistan before Kandahar fell and before Kabul fell,” said Major-General David Fraser, who also testified on Feb. 14. “This is on the shoulders of Canadians and I don’t just mean the military. We could have actually done more.”

Sirrs was reassigned as ambassador to Argentina on Dec. 23, 2021.