Americans exit Kabul: Taliban facilitate large-scale departure flight.
US official says Taliban leaders facilitated flight
KABUL, Afghanistan – An estimated 200 foreigners, including Americans, left Afghanistan on a commercial flight out of Kabul on Thursday with the cooperation of the Taliban – the first such large-scale departure since U.S. forces completed their frantic withdrawal over a week ago.
The Qatar Airways flight to Doha marked a breakthrough in the bumpy coordination between the U.S. and Afghanistan’s new rulers. A dayslong standoff over charter planes at another airport has left hundreds of mostly Afghan people stranded, waiting for Taliban permission to leave.
A senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Taliban’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister helped facilitate the flight. Americans, U.S. green-card holders and other nationalities, including Germans, Hungarians and Canadians, were aboard, the official said.
Qatari envoy Mutlaq bin Majed alQahtani said another 200 passengers will leave Afghanistan on Friday.
It was not immediately clear how many Americans were on board Thursday and how many were still in Afghanistan.
The White House said before the flight that about 100 American citizens were left in Afghanistan. But several veterans groups have said that that number is too low because many citizens never bothered to tell U.S. officials they were in the country. They said the figure overlooks green-card-carrying permanent U.S. residents living in Afghanistan who want to leave.
Many thousands of Afghans remain desperate to get out, afraid of what Taliban rule might hold. The Taliban have repeatedly said foreigners and Afghans with proper travel documents could leave.
But their assurances have been meet with skepticism, and many Afghans have been unable to obtain certain paperwork.
U.S. lawmakers, veterans groups and others are pressing the Biden administration to ensure that former Afghan military interpreters and others who could be in danger of Taliban reprisals for working with the Americans are allowed to leave.
In the U.S., National Security Council spokesperson Emily Horne said that Thursday’s flight was the result of “careful and hard diplomacy and engagement” and that the Taliban “have shown flexibility, and they have been businesslike and professional in our dealings with them in this effort.”
“This is a positive first step,” she said, adding that the U.S. will continue trying to extract Americans and Afghan allies who want to leave.
As Taliban authorities patrolled the tarmac, passengers presented their documents for inspection and dogs sniffed luggage laid out on the ground.
The airport was damaged in the frenzied final days of the U.S. airlift that evacuated over 100,000 people. But Qatari authorities announced that it had been repaired with the help of experts from Qatar and Turkey and was ready for the resumption of international airline flights.
“I can clearly say that this is a historic day in the history of Afghanistan as Kabul airport is now operational,” al-Qahtani said. “Hopefully, life is becoming normal in Afghanistan.”