Source: PoliticsHome.com
A woman airlifted out of Afghanistan with her family said the government has abandoned its responsibility to those left behind and must urgently step up efforts to get more people to the UK.
Peymana Assad, who is a Labour councillor in Harrow and the first elected official of Afghan origin in the UK, was evacuated with a family member in August after she visited the country to see relatives.
Source: Associated Press
MADRID (AP) — Spain has started a new evacuation operation to extract more Afghans and their families left behind following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
Spain’s Defense Ministry said Sunday that it is working with the foreign ministry on a new evacuation mission.
Source: Guardian
The deeply partisan US Congress is rarely a conducive place for national introspection and Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the Afghanistan withdrawal did not provide an exception.
In the midst of the point-scoring and blame-shifting on display in the senators’ questions to the nation’s military leadership, it was clear that it was a contest to apportion shares in failure.
And behind the debacle of the pullout that left tens of thousands of vulnerable Afghans behind, there were fleeting references to the far deeper failure of the preceding two decades – a reckoning that has only just begun for the Pentagon and the US foreign policy establishment.
Source: Task&Purpose
One digit on a single piece of paper separated Zee and his family from an uncertain fate. A month ago, the former Afghan interpreter escaped Kandahar, Afghanistan where the Taliban seized his home. They were looking for him, according to his brother who later sent him a video of several men loitering around his backyard. Zee dressed his family in worn and dirty clothes, hoping to disguise them as beggars, then boarded a bus with 50 other escapees at midnight. The bus headed toward Kabul and stopped six or seven times at Taliban checkpoints along the way. Zee said that armed men entered the bus and questioned the occupants: “What do you do? What was your job?” He sunk back into the seat with his family, hoping the disguises helped. No one questioned them.
Source: CNN
Wakil’s eyes fill with tears. He has no idea whether he and his family will get out of Afghanistan, and fears that if they don’t the Taliban will hunt him down and kill him. A former US government employee, Wakil is not his real name; he spoke to CNN on the condition that his identify would not be revealed
Continue reading ‘They didn’t betray us yet,’ says stranded Afghan ally with enduring hope of US rescueSource: GOV.UK
Councils who support people through the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS) or Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) scheme will receive £20,520 per person, over 3 years, for resettlement and integration costs. This is based on the previous Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme, but over 3 rather than 5 years, with more money provided in the crucial early period to help people settle and become part of their new communities.
Source: BBC
Former Royal Marine Paul “Pen” Farthing said the campaign to evacuate workers at his animal shelter from Afghanistan has been “a complete success”.
Last month, Mr Farthing was forced to leave behind 68 staff and family members when he and some 150 animals were evacuated from Kabul.
The staff are now in Pakistan in the care of the British High Commission.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said they would be brought to the UK in the coming days.
Source: Guardian
Mohammad Zaman Khadimi was forced to make an impossible choice as he fled the Taliban for sanctuary in Australia
On an August morning, Mohammad Zaman Khadimi walked out of class and into a world entirely changed.
“I heard the news that the Taliban were coming,” he says. “They had captured Herat and Lashkar Gah and they would come to Kabul. Nothing would stop them. Everything changed. I knew I would be vulnerable.”
Within 48 hours, the Islamist group would seize control of Kabul and sit in the presidential palace. The Taliban would be the government.
Source: Fox News
A new series “Fox News Digital Originals” analyses the reasons behind the fall of Kabul and the last days before the evacuation mission this year. It contains some nuanced information but should be read with a grain of salt considering the source.
Mick Mulroy, a former senior Defense Department official in the Trump administration who now thinks it was a mistake to negotiate with the Taliban, and other experts give their analyses on why the Afghan National Army was not able to defend the country against the Taliban.
Continue reading How Kabul became an evacuation bottleneck and a prime terror target: The Last 96The last US aircraft has taken off from the Hamid Karzai Airport, Marine Corps General Kenneth McKenzie announced at a Pentagon briefing.