Afghanistan’s chaos forcing U.S. changes
Tactics evolving to amass evacuees at Kabul airport
KABUL, Afghanistan — Islamic State threats against Americans in Afghanistan are forcing the U.S. military to develop new ways to get evacuees to the airport in Kabul, a senior U.S. official said Saturday, adding a complication to already chaotic efforts to get people out of the country after its swift takeover by the Taliban.
The official said small groups of Americans and possibly other civilians will receive specific instructions on what to do, including moving to transit points where they can be gathered up by the military. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations.
In a news briefing Saturday, Pentagon officials said the Kabul airport “remains secure” but the situation outside the perimeter of the airport “changes almost by the hour.” They also stressed that U.S. military commanders were continuing to process credentialed Americans attempting to leave the country, despite an alert that the U.S. Embassy in Kabul issued Saturday telling citizens not to travel to the Kabul airport without individual instruction from a U.S. government representative.
Officials say fragments of the Islamic State group are still active in Afghanistan despite U.S. and Taliban attacks, and the U.S. is concerned about it reconstituting in a larger way as the country comes under divisive Taliban rule.
Officials declined to provide more specifics about the ISIS threat but described it as significant. They said there have been no confirmed attacks so far.
Pentagon officials said airport gates had been temporarily closed but were open intermittently to allow Americans with proper credentials to enter. While the Taliban control Kabul and the area around the airport up to the entry gates, U.S. and British troops control direct access through the gates.
Maj. Gen. William Taylor of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff said that in the past 24 hours, 3,800 passengers, roughly half of them Americans, had been flown out. That figure was down from 6,000 evacuated two days ago. U.S. officials have estimated that there are as many as 15,000 Americans in Afghanistan, but they acknowledge they don’t have solid numbers.
In his remarks on the situation Friday, President Joe Biden did not commit to extending the Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline, though he did issue a new pledge to evacuate not only all Americans in Afghanistan, but also the tens of thousands of Afghans who have aided the war effort since Sept. 11, 2001. That promise would dramatically expand the number of people the U.S. evacuates.
Biden faces growing criticism as videos depict pandemonium and occasional violence outside the airport and as vulnerable Afghans who fear the Taliban’s retaliation send desperate pleas not to be left behind.
Afghans and their families have been assaulted with tear gas and by Taliban gunmen who have beaten people with clubs and whips as they continued to swarm the airport in hopes of getting aboard U.S. military transport planes.
Scrambling to cope with the flood of people trying to leave the country, the Biden administration is making plans to enlist commercial airlines from outside Afghanistan to take refugees to more bases. The effort could involve 20 airlines and would transport thousands of Afghan refugees arriving at U.S. bases in Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, and fly them to other countries for resettlement, officials said.
The Embassy alert underscored the deteriorating security situation in the capital amid reports that Taliban gunmen were going door-todoor, searching for Afghans who had worked for the U.S. government or military, or for the U.S.-backed government.
The militants are threatening to arrest or punish family members if they can’t find the people they are seeking, according to former members of the Afghan government, according to a confidential report prepared for the United Nations and U.S. veterans who have been contacted by desperate Afghans allies.
The International Rescue Committee estimates that more than 300,000 Afghan civilians have been affiliated with the U.S. since 2001, but only a minority qualify for evacuation.
The president said he was unaware of any Americans who had been prevented by Taliban gunmen or other obstacles from reaching the airport. But two resettlement agencies in the U.S. reported that they had received panicked calls from Afghan American clients holding U.S. passports or green cards who had been unable to reach the airport.
Despite the U.S. Embassy warning, crowds remain outside the Kabul airport’s razor-wire-topped barriers, clutching documents and sometimes children.
POLITICAL LEADER
Meanwhile, Abdul Ghani Baradar, considered the Taliban’s top political leader, arrived in Kabul on Saturday as the Islamist group looks at forming a new government.
Baradar, who served as a negotiator for peace talks in Doha, Qatar, and is the likely next leader of Afghanistan, is in the capital to consult with “his friends” about “what type of government will be in Kabul,” Taliban official Zabiullah Mujahid said, adding that no decision has been made about what form it will take.
Baradar negotiated the 2020 peace deal with the U.S., and he is now expected to play a key role in negotiations between the Taliban and officials from the Afghan government that the militant group deposed.
Afghan officials familiar with talks held in the capital say the Taliban have said they will not make announcements on their government until the Aug. 31 deadline for the troop withdrawal passes.
Taliban leaders have not provided details on the type of government they envision, beyond saying that it would adhere to Islamic values, a clear indication that the militants intend to impose their strict interpretation of Shariah law.
Abdullah Abdullah, a senior official in the ousted government, tweeted that he and ex-President Hamid Karzai met Saturday with the Taliban’s acting governor for Kabul, who “assured us that he would do everything possible for the security of the people” of the city.
TALIBAN DEFEATS
In northern Afghanistan, the Taliban faced the first armed challenge to their rule as former Afghan soldiers, aided by villagers, drove the militants out of three districts in the mountains north of Kabul, according to former Afghan officials.
The fighting took place in remote valleys Friday, and details of the clashes were still trickling out. But video posted on social media showed fighters and civilians tearing down the white flag of the Taliban and raising the red, green and black Afghan national flag. The former acting defense minister, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, called the fighters “popular resistance forces” in a tweet.
“The resistance is still alive,” he wrote.
The fighting was reportedly set off by the Taliban conducting house-to-house searches. Former Afghan officials said the clashes appeared to have been led by a local police chief who knew he was not long for his post under Taliban rule.
The fighting took place in three districts — Pul-e-Hesar, Deh-e-Salah and Bano — that are about 100 miles north of Kabul but only reachable by poor roads that wind through the mountains. The fighters claimed to have killed as many as 30 Taliban and captured nearly two dozen more. A pro-Taliban Twitter account put the militants’ death toll at half that number.
In addition to the armed resistance, small groups of women, fearful that the Taliban will try to reimpose their stringent and often brutal interpretation of Islamic law, have braved retribution to publicly demand their rights. Others have simply refused to fly the Taliban’s white flag, insisting that the Afghan national flag was the only banner they wanted to fly.
However, there appears to be little international will to back any armed resistance to the Taliban.
The U.S. and its allies are focused on evacuating people from Kabul. They are actively seeking cooperation from the Taliban to do so, and so far the militants have proven somewhat cooperative, eager to show the world that they are no longer the same brutal zealots who ruled Afghanistan two decades ago.
Armed uprisings could quickly change that calculus, prompting the Taliban to violently clamp down at the very moment when Western countries are struggling to keep the evacuation moving.
U.S. military and intelligence officials Saturday said they were closely monitoring reports that Afghan resistance fighters had pushed the Taliban out of the three northern districts, but there had been no requests from those groups for U.S. airstrikes or other assistance, and none offered, at least publicly.
DISTORTIONS ALLEGED
A top homeland security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence accused the Trump administration of distorting the truth about Afghan refugees, writing on Twitter that the former president and Stephen Miller, his top immigration adviser, sought to prevent the refugees from entering the U.S.
Olivia Troye recalled Miller’s demands for restrictions on refugees, including those from Afghanistan and Iraq, which she said hollowed out the government’s ability to bring the interpreters and others to the U.S.
“Now we are in this crisis, and they are saying Trump would have evacuated them,” Troye said. “But he didn’t in four years. You don’t get to play revisionist history here. There are people who know what the situation is.”
Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed in recent days that his administration would have handled a withdrawal from Afghanistan better than Biden, whom Trump criticized for failing to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies.
Troye rebutted those claims on Twitter, claiming instead that Trump administration officials “would undermine anyone who worked on solving the SIV issue by devastating the system at DHS & State.”
Miller did successfully press for deep cuts to the number of refugees that the U.S. admitted, although the Trump administration did seek to prioritize visas for Afghans and Iraqis near the end of the president’s term.
Last week, Miller warned against bringing “millions” of Afghans to the U.S., advocating for resettlement of refugees in other countries.
“Bottom line: if we are not careful, all we could have to show for 20 years in Afghanistan is a failed terror state, a humanitarian catastrophe, and an immigration policy that has brought the threat of jihadism inside our shores,” Miller wrote.
U.S. WELCOME
Hundreds of Afghan refugees and special-immigrant visa recipients arrived overnight at Northern Virginia Community College after a harrowing journey evacuating Afghanistan.
By Saturday morning, a swarm of volunteers had arrived at the Annandale campus to help. They provided clothes and toiletries, toys and diapers. By noon, the piles of donations had grown so high that volunteers had to turn some away.
Many of the volunteers were Afghan Americans in Virginia — many worried about their own family members still stranded in Kabul.
“We just want to share their pain,” said one volun
teer named Nasrul, who gave only his first name because his siblings’ lives are still in danger in Afghanistan. “We are not in Afghanistan, but we are in sorrow.”
Maybe, he said, they could help the new arrivals relax.
“At least these lives are safe now.”
One was a 32-year-old father who had recently arrived with his 18-month-old son.
He had worked with a Pakistani cargo company working with the U.S. military, and he got a special-immigrant visa. He waited two days outside the gate to get into the Kabul airport — but despite his pleas, he could not take his wife and daughter because they did not have the proper documents, said the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was still worried about their safety.
“It is difficult to be with a baby and be his mother and his father,” he said. “No one can feel my sensation. I repeatedly, repeatedly cried — this is his time to be with his mother.”
But he knew his baby could not remain in Afghanistan, so he knew he had to go.
“He still asks me for his mom,” the father said. Information for this article was contributed by Ahmad Seir, Rahim Faiez, Kathy Gannon, Lolita C. Baldor, Jon Gambrell, Colleen Barry, Matt Lee and Geir Moulson of The Associated Press; by Michael D. Shear, David Zucchino and Matthew Rosenberg of The New York Times; and by Jennifer Hassan, Sara Sorcher, Helier Cheung, Ruby Mellen, Haq Nawaz Khan, Meryl Kornfield, Amy B Wang and Meagan Flynn of The Washington Post.