Afghanistan live news: unclear how many will be left behind after evacuation, says UK foreign secretary – The Guardian

Alex Mistlin here taking our Afghanistan live blog. If you’re on the ground, have info or have spotted a mistake then DM me on Twitter: @amistlin

The Pentagon is not very happy about the surprise visit of two congressmen to Kabul airport yesterday. Democrat Seth Moulton and Republican Peter Meijer, both of them Iraq veterans, said they made the stealth visit for the purpose of oversight of a critical situation.

“We were not aware of this visit, and we are obviously not encouraging VIP visits to a very tense, dangerous and dynamic situation at that airport and inside Kabul generally,” the Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, said.

He added that he did not know whether the two visitors had taken seats on planes that would have gone to American or Afghan evacuees, but Kirby said pointedly: “They certainly took time away from what we had been planning to do that day.”

Asked about a report in Politico overnight that the threat of an attack on Kabul airport by Isis could jeopardise the evacuation, Maj Gen Hank Taylor said he would not go into specific threat but “we know, as previously reported, there is a threat.”

“This has been a dangerous place that has had threats by Isis, and we continue to ensure that we collect [intelligence], and keep the force protection to the highest levels possible to ensure that we’re able to continue the evacuation operation.”

As the evacuation goes on, the Pentagon made clear today that military personnel and equipment would take up an increasing share of the capacity.

The US military presence at the airport is already beginning to draw down, from 5,800 at its peak in the past few days, to 5,400 now.

On the subject of the 31 August deadline, the Pentagon line remains the same. The military is working towards that date, but as a matter of course, has contingencies in case it needs to be extended. Apparently, in military-speak, such options are called “branches and sequels”.

The Taliban have agreed to let Afghans leave Afghanistan after the US withdrawal deadline of 31 August, AFP reports a German envoy as saying.

AFP News Agency (@AFP)

#BREAKING Taliban agree to let Afghans leave Afghanistan after US withdrawal deadline of August 31: German envoy pic.twitter.com/RNJR68lgFd

August 25, 2021

The Pentagon has said there was a US helicopter rescue mission last night that brought people stranded in Kabul city to the airport.

“Last night, during the period of darkness, there was an operation to safely evacuate evacuees back into Kabul. They are at HKIA (Hamid Karzai international airport), and they’re safely preparing to be evacuated,” said Maj Gen Hank Taylor.

Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, would not give further details other than saying there were less than 20 evacuees on the flight.

It is the third such helicopter rescue, but the Pentagon said yesterday the US military was also conducting extractions by road, but would not release details for security reasons.

The Chinese and Russian leaders, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, have vowed to counter “threats of terrorism” emerging from Afghanistan in a phone call.

The two leaders “expressed their readiness to step up efforts to combat threats of terrorism and drug trafficking coming from the territory of Afghanistan”, according to the statements issued by both Beijing and Moscow.

The phone call on Wednesday came immediately after leaders from the G7 held an emergency meeting on the developing situation in Afghanistan. Boris Johnson, who chaired the meeting, said the group had agreed to ask the Taliban for guarantee of safe passage from Afghanistan.

In the phone call, Xi and Putin also spoke of the “importance of establishing peace” in Afghanistan and “preventing the spread of instability to adjacent regions”.

Xi said that his country “respects Afghanistan’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity, pursues a policy of non-interference in Afghanistan’s internal affairs, and has always played a constructive role in the political settlement of the Afghan issue”, according to Xinhua.

In the past week, Chinese commentators have been discussing to what extent Beijing should step into the vacuum left by the US in the volatile central Asian country. Zhou Bo, a former senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, wrote in the New York Times that China “is ready to step into the void left by the hasty US retreat to seize a golden opportunity”.

But others pointed to Afghanistan’s long history of political and security instability. “China shouldn’t rush to invest in Afghanistan,” said Liu Zongyi, secretary general of the China and South Asia Cooperation Research Center at the prestigious Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS) last week.

In Moscow, while the Kremlin has been cautiously optimistic about the new leadership in Kabul, Putin has warned of Afghan militants entering neighbouring countries as refugees.

Putin has also criticised the involvement of outside powers in Afghanistan’s domestic affairs and said Moscow had “learned lessons” from the Soviet Union’s decade-long invasion of the country.

Additional reporting by AFP news agency

The Pentagon is giving its regular morning update on the progress of the evacuation operation. According to Maj Gen Hank Taylor, 90 flights left in the past 24 hours with 19,000 people, a new daily record. Of that total, 11,700 people left on 42 US military transports.

Another 7,800 went on 48 planes flown by coalition nations and other countries. On average a flight left Kabul every 39 minutes. At the moment there are 10,000 people at Kabul airport waiting for a flight out.

The US military will continue its evacuation effort from Kabul airport until the 31 August deadline if needed, but on the last couple of days it will prioritise the removal of US troops and military equipment.

Four Russian military planes evacuated Russian and other nationals from Kabul on Wednesday on the orders of the president, Vladimir Putin, as Moscow held military exercises involving its tank forces in neighbouring Tajikistan.

The flights mark a shift in Russia’s stance on Afghanistan. Its ambassador to Kabul had previously praised the Taliban’s conduct and said the group, still officially designated a terrorist organisation in Russia, had made Kabul safer in the first 24 hours than it had been under the previous authorities.

But the Kremlin said the situation was very tense and, citing the presence of Islamic State in Afghanistan as well as the Taliban, said that the terrorist threat was “very high”.

The Russian defence ministry said it was evacuating more than 500 people from Afghanistan, including Russians and citizens of Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine.

Kabul airport’s air traffic now seems to be at a stable level due to an increase in military aircraft evacuating people, new Guardian analysis has revealed.

Fewer than 15 aircraft arrived or departed each day between 16 and 19 August, according to data from Flightradar24.

It has recovered to about 60 a day between 20 and 21 August – the latest day for which data is available. This is around half the level seen before the Taliban seized power in Kabul.

Evacuating Afghanistan: a visual guide to flights in and out of Kabul

That’s it from me, Robyn Vinter. Here’s a summary of the day’s events as I hand over to my colleague Jessica Murray.

Western nations today rushed to evacuate people from Afghanistan as the 31 August deadline for the withdrawal of foreign troops drew closer and fears grew that many could be left behind to an uncertain fate under the country’s new Taliban rulers.

In one of the biggest such airlifts ever, the United States and its allies have evacuated more than 70,000 people, including their citizens, NATO personnel and Afghans at risk, since 14 August, the day before the Taliban swept into the capital Kabul to bring to an end the 20-year foreign military presence.

• A group of 200 workers who guarded World Bank projects in Afghanistan for the last 10 years until they lose their jobs last week have sent a desperate plea to the British government to rescue them urgently.
• Two thousand Afghan interpreters and others who worked for the British government are still to be airlifted out of Kabul by the RAF, defence sources said as the emergency evacuation reaches its final stages.
• The UK foreign secretary has been urged to help evacuate two Afghan aid workers employed by a Scottish charity set up in the memory of the kidnapped aid worker Linda Norgrove.
• France will end evacuation operations from Afghanistan in the coming hours or days before the 31 August deadline, a government spokesman said.
• The leader of a resistance movement to the Taliban has vowed to never surrender but is open to negotiations with the new rulers of Afghanistan, according to an interview published by Paris Match today. Ahmad Massoud has retreated to his native Panjshir valley north of Kabul along with former vice-president Amrullah Saleh.
• Germany will keep evacuating people from Afghanistan as long as it is responsible to do so, Chancellor Angela Merkel told conservative lawmakers, adding, however, that this is only possible with the United States.
• Covid-19 vaccinations in Afghanistan have dropped by 80%, the UN agency UNICEF said, warning that half of the few doses delivered to the country so far are close to expiry.
• Afghanistan’s only boarding school for girls has temporarily relocated to Rwanda, its co-founder has said, just days after a video of her burning class records to avoid Taliban recriminations was widely shared on social media.
• A former Royal Marine who has been campaigning to have dozens of people and hundreds of animals at his sanctuary evacuated from Afghanistan has been offered a glimmer of hope after the defence secretary said UK officials would help.
• Dominic Raab said he is unclear how many people will be left behind in Afghanistan once British troops withdraw by 31 August. The UK foreign secretary said the figure depends on “the window” left in terms of timing and how many people they manage to process over the next few days.
• Raab has said 9,000 British nationals, Afghans who worked for British forces and those at risk, journalists and Chevening scholars have been evacuated from Afghanistan since 15 August. Raab said this Taliban regime needs to be more “inclusive” and “moderate” compared to the previous Taliban.
• Two members of Congress flew unannounced into Kabul airport in the middle of the ongoing chaotic evacuation Tuesday, stunning State Department and US military personnel who had to divert resources to provide security and information to the lawmakers, US officials said.
• Spain will not be able to rescue all Afghans who served alongside its troops in Afghanistan because of the “dramatic” situation on the ground, Defence Minister Margarita Robles said on Tuesday. Robles said Taliban checkpoints and violence were making it difficult for people to reach Kabul airport to catch one of Spain’s daily military flights out of Afghanistan.
• Joe Biden has rejected the pleas of domestic and international allies to keep troops in Afghanistan for evacuation efforts beyond 31 August, citing the growing threat of a terrorist attack.
• Reports are filtering in that the United States has started to take some of the 6,000 troops it has in Afghanistan out of the country, as it accelerates evacuations. The US president did not take any questions after his White House remarks, and did not mention this point. Moments earlier, the White House press secretary had declined to discuss it at the media briefing.

Mexico received 124 media workers and their family members from Afghanistan, including New York Times journalists, the government said on Wednesday, as people flee after the Taliban militant group’s takeover.

They arrived at Mexico City’s international airport early on Wednesday morning, where the country’s foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, waited to greet them.

He said:

Mexico has decided to support human rights applications for refuge, asylum and humanitarian visas for people in Afghanistan who have asked to have this humanitarian condition.

A day earlier, five members of Afghanistan’s all-girls robotics team arrived in Mexico.
Mexico has pledged to aid Afghan women and girls amid concern about their treatment under Taliban rule. Ebrard said on 18 August that the country was processing refugee applications of Afghan citizens, especially women and girls, with the aid of Guillermo Puente Ordorica, Mexico’s ambassador in Iran.

Ebrard helped to quickly arrange the journalists’ departure from Kabul, which included a stopover in Qatar, before their eventual arrival to Mexico, according to the New York Times.

Reuters evacuated a group of 73 people made up of its workers and their families to Pakistan from Afghanistan on Monday.

Marcelo Ebrard, the Mexican secretary of foreign affairs, speaks during a press conference in Mexico City to welcome a group of journalists living in Afghanistan who received humanitarian asylum together with their families. Photograph: Héctor Vivas/Getty Images

Images here of banners from the protest by former World Bank security staff who fear they have been left behind in Afghanistan by the British government.

200 Afghans who worked for G4S until 17 August plea for international rescue from the threat of the Taliban. Photograph: Afghan security workers at G4S/World Bank

200 Afghans who worked for G4S until 17 August plea for international rescue from the threat of the Taliban. Photograph: Afghan security workers at G4S/World Bank

200 Afghans who worked for G4S until 17 August plea for international rescue from the threat of the Taliban. Photograph: Afghan security workers at G4S/World Bank

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