Kabul flights winding down
US readies to pull its last troops after carrying out airstrike
Evacuation flights from Kabul’s international airport began winding down Saturday as the United States prepared to withdraw its remaining troops from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan after carrying out a retaliatory airstrike in response to a terrorist attack that killed 13 U.S. service members and as many as 170 civilians.
Britain’s evacuation of its citizens was supposed to end Saturday, and the country will begin to bring its remaining troops home, Gen. Nick Carter, chief of the defense staff, told the BBC’s Radio 4.
The troop departures signaled a tumultuous end to a 20-year war that has left the country awash in grief and desperation, with many Afghans fearing for their lives under Taliban rule and struggling with cash shortages and rising food prices.
“We haven’t been able to bring everybody out and that has been heartbreaking,” Carter told the BBC. “There have been some very challenging judgments that have had to be made on the ground.”
France, too, has ended its evacuations, French officials said Friday.
Three days remain before President Joe Biden’s deadline of Aug. 31 for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Yet the mission was already slowing, as the military shifted from airlifting Afghan civilians to bringing home U.S. troops and military personnel.
About 6,800 people were evacuated from the airport Friday, bringing the total to 111,900 since the U.S. evacuation operation began Aug. 14, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Saturday. That represented a significant drop from early Thursday, when White House officials said that 13,400 people had been evacuated from the Kabul airport in the previous 24 hours.
Hundreds of thousands of Afghans are still thought to be trying to flee the country, yet Biden and other global leaders have acknowledged that many will not get out before the deadline.
Outside Kabul’s airport Saturday morning, roads remained closed and the large crowds that had strained to push inside had largely dissipated in the aftermath of Thursday’s suicide bombing, which struck as U.S. troops were screening people outside the airport. At the Abbey Gate, near where the bombing occurred, only two families and two young men still waited.
The airport’s South Gate remained open, and there was a growing backlog of buses carrying some 500 to 1,000 people, as military personnel screened for suicide vests and other explosives. Few people, if anyone, were getting through the airport gates.
Among those still hoping to leave were two brothers who said they had traveled 26 hours from Herat, a city in western Afghanistan, and had managed to sneak past guards outside the airport’s perimeter to reach the Abbey Gate. One of them said he had been selected by a U.S. visa lottery.
The brothers knew of the deadly explosion at the gate two nights ago, “but what can we do,” one of them said Saturday. “This is our only way out.”
Thursday’s airport attack was one of the deadliest in the nearly two decades since the U.S.-led invasion. U.S. officials believe “another terror attack in Kabul is likely,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday. “The threat is ongoing, and it is active. Our troops are still in danger.”
The Pentagon has released the names of those killed — 11 Marines, one Navy sailor and one Army soldier. Twelve of them were in their 20s; some were born in 2001, the year America’s longest war began. The oldest was 31.
On Friday night, the U.S. military announced its first strike in response to the airport bombing.
On Saturday, Pentagon officials gave more details of the operation, saying that the military had used a drone to kill two “high-profile” targets for the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan, also known as ISIS-K or the Islamic State Khorasan, a group that is foes of the Taliban and had claimed responsibility for the attack. Military officials said one other target was injured.
Biden on Saturday promised that the U.S. strike would not be the last in response to the bombing.
“We will continue to hunt down any person involved in that heinous attack and make them pay,” he said in a statement.
The suicide bombing and the response from the U.S. military came as Afghanistan’s economy, which was sustained for years by an influx of international aid, has been in free fall.
Teachers and other civil servants are struggling to support their families, and people have gathered outside banks and ATMs in the hope of withdrawing money, only to return home cashless and in despair.
On Saturday, hundreds of Afghans protested outside one bank branch in Kabul and scores more marched through central Kabul to demand the reopening of banks that had closed after the Taliban takeover.
“Islamic government, give us our rights!” they chanted.
A representative of the central bank said that it would reopen Sunday, but that to prevent bank runs, it might not begin distributing money until a new government was established.