White House re-commits to getting Americans out of Afghanistan

A senior White House official promised on Sunday that the United States would find a way to evacuate the remaining Americans from Afghanistan if they wanted to leave, but a key Republican foreign affairs lawmaker said Taliban insurgents are blocking the exit from the Kabul airport. .

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain told the show State of the Union from CNN that US officials believe that “about 100” Americans remain in Afghanistan for nearly a week since the US military withdrew its last troops from the country after a nearly two-decade war against al-Qaida terrorists and the Taliban.

“We are going to find ways to get them out if they want to leave,” Klain said, probably through the resumption of flights to Qatar.

In addition, he said that the United States will continue to try to help Afghans who have helped American troops over the years escape the country and the Taliban government.

But a key opposition lawmaker, Congressman Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, told the show Fox News Sunday which, based on US intelligence reports, believes that “hundreds of Americans” were left behind when the last US military flights left Kabul last Monday. He said that no American citizen has left Afghanistan since then.

“The Taliban have been making demands, not allowing the planes to go out,” McCaul said.

Officials in Afghanistan said at least four planes had been blocked from the Mazar-e-Sharif airport and chartered to evacuate several hundred people. An Afghan official said the potential passengers were Afghans, many of whom did not have passports or visas, while McCaul said the group included Americans and that six planes had stalled.

He said the Taliban “want something in return,” the full recognition of the United States of its control over the Afghan government.

“This is not a new and improved Taliban,” McCaul said, in comparison to the group’s conduct in 2001 when the United States overthrew it in an invasion targeting Taliban-hosted al-Qaida terrorists while planning the attacks on 11 September. September against the United States that killed almost 3,000 people.

He said that some Afghan interpreters who have assisted American troops over the years and who seek to leave their homeland have been forced to return from the Kabul airport and forced to return home to see how their relatives have been executed, including some beheaded, before the interpreters themselves are assassinated. McCaul did not provide his source for this information or say how many had been killed by the Taliban.

“I’ve always said that [el presidente Joe Biden] His hands are stained with blood, ”McCaul said.

After the United States withdrew its last troops from Afghanistan last week, Biden vigorously defended its withdrawal by pulling 98% of Americans out of the country as an “extraordinary success.”

Biden has often said that he would not continue the US presence in Afghanistan as an “eternal war.”

National polls in the United States show that Americans support Biden’s decision to leave the country, but not the chaotic end of operations there. In the last days of the American presence, 13 American soldiers were killed in a suicide bomb attack at the airport claimed by the Islamic State Khorasan, an Afghan branch of the terror group.