‘WE LIBERATED OUR COUNTRY FROM A GREAT POWER’
AFGHAN WITHDRAWAL As many celebrate, others fear reprisals from Taliban
The Taliban celebrated their victory over the United States on Tuesday, firing guns into the air, parading coffins draped in U.S. and NATO flags and setting about enforcing their rule after the last U.S. troops withdrew from a shattered Afghanistan.
The Islamist militants now control more territory than when they last ruled before they were driven out in America’s longest war, which took the lives of nearly 2,500 U.S. troops, 150 Canadians and an estimated 240,000 Afghans, and cost some $2 trillion.
“We are proud of these moments, that we liberated our country from a great power,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said at Kabul airport after a C-17 aircraft took the last troops out a minute before midnight, ending a hasty and humiliating exit for Washington and its NATO allies.
An image from the Pentagon taken with night-vision optics showed the last U.S. soldier to step aboard the final evacuation flight out of Kabul — Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.
The U.S. invasion in 2001 drove the Taliban from power and stopped Afghanistan being used by al-qaida as a base to attack the U.S. The Taliban enacted their own, strict interpretation of Islamic law from 1996 to 2001, not least by oppressing women, and the world is watching now to see if the movement will form a more moderate and inclusive government.
There was a mixture of triumph and elation on the one side as the Taliban celebrated their victory, and fear on the other.
While crowds lined the streets of the eastern city of Khost for a fake funeral with coffins draped with Western flags, long lines formed in Kabul outside banks shuttered since the fall of the capital.
“I had to go to the bank with my mother but when I went, the Taliban (were) beating women with sticks,” said a 22-year-old woman who spoke anonymously because she feared for her safety.
She said the attack occurred among a crowd outside a branch of the Azizi Bank next to the Kabul Star Hotel in the centre of the capital. “It’s the first time I’ve seen something like that and it really frightened me.”
Destruction from recent fighting, divisions among its people and a hiatus in administration and the foreign aid on which many Afghans depend has left the country in a precarious state.
Thousands of Afghans have already fled the country, fearing Taliban reprisals.
The U.S. Senate passed legislation to provide aid to Americans returning from Afghanistan and European Union countries proposed to step up assistance to Afghanistan and its neighbours. But the EU’S 27 member countries could not agree a common policy on accepting asylum-seekers.
More than 123,000 people were evacuated from Kabul in a massive but chaotic airlift by the United States and its allies over the past two weeks, but many of those who helped Western nations during the war were left behind.
A contingent of Americans, estimated by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at fewer than 200, and possibly closer to 100, was unable to get on the last flights.
Gen. Frank Mckenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told a Pentagon briefing that leaving people had been heartbreaking. “But I think if we’d stayed another 10 days, we wouldn’t have gotten everybody out,” he said.
The departing U.S. troops destroyed more than 70 aircraft and dozens of armoured vehicles. They also disabled air defences that had thwarted an attempted Islamic State rocket attack on the eve of their departure.
As the Taliban watched U.S. troops leave Kabul on Monday night, at least seven of their fighters were killed in clashes in the Panjshir valley north of the capital, two members of the main anti-taliban opposition group said.
Several thousand anti-taliban fighters, from local militias as well as remnants of army and special forces units, have gathered in the valley under the command of regional leader Ahmad Massoud.