A report from Kabul on what the evacuations are like for westerners in la Repubblica (translated from Italian):
Embassies close, they leave the country. US citizens receive airlift emails – go to the airport now or we won’t be able to help you anymore. Same for Canadians. Then it’s up to us, the Italians: ‘We inform you that, given the serious deterioration in security conditions, an air force flight will be made available tomorrow, August 15’.
The embassy suspends work: only the consul will remain in Kabul, to assist the translators who for years have helped the Italian soldiers in Afghanistan, to whom Italy has guaranteed assistance to leave the country.
All others who want it – diplomats, humanitarian personnel, journalists – will be evacuated by military flight from Hamid Karzai airport, now controlled by the Turks, who have deployed troops after the withdrawal of NATO.
More on the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif, from AP:
The fall of the country’s fourth largest city, which Afghan forces and two powerful former warlords had pledged to defend, hands the insurgents control over all of northern Afghanistan, confining the Western-backed government to the centre and east.
Abas Ebrahimzada, a lawmaker from the Balkh province where the city is located, said the national army surrendered first, which prompted pro-government militias and other forces to lose morale and give up in the face of a Taliban onslaught launched earlier Saturday.
A view of a deserted road showing a monument with image of former Mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Masood, in Mazar-e-Sharif, the provincial capital of Balkh province, Afghanistan, 14 August 2021. Photograph: EPA
Ebrahimzada said Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ata Mohammad Noor, former warlords who command thousands of fighters, had fled the province and their whereabouts were unknown.
Noor said in a Facebook post that his defeat in Mazar-e-Sharif was orchestrated and blamed the government forces, saying they handed their weapons and equipment to the Taliban. He did not say who was behind the conspiracy, nor offer details, but said he and Dostum “are in a safe place now”
The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson, who reported from Afghanistan in the early 2000s:
There is a conceit that today’s Taliban is different from the Taliban of 2001. This is certainly an idea that some senior Taliban officials have sought to propagate in recent years. Facts on the ground suggest otherwise. They claim to have moved on from their old alliance with Al Qaeda, for instance, but over the years they have partnered with other jihadist groups operating, as they have done, out of sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan, such as the Haqqani network, which is responsible for scores of suicide bombings and so-called complex attacks—involving gunmen and suicide bombers acting in tandem—and for causing hundreds of civilian deaths.
The Taliban have rendered Afghanistan unworkable as a country; unworkable, that is, without them. And the truth is that they were never really beaten. They merely did what guerrillas do in order to survive: they melted away in the face of overwhelming force, regrouped and restored themselves to fighting strength, and returned to battle. Here they are.
The words of political leaders can come back to haunt them. “None whatsoever, zero,” Joe Biden said last month when asked if he saw any parallels between the US withdrawals from Vietnam and Afghanistan.
“The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese army. They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of the embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
The dispatch of 3,000 extra US troops to help evacuate embassy staff looks like a pre-emptive move to avoid such a humiliating spectacle. Even so, with the Taliban on the march and closing in on Kabul, it did not stop cable news networks on Friday replaying grainy images from Vietnam nor the rightwing New York Post running the front page headline “Biden’s Saigon”.
A blame game away is under way for an issue that defies finger pointing, simple headlines or strident certainty perhaps more than any other. Biden is only the latest American president to stumble into a hall of mirrors where every argument has a counter-argument, every action has a reaction, no escape route is offered and the only guarantee is that Afghan civilians will lose:
Queues at the passport office in Kabul yesterday:
Afghans wait in long lines for hours at the passport office as many are desperate to have their travel documents ready to go on 14 August 2021 in Kabul, Afghanistan. Photograph: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
From Sangar Paykhar, who was born in Afghanistan:
سنګر پیکار(@paykhar)
I am very worried. My uncles, aunts, nieces & nephews have never left #Afghanistan. They chose to stay in Kabul and they have been through hell. None of them has money & a Western passport. Unlike ruling elite in Kabul they can’t, and won’t escape.
The UN’s refugee agency provided this update on Friday. What is particularly worrying about Kabul at the moment is that it is where so many people (120,000 from rural areas) fled to seeking safety in recent months:
Some 80% of nearly a quarter of a million Afghans forced to flee since the end of May are women and children.
Nearly 400,000 were forced from their homes since the beginning of the year, joining 2.9 million Afghans already internally displaced across the country at the end of 2020.
Ongoing fighting has been reported in 33 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.
The overwhelming majority of Afghans forced to flee remain within the country, as close to their homes as fighting will allow. Since the beginning of this year, nearly 120,000 Afghans have fled from rural areas and provincial towns to Kabul province.
The sun will begin rising shortly over Kabul (which has been blacked out for the last few hours) and we should start to get a clearer picture of where things stand.
What are we expecting to happen in coming days?
The Taliban have said they will not stop fighting until the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, resigns. Ghani held urgent talks with local leaders and international partners on Saturday, but gave no sign of responding to the Taliban’s demand, saying “reintegration of the security and defence forces is our priority, and serious measures are being taken in this regard”.
Ghani’s resignation would help to avoid many, many deaths in a battle for Kabul, which is why he is facing international pressure to do so.
Activists have however warned of targeted killings in areas that fell under Taliban control in recent weeks.
There have also been restrictions brought in on women’s rights, which have raised fears the country is returning to the harsh restrictions of Taliban rule in the 1990s, even though the group’s envoys have promised they respect women’s rights under Islam. In Kandahar women were ordered from banking jobs at gunpoint, and told that male relatives could take their place, Reuters reported. And after Herat fell to the Taliban, rights activists said that women have been barred from the university, where they make up over half of students.
The capital is already packed with internal refugees who have fled either fighting or the Taliban. Over a quarter of a million people have been displaced since May, the UN said, the vast majority women and children.
This piece by Human Rights Watch’s associate Asia director, Patricia Gossman, is worth reading.
It includes this on alleged warcrimes by Australian and US forces:
Today, Australia is grappling with the fallout of serious allegations about a pattern of potential war crimes its special forces committed during raids in Uruzgan province that included murdering children, kicking detainees off cliffs, and planting weapons on men whom they had summarily executed.
The alleged crimes echo those of US special forces, including the never-prosecuted 2012 murders of 17 civilians who were detained and tortured to death in Nerkh district. Afghan victims of such crimes never saw justice – which is why the International Criminal Court has sought an investigation into crimes by all parties to the conflict, including the US military and CIA, as well as the Taliban and Afghan government forces. The US response has been to reject the ICC’s jurisdiction and try to shut down any investigation.
Australian prime minister Scott Morrison was asked in a press conference moments ago whether the Taliban had “won the war in Afghanistan”.
His response:
My concern is for the people of Afghanistan and seeking to protect the lives of Afghans.
The world is a complex place and there is no place more complex than Afghanistan. Australia and our allies have done much to secure their peace but this remains a very troubled part of the world not just recently but over generations and generations. We went there with our primary purpose, as I’ve indicated, and that was to hunt down Osama bin Laden and prevent al-Qaeda using it as a base and mounting their attack. That was achieved but the challenge for the people of Afghanistan, sadly, remains an unresolved issue and we hope for the best for them but the situation is very dire.
Our focus now is to ensure that we continue to support those who have aided us and ensuring that 400 people have already been brought to Australia as we have been working on this quite rapidly in recent months as the situation continues to deteriorate. We will continue to redouble our effort in that regard with our partners.
The Australian government is currently facing pleas to allow Afghan nationals to stay in Australia when their visas expire, as Canberra separately plans a potential military mission to Afghanistan to rescue former employees fearing the resurgent Taliban.
Officials confirmed on Friday that the Taliban had captured Afghanistan’s second biggest city, Kandahar, as well as Lashkar Gah in the south.
The significance of the Taliban’s retaking of Kandahar after 20 years should not be underestimated either in terms of history or strategically. Regarded as the capital of the Pashtun-speaking south, Kandahar has always exerted a special sense of gravity on the rest of the country, representing one of its main ethnic faultlines.
What it underlines most powerfully is how the Taliban survived during the long years of the US-led intervention to be able to return to the place where it began.
If the sight of US and British special forces outside Mullah Omar’s house appeared to mark the emirate’s fall in 2001, the appearance of its fighters in Martyrs Square has reified its resurgence.
It was first formed in the early 1990s by members of the CIA-backed Afghan mujahideen, who had resisted the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989, and attracting younger Pashtun tribesmen who studied in Pakistani madrassas in exile:
The Times and Sunday Telegraph are reporting that arrangements are being made to airlift the British ambassador Sir Laurie Bristow our of Kabul by Monday evening.
The Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) had intended Sir Laurie and a small team of officials to remain at the airport with other international diplomats, according to the Press Association.
However, The Sunday Telegraph reported that their departure had been brought forward amid fears the airport could be overrun as the Taliban continue their lightning advance through the country.
Six hundred British troops are being deployed to the city to assist with the evacuation of the remaining nationals, PA reports, as well as Afghans who worked with UK forces and who face reprisals if they fall into the hands of the Taliban.
With signs time is rapidly running out, a RAF Hercules was reported to have flown out of the airport on Saturday carrying diplomats and civilians.
A reminder that the US has been in Afghanistan for 20 years. Biden had vowed to be out by 11 September this year, (the 20-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks).
In a statement on Saturday justifying sticking to that pledge, Biden pointed out that the US has spent almost $1tn dollars in the country in that period, and trained over 300,000 Afghan security forces.
Here is some insight on what the Taliban’s plans may be, from the New York Times. I will try to bring you the best expert estimates we can find on how long it is expected to take for the US complete evacuations:
The senior US official said Zalmay Khalilzad, the chief American negotiator with the Taliban in peace talks in Doha, had asked the extremist group to not enter Kabul until the United States concludes the evacuation mission. Taliban officials have countered by asking that the US cease airstrikes against its fighters who are rampaging across Afghanistan, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the high-level negotiations.
This is a sobering reminder from the Wall Street Journal’s reporter on Afghanistan, Sune Engel Rasmussen (formerly of the Guardian) of how swiftly the Taliban has been able to capture cities across the country:
Sune Engel Rasmussen(@SuneEngel)
Let’s recap how astonishing the collapse of Afghanistan has been: before last week, the Taliban had only captured one major city since 2001 – Kunduz in 2015 – and only for a few days.
Now, in the span of 8 days, they have seized everything but Kabul.
The Taliban captured Mazar-i-Sharif, the country’s fourth-largest city and the government’s last major stronghold in the north on Saturday, as they tightened their grip on the country and closed in on Kabul.
Residents in Kabul were last night gripped by fear and a panicked search for escape routes from the bloodshed many fear could lie ahead. With the collapse of Mazar, the only cities outside the militants’ grasp are eastern Jalalabad, where the Taliban were advancing, and the capital itself.
In the afternoon, President Ashraf Ghani addressed the nation. Kabul had been swirling with rumours that he would step down to pave the way for a peace deal to spare the capital and its population of over 4 million people.
Instead he said he would reorganise the military, and made vague reference to “starting consultations” across society and with international allies. He may not have long to make a decision as much of the country collapses into Taliban hands.
This is our live coverage of the latest developments in Afghanistan as the Taliban surrounds Kabul, after taking control of the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the last government stronghold in the country’s north.
My name is Helen Sullivan and I’ll be bringing you the news from Afghanistan as it happens.
Here are the key recent developments:
US President Joe Biden has ordered an increased deployment of 5,000 troops to accelerate the departure of US diplomats and their Afghan allies, as he said America would not reverse its decision to leave Afghanistan, despite the Taliban advances.
“I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan – two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war on to a fifth,” he said.
Kabul has been in total blackout for at least two hours. The time there now is nearly 5am.
We will bring you the latest developments as they happen.
If you are in Kabul, see news you think we may have missed, or have questions, get in touch with me on Twitter @helenrsullivan.
No comments:
Post a Comment