US ambassador flees Kabul embassy with flag as Americans shelter in place

The US Ambassador to Afghanistan and some of his staff were seen fleeing their Kabul workplace with the stars and stripes flag Sunday, as the Pentagon increased the number of troops deployed in the region by 1,000 to 6,000. 

Ambassador Ross Wilson and the flag were both seen arriving at Kabul Airport, as other Americans still in the country were ordered to shelter in place, with shots being fired at the city’s airport. 

Late on Sunday night, the State Department announced all personnel had been evacuated from the US Embassy in Kabul and are at the airport.

‘We can confirm that the safe evacuation of all Embassy personnel is now complete. All Embassy personnel are located on the premises of Hamid Karzai International Airport, whose perimeter is secured by the US Military,’ State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement.

Initially, the aim had been to have staff removed within 72 hours but the Taliban’s astonishing advances across the Afghan capital Kabul prompted the immediate removal of all staff. 

 

An official security alert was issued by the US government after shots were fired at the airport, sparked fears American jets could be shot down as they try to flee the country, which the Taliban have vowed to rename the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. 

The government said the ‘security situation in Kabul is changing quickly including at the airport’ and has instructed US citizens to shelter in place. 

It had estimated the city would be able to hold off the Taliban for a year, then revised its guess down to a worst case scenario of 30 days, but the city has fallen to the Islamic extremists in just a few days. 

The Departments of State and Defense also announced on Sunday night that US forces will take over air traffic control at Kabul airport, in addition to expanding security there.

‘Tomorrow and over the coming days, we will be transferring out of the country thousands of American citizens who have been resident in Afghanistan, as well as locally employed staff of the U.S. mission in Kabul and their families and other particularly vulnerable Afghan nationals,’ the joint statement from the two agencies said.

‘And we will accelerate the evacuation of thousands of Afghans eligible for U.S. Special Immigrant Visas, nearly 2,000 of whom have already arrived in the United States over the past two weeks,’ the statement continued. 

‘For all categories, Afghans who have cleared security screening will continue to be transferred directly to the United States. And we will find additional locations for those yet to be screened.’

Late on Sunday night, the terrorist group was reported to have seized Bagram Air Base and freed thousands of U.S. prisoners that include some of the Taliban’s hardened fighters together with senior al Qaeda operatives.

Meanwhile, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told US senators Sunday morning that the sudden collapse of the Afghan government means terror groups like Al Qaeda could grow stronger in Afghanistan far sooner than the two years Congress had previously estimated it would take them to become a threat.

He conceded that the prediction also raised the possibility of a domestic attack in the US, or on one of its allies. Milley said up to 60,000 refugees could qualify for Special Immigrant Visas as a result of Iran’s collapse. 

The Pentagon has now authorized to send 6,000 US troops to Afghanistan to help with the evacuation, officials confirmed to Reuters Foreign Policy Correspondent Idrees Ali on Sunday, an increase from the original 5,000 that President Joe Biden said we be heading to the area.

Biden has set an August 31 deadline for the competition of the withdrawal. The pentagon estimates that 30,000 people will need to be evacuated in this process.

Video shared on social media Sunday shows people in Kabul rushing towards the airport. 

Biden also attributed the current situation in Afghanistan to his predecessor, Donald Trump, who he said ‘left the Taliban in the strongest military position since 2001′ and blamed him for the militants’ swift takeover of most of Afghanistan upon the US troop withdrawal.

In a scene mirroring that of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war, a US Air Force helicopter was seen taking off from the US embassy earlier Sunday.

The Chinook helicopter was seen taking to the skies above the city – just like in 1975 when a US Marine helicopter was seen evacuating embassy staff from Vietnamese capital. 

Smoke was seen rising from near to the US embassy earlier Sunday as security staff work to destroy any important documents, including CIA information, electronic devices, or material that could be used ‘in propaganda efforts’.  

‘Please also include items with embassy or agency logos, Americans flags, or items which could be misused in propaganda efforts,’ the notice said. 

It comes as the US steps up its evacuation of Kabul with Taliban fighters quickly moving in ‘from all sides’.  Shots were heard on the outskirts of the capital earlier Sunday, much earlier than first anticipated, before fighters poured into the city.

Two sources familiar with the situation told CNN that the US is ‘completely pulling out all personnel from the embassy in Kabul over the next 72 hours’.

This is a ‘rapid acceleration’ of Biden’s evacuation process, which was announced just last Thursday.

According to the news outlet, US Senators were briefed by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley Sunday as the situation in Afghanistan continues to unfold.

The Senate was informed that as many as 60,000 people who could possibly qualify as Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) holders or applicants, P1 and P2 visa holders, or others like human rights defenders. 

People are panicking at the airport, as evidenced by footage posted to social media.

Video shows frightened passengers yelling and scuffling inside cabin of plane allegedly at the Kabul airport.

Chaotic crowds of people are attempting to board flights at the airport. 

NATO officials announced that all commercial flights have been suspended from the Kabul airport and only military aircraft are allowed to operate.  

Meanwhile, a Taliban official says they will soon declare the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from the presidential palace in Kabul. 

US Intelligence officials had expected Kabul to hold out for three months, while UK ministers were hoping they had until the end of the month.

Leaders of the extremist group have Sunday demanded the Afghan government surrender the city to them in a bid to avoid bloodshed – adding the chilling warning ‘we’ve not declared a ceasefire’. 

As many as 10,000 US citizens are being evacuated from the city. Around 3,000 US troops are being sent to aid the mission. 

According to Biden, he and his security team made the decision in an effort to ‘protect our interests and values as we end our military mission in Afghanistan.’

Government leaders are trying to ensure an ‘orderly and safe drawdown of U.S. personnel and other allied personnel’ and an ‘orderly and safe evacuation of Afghans who helped our troops during our mission and those at special risk from the Taliban advance’.

The president says the U.S. government is also actively working to ‘process, transport, and relocate Afghan Special Immigrant Visa applicants and other Afghan allies’.

There are also fears about the safety of thousands of translators who are concerned they may be viewed as ‘traitors’ by the extremist Taliban.

It is understood the plan is to evacuate the translators and their families, though there are concerns that the evacuation efforts may be hampered if fighters quickly reach Kabul airport.

Taliban officials Sunday demanded foreigners who don’t leave to register their presence with Taliban administrators in the coming days. While western countries such as the US and UK have opted to evacuate staff, Russia Sunday confirmed that it did not intend to evacuate its embassy staff in Kabul.  

As the Taliban advance continues, following the decision by the US to pull its troops out, gunfire was Sunday heard near the presidential palace in Kabul.

The militants were seen in the districts of Kalakan, Qarabagh and Paghman hours after taking control of Jalalabad, the last major Afghan city to fall to the insurgents.

The terror group said in a statement they do not intend to take the capital ‘by force’ after entering the outskirts of the city.

An Afghan official earlier confirmed Jalalabad fell under Taliban control without a fight early Sunday morning when the governor surrendered, saying it was ‘the only way to save civilian lives.’

Its fall has also given the Taliban control of a road leading to the Pakistan city of Peshawar, one of the main highways into landlocked Afghanistan.

Jalalabad is close to the Pakistani border and just 80 miles from Kabul – the Afghanistan capital home to more than four million people and currently the only remaining major city still under government control.

Besides Kabul, just seven other provincial capitals out of the country’s 34 are yet to fall to the Taliban.

Concerns are mounting over how long Kabul can stave off the Taliban insurgents as they have captured the northern stronghold of Mazar-i-Sharif, the second-largest city Kandahar and third-largest city Herat all within the last 48 hours.

The Taliban are now closing in on the capital from all sides, controlling territories to the North, South, East and West and advancing to just seven miles south of the city. 

Hoda Ahmadi, a lawmaker from Logar province, told The Associated Press that the Taliban have reached the Char Asyab district on the outskirts of the capital, which was gripped by blackouts, communications outages and street fighting overnight Saturday as the country descends into chaos.

A US defense official has warned it could be only a matter of days before the insurgent fighters take control of Kabul. 

Meanwhile, Special Forces units are joining 600 British troops from the 16 Air Assault Brigade, including 150 Paratroopers, while RAF planes are being scrambled from around the world, to airlift more than 500 British Government employees out of Kabul.  

It is believed that by Saturday night that the number of UK officials still in Afghanistan had been reduced to the ‘low tens’ – including ambassador Sir Laurie Bristow.  

The UK Government says it aims to get British ambassador Sir Laurie and his remaining embassy staff out by Sunday night – amid fears the Taliban could seize Kabul airport within days. 

On Sunday the Taliban said they aim to take the city, but say they have no plans to take Kabul ‘by force’.

Leaders of the extremist group say they don’t want a ‘single Afghan to be injured or killed’ during the hostile takeover – but warned ‘we’ve not signed a ceasefire yet’. 

Just last week, US intelligence estimates expected the city to be able to hold out for at least three months. 

A senior US official told the New York Times the Taliban have warned the US it must cease airstrikes or else its extremist fighters will move in on US buildings.

Joe Biden has vowed that any action that puts Americans at risk ‘will be met with a swift and strong US military response.’  

Meanwhile, in the UK, Boris Johnson is facing calls for a last-ditch intervention to prevent the complete collapse of Afghanistan.

The lead elements of the British force sent to evacuate the remaining UK nationals were understood to be in the capital amid fears it could fall within days or even hours. 

But amid a hurried scramble for safety, helicopters were seen landing at the US embassy to ferry away remaining personnel.

In the UK, there was deep anger among many MPs at the way – 20 years after the first international forces entered Afghanistan – the country was being abandoned to its fate.

The chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Tom Tugendhat said it was ‘the biggest single foreign policy disaster’ since Suez, while Defence Committee chairman Tobias Ellwood said it was a humiliation for the West.

Despite the decision of the Biden administration to withdraw the remaining US troops which triggered the collapse, Mr Ellwood said it was still not too late to turn the situation around.

He called for the despatch of the Royal Navy carrier strike group to the region and urged the Prime Minister to convene an emergency conference of ‘like-minded nations’ to see what could be done.

‘I plead with the Prime Minister to think again. We have an ever-shrinking window of opportunity to recognise where this country is going as a failed state,’ he told Times Radio.

‘We can turn this around but it requires political will and courage. This is our moment to step forward.

‘We could prevent this, otherwise history will judge us very, very harshly in not stepping in when we could do and allowing the state to fail.’

Biden’s words come back to haunt him: Just five weeks ago the president said there’s ‘no circumstance where Americans will be lifted out of the U.S. embassy in Kabul by helicopter’ – and now he’s trying to squirm out of it by blaming Trump

Joe Biden insisted last month that there’s no way his troop withdrawal from Afghanistan would lead to a Saigon-like situation with Americans emergency evacuated out of the U.S. embassy in Kabul by helicopter.

‘There’s going to be no circumstance where you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of a (sic) embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,’ the president said during a press conference on July 8, 2021.

Biden insisted during that press conference that the U.S. would not succumb to the Taliban once troops were withdrawn and is now trying to divert blame for the takeover on Donald Trump.

Those words are coming back to bite the president after the majority of Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in just under a week and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was forced to evacuate by helicopter once the militant forces breached the city on Sunday.

‘Is the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?’ a reporter asked the president at the time of the July 8 press conference.

‘No, it is not,’ Biden responded.

He explained: ‘You have the Afghan troops at 300,000 – well equipped, as well as any army in the world – and an Air Force, against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable.’

He also said at the same press conference ‘that is not true’ that his own intelligence community was warning the Afghan government will likely collapse if there was a total and swift withdrawal.

‘Afghan government leadership has to come together,’ Biden said. ‘They clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place.’

Joe Biden immediately passed the buck to his predecessor, claiming that Trump ‘left the Taliban in the strongest military position since 2001’.

‘When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on US forces,’ Biden wrote in a statement Saturday.

‘Shortly before he left office, he also drew US forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500,’ the president continued in blaming former President Trump for the unfolding disaster in Afghanistan. ‘Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict.’

As the Taliban continues to overtake the majority of the country, forces reached the Capital City of Kabul on Sunday with officials seeking the unconditional surrender of the central government.

‘Our leadership had instructed our forces to remain at the gates of Kabul, not to enter the city,’ Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen told BBC in an interview.

‘We are awaiting a peaceful transfer of power,’ he said, adding the group expects that to happen in a matter of days.  

Secretary of State Antony Blinken also blamed Trump for forcing the administration’s hand on a total withdrawal by May.

‘Like it or not, there was an agreement that the forces would come out on May 1,’ Blinken told CNN on Sunday morning. 

 

‘Had we not begun that process, which is what the president did and the Taliban saw, then we would have been back at war with the Taliban, and we would have been back at war with tens of thousands of troops having to go in because the 2,500 troops we had there and the air power would not have sufficed,’ he said.

Blinken added in his interview on State of the Union that ‘it’s simply not in the national interest’ to remain in Afghanistan, claiming other U.S. adversaries would like ‘nothing more’ than to see another decade of American forces diverted there.

‘Come May 2nd, if the president had decided to stay, all gloves would have been off. We would have been back at war,’ Blinken said in a second interview Sunday morning with NBC’s Meet the Press.

He also said Sunday: ‘We had to put in place an entire system to deal with this. Unfortunately none of that work was done when we came in.’ 

The militant Islamic group was able to seize nearly all of Afghanistan in a little over a week – a stunning feat after the billions spent by the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) over two decades the build up Afghanistan’s security forces. 

An American military assessment estimated it would be a month before Kabul would come under insurgent pressure.

Biden vowed he would not pass on the war in the Middle East to whoever is president after him.

‘I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan — two Republicans, two Democrats,’ he continued. ‘I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.’

Trump immediately fired back at Biden in his own email statement on Saturday claiming that due to the current administration’s actions, the Taliban don’t fear America’s power anymore.

‘Joe Biden gets it wrong every time on foreign policy, and many other issues,’ he wrote.

‘Everyone knew he couldn’t handle the pressure.’

‘He ran out of Afghanistan instead of following the plan our Administration left for him—a plan that protected our people and our property, and ensured the Taliban would never dream of taking our Embassy or providing a base for new attacks against America,’ the former president continued.

‘The withdrawal would be guided by facts on the ground,’ Trump said of the deal he made in 2019 with leaders of the Taliban.

‘After I took out ISIS, I established a credible deterrent,’ Trump added. ‘That deterrent is now gone.’

‘The Taliban no longer has fear or respect for America, or America’s power,’ he said. ‘What a disgrace it will be when the Taliban raises their flag over America’s Embassy in Kabul.’

‘This is complete failure through weakness, incompetence, and total strategic incoherence.’

In Biden’s Saturday statement, he provided a list of five things his administration is doing to address the situation in Afghanistan. This includes deploying 5,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan to assist in the total withdrawal of all allies and U.S. personnel.

‘[B]ased on the recommendations of our diplomatic, military, and intelligence teams,’ he said, ‘I have authorized the deployment of approximately 5,000 US troops to make sure we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of US personnel and other allied personnel and an orderly and safe evacuation of Afghans who helped our troops during our mission and those at special risk from the Taliban advance.’

Around 1,000 service members are already on the ground and 3,000 more were already being sent next week, before officials announced the deployment of an extra 1,000 as the situation escalated over the weekend.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan will be evacuated in 72 hours under the protection of the military, and some staffers have already arrived at the Kabul international airport.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken held talks with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani Saturday to discuss the ‘urgency of ongoing diplomatic and political efforts to reduce the violence,’ the State Department said in a statement.

‘The Secretary emphasized the United States’ commitment to a strong diplomatic and security relationship with the Government of Afghanistan and our continuing support for the people of Afghanistan.’

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has slammed Biden for the ‘complete mismanagement’ of the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Pentagon officials warned it could be just a matter of a couple days before the Taliban seizes control of Kabul, a city with more than four million people.

McCarthy said: ‘The White House has no discernible plan other than pleading with the Taliban. The bungled withdrawal, reminiscent of his failed withdrawal from Iraq, is an embarrassment to our nation.’

‘President Biden must continue to provide the close air support necessary for the Afghan government to protect themselves from the Taliban and make sure al Qaeda and ISIS do not gain a foothold due to the Biden administration’s disastrous policies.’

But Biden hit back in a statement from Camp David on Saturday afternoon, insisting that he could not force the Afghan army to fight.

He said: ‘One more year, or five more years, of US military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.’

Biden and first lady Jill Biden departed for Camp David on Friday and plans to stay there through Wednesday.