Taliban resume some flights
Rulers step up assault on remaining resistance
KABUL, Afghanistan – Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers resumed some domestic passenger flights to and from Kabul on Sunday, as the religious militia’s fighters stepped up an assault on the last remaining pocket of resistance being led by fighters opposed to their rule.
The anti-taliban fighters in Panjshir province, north of the Afghan capital, are being led by former Vice President Amrullah Saleh, who has appealed for humanitarian aid to help the thousands of people displaced by the fighting.
A senior Taliban spokesman tweeted Sunday that Taliban troops had overrun Rokha district, one of largest of eight districts in Panjshir. Several Taliban delegations have attempted negotiations with the holdouts there, but talks have failed to gain traction.
Saleh fled to Panjshir after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the coun
gled community garden by neighbor Jelagat Cheruiyot, a Tulane University ecology professor.
The garden is a project of the venerable Broadmoor Improvement Association, which rose to prominence advocating for the preservation of the working-class Broadmoor neighborhood after levee failures during Hurricane Katrina inundated homes there in 2005.
Refreshment-related relief efforts weren’t limited to those with culinary skills.
“Take all you want. Leave what you can,” read a hand-scrawled sign taped to a box of potato chip and snack mix bags on a little folding table in front of a shotgun cottage near the Mississippi River.
Friends of Bette Matheny helped her remove sodden carpets and other water-damaged debris from her recently renovated ranch house in Lakeview, an area devastated during the levee failures of Katrina in 2016 and hit by flash flooding during Ida.
“Every single person we know has offered us anything they can,” she said.
Matheny, who was 13 when she evacuated during Katrina 16 years ago, noted that people often remark on the storms that strike with such frequency in New Orleans and ask, “‘Why would you stay there? Does this make you want to move?’ ”
She responded with emotion, her voice breaking: “No. Why would I want to move? People are so amazing. You don’t find this anywhere else, you know?”