RETREAT YOURSELF Looters pounce as US quits base
American forces left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield over the weekend without notifying the new commander from the Kabul government — giving looters precious time to swipe anything that was not bolted down, shocking photos show.
The United States announced Friday that it had vacated Bagram as part of a final withdrawal the Pentagon says will be completed by the end of August. It is Afghanistan’s largest airfield and was the hub of the 20-year US campaign to remove the Taliban from government, track down Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda cohorts, and keep the nation’s fragile elected government in place amid a Taliban resurgence.
However, US forces apparently forgot to tell the Afghans, cutting the electricity within 20 minutes of their departure and plunging the base into darkness. That acted as a “go” signal for teams of looters who smashed through the north gate and ransacked barracks and storage tents before security forces who had been patrolling the perimeter managed to evict them.
“We [heard] some rumor that the Americans had left Bagram . . . and finally, by 7 o’clock in the morning, we understood that it was confirmed that they had already left Bagram,” said new base commander Gen. Mir Asadullah Kohistani.
“In one night they [the Americans] lost all the good will of 20 years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area,” one Afghan soldier, who identified himself only as Naematullah, told The Associated Press.
“At first, we thought maybe they were Taliban,” another soldier, a 10year veteran named Abdul Raouf, said of the looters.
Raouf went on to claim that the American forces called from the international airport in Kabul — an hour’s drive south of Bagram — to inform their Afghan counterparts that they had left the base.
On Monday, when Afghan forces opened the airfield to the world’s media, soldiers were still collecting piles of garbage that included empty bottles and cans of water and energy drinks left behind by the looters.
Outside the base gates, scrap dealers and vendors were photographed hawking items abandoned by the departing Americans, including basketballs, bicycles and helmets, electric fans, noise-canceling headphones — even laundry detergent.
US military spokesman Col. Sonny Leggett did not address the specific complaints by Afghan soldiers, instead referring to a statement sent out last week.
That statement said the handover had been in process since soon after President Biden’s mid-April announcement that the US was withdrawing the last of its forces. Leggett said in the statement that the forces had coordinated their departures with Afghanistan’s leaders.
Gen. Kohistani said the Americans left behind 3.5 million items, a number that he said includes “every phone, every doorknob, every window in every barracks, every door in every barracks.”
It also includes thousands of civilian vehicles — many of them without keys to start them — and hundreds of armored vehicles.