'We found our home again,' Afghan man says after family arrives on charter flight to Manitoba

An Afghan man whose family arrived in Manitoba this week says they're grateful to finally be in Canada after years of living in fear of the Taliban.

"I told [my] family that we found our home again," Azizullah Mahdi said in a phone interview on Friday, after landing with his wife and their seven children at the Winnipeg Richardson International Airport Wednesday morning.

The chartered flight from Pakistan transported 256 Afghan nationals, including people who supported Canada's mission in Afghanistan, family members of former interpreters and privately sponsored refugees arriving through the humanitarian stream, Jeffrey MacDonald, a spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, said in an email.

The newcomers will be resettled in roughly 25 communities across Canada, including Winnipeg, Edmonton, Toronto and Ottawa. It's part of the federal government's commitment to resettle at least 40,000 Afghans in Canada — which MacDonald said the country is on track to meet by the end of 2023.

Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan and its largest city, fell to the Taliban on Aug. 15, 2021. The country has since faced a humanitarian crisis, with millions of people struggling to find food, while women and girls have lost basic rights.

Mahdi said he and his wife, Fatima Amiri, were both in danger because they worked in human rights, and because he belongs to the country's minority Hazara community. They moved from their home in Ghor, an Afghan province, to the larger city of Kabul to avoid detection by the Taliban, then last year moved again to Pakistan in the hopes of getting a flight to Canada.

"We were worried a lot. Our family and my parents, they were worried a lot because our life was not safe. So we were trying to find a solution, how to get out," he said.

Mahdi said his family waited more than seven months before their chance finally came this week, after several cancelled flights last month. He said it was a relief to see the end of a stressful time in his family's lives, including his children, who range in age from a toddler to a 17-year-old.

"We already knew that Canada is the home of everybody, and Canada is the home of those who have no home in their country," he said. "That's why I come here, to find my right country."

Mahdi's family is now among those settling in the southwestern city of Brandon, where he said he and his wife are looking forward to getting involved in human rights work locally and becoming "active and responsible" members of the community.

Meanwhile, he said he hopes the federal government can help the rest of his family get to Canada — including his parents and siblings, and his wife's family, who fled to India after the 2019 death of Amiri's brother at the hands of the Taliban.

Boris Ntambwe, a resettlement program manager who works with Winnipeg settlement service Accueil francophone, said 67 of the latest Afghans to land in Winnipeg will stay in Manitoba — with 21 of them heading to the southwestern city of Brandon and the rest staying in the capital city.

"They're doing fine. They were happy, you know — we have the reception centre, and they've been taken to a hotel where they had a buffet breakfast offered to them. They're all happy and excited," Ntambwe said hours after the flight landed on Wednesday.

"It was quiet today. It was not stressful like other charter flights. Everything went smooth."