Month: August 2021

Costs in Bali Bombing Case Are Delayed at Guantánamo

Post author By
Post date August 31, 2021

The three prisoners’ lawyers also told the judge that in 2020 the court’s official Indonesian translator believed that “the government is wasting money on these terrorists; they should have been killed long ago, ”adding that they had an affidavit from a witness who heard the comment. The public prosecutor’s office demands life imprisonment in the case.

Mr. Bin Lep’s attorney, Brian Bouffard, declared the Indonesian-American contract translator to be “irretrievably biased.” Mr. Bin Amin’s attorney, Christine Funk, asked why the prosecutors even needed an interpreter when bringing charges: “Are you spying on us? I do not know.”

The Trial Judge, Navy Cmdr. Hayes C. Larsen, tried to fix the problems. He gave the court’s official translation team a 10-minute break every 20 minutes. He urged defense attorneys to file legal motions if they believed there were problems of interpretation that required remedial action. And he postponed the reading of the charges until Tuesday, which was the reason for the hearing on Monday.

Both civilian and military defense attorneys, all paid by the Pentagon, said the case was still in its infancy. Prosecutors, they said, provided perhaps 2 percent of the pre-trial documents that could be used in the case, including reports of interrogations the FBI conducted with the detainees in 2007 shortly after they were transferred to military custody by the CIA was.

Mr. Hambali’s attorney, James R. Hodes, described the case as “absurd,” in part because of his client’s long prison term and nearly two decades late in bringing charges against him. He told reporters before the hearing that Mr. Hambali had been “brutalized” and had spent at least half of his detention in solitary confinement. He said the prisoner was due “an apology” and repatriation “to avoid being held in a cage on a Caribbean island.”

The hearings in Guantánamo took place mainly between English and Arabic, but also had translation problems. In 2015, one of the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks blurted out in court by the name of a translator – revealing that the linguist had previously worked for the CIA in a black place, his identity and derailed a week of hearings.

Tags Bali, bombing, Case, charges, delayed, Guantanamo

World News

Afghanistan Information: Reside Updates – The New York Occasions

Post author By
Post date August 30, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

The last vestiges of the American presence in Afghanistan have departed Kabul airport, ending an occupation that resulted in a complete takeover of the country by the adversary the U.S. military spent two decades fighting, U.S. military officials said.

In recent days, American military leaders said the United States would continue evacuation efforts and fully withdraw by Aug. 31. But those efforts were wrapped up a full day early.

Evacuation flights ended on Monday, and the military finished packing everything it intended to fly out of the airport onto transport planes before loading the remaining U.S. service members onto planes for departure.

Control of the airport was left in the hands of the Taliban, who said they were still working on the shape of their new government.

A senior Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, took to Twitter and declared: “Our country has achieved a full independence, thanks to God.”

A few hundred people were waiting outside the airport perimeter on Monday evening, but were kept at a distance by Taliban fighters guarding the area. Around 1,200 people had been airlifted from Kabul in the previous 24 hours, a White House spokeswoman said early Monday morning.

But that leaves behind at least 100,000 people, by one estimate, and possibly many more who might be eligible for an expedited U.S. visa but now find themselves in an Afghanistan under the complete control of the Taliban. Many are former interpreters for the U.S. military who are in some stage of the process to receive a Special Immigrant Visa, and who fear they are at immediate risk of being killed by the Taliban.

The United States and 97 other countries have said that they will continue to take in people fleeing Afghanistan and that they have secured an agreement with the Taliban to allow safe passage for those who plan to leave.

The Taliban’s chief negotiator, Sher Mohammed Abas Stanekzai, said Friday that the group would not stop people from departing, no matter their nationality or whether they had worked for the United States during the 20-year war.

Whether the Taliban will uphold that commitment, however, and when the airport might reopen for commercial flights, was uncertain.

Credit…Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

Hours after a U.S. military drone strike in Kabul on Sunday, Defense Department officials said that it had blown up a vehicle laden with explosives, eliminating a threat to Kabul’s airport from the Islamic State Khorasan group.

But at a family home in Kabul on Monday, survivors and neighbors said the strike had killed 10 people, including seven children, an aid worker for an American charity organization and a contractor with the U.S. military.

Zemari Ahmadi, who worked for the charity organization Nutrition and Education International, was on his way home from work after dropping off colleagues on Sunday evening, according to relatives and colleagues interviewed in Kabul.

As he pulled into the narrow street where he lived with his three brothers and their families, the children, seeing his white Toyota Corolla, ran outside to greet him. Some clambered aboard in the street, others gathered around as he pulled the car into the courtyard of their home.

It was then that they say the drone struck.

At the time of the attack, the Corolla was in a narrow courtyard inside a walled family compound. Its doors were blown out, and its windows shattered.

Mr. Ahmadi and some of the children were killed inside his car; others were fatally wounded in adjacent rooms, family members said. An Afghan official confirmed that three of the dead children were transferred by ambulance from the home on Sunday.

Journalists on the scene for The New York Times were unable to independently verify the family’s account.

Mr. Ahmadi’s daughter Samia, 21, was inside when she was struck by the blast wave. “At first I thought it was the Taliban,” she said. “But the Americans themselves did it.”

Samia said she staggered outside, choking, and saw the bodies of her siblings and relatives. “I saw the whole scene,” she said. “There were burnt pieces of flesh everywhere.”

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U.S. Investigating Civilian Casualties in Kabul Strike

Pentagon officials acknowledged the possibility of civilian casualties in Kabul, Afghanistan, following a U.S. military drone strike on a vehicle they said was carrying explosives related to an ISIS-K threat on the airport.

On Sunday, U.S. military forces conducted an unmanned over-the-horizon airstrike on a vehicle known to be an imminent ISIS-K threat. This self-defense strike successfully hit the target near Kabul airport. Significant secondary explosions from the targeted vehicle indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material. We are aware of reports of civilian casualties and we take these reports very seriously and we are continuing to assess the situation. Make no mistake, no military on the face of the Earth works harder to avoid civilian casualties than the United States military. And nobody wants to see innocent life taken. We take it very, very seriously. And when we know that we have caused innocent life to be lost in the conduct of our operations, we’re transparent about it. We’re investigating this. I’m not going to get ahead of it. But if we have, you know, verifiable information that we did, in fact, take innocent life here, then we will be transparent about that, too. Nobody wants to see that happen. But you know what else we didn’t want to see happen? We didn’t want to see happen what we believe to be a very real, a very specific and a very imminent threat to the Hamid Karzai International Airport and to our troops operating at that airport, as well as civilians around it and in it.

Pentagon officials acknowledged the possibility of civilian casualties in Kabul, Afghanistan, following a U.S. military drone strike on a vehicle they said was carrying explosives related to an ISIS-K threat on the airport.CreditCredit…U.S. Network Pool

The Pentagon acknowledged the possibility that Afghan civilians had been killed in the drone strike, but suggested that any civilian deaths resulted from the detonation of explosives in the vehicle that was targeted.

“We’re not in a position to dispute it,” John F. Kirby, the chief Pentagon spokesman said Monday about reports on the ground of civilian casualties. He repeated earlier Pentagon statements that the military was investigating the strike on a vehicle two miles from Hamid Karzai International Airport.

“No military on the face of the earth works harder to avoid civilian casualties than the United States military,” Mr. Kirby said. “We take it very, very seriously. And when we know that we have caused innocent life to be lost in the conduct of our operations, we’re transparent about it.”

Among the dead was Samia’s fiancé, Ahmad Naser, 30, a former army officer and contractor with the U.S. military who had come from Herat, in western Afghanistan, in the hopes of being evacuated from Kabul.

VideoFootage showed the site of a U.S. military drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan. The strike targeted a vehicle carrying explosives, a Defense Department official said.CreditCredit…EPA, via Shutterstock

A spokesman for the U.S. Central Command said on Sunday that the U.S. military had carried out a drone strike against an Islamic State Khorasan vehicle planning to attack the airport. The group had claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing at the airport on Thursday.

On Monday, Capt. Bill Urban, the spokesman, reaffirmed an earlier statement that the military hit a valid target, an explosives-laden vehicle.

Mr. Ahmadi was a technical engineer for the local office of Nutrition and Education International, an American nonprofit based in Pasadena, Calif. His neighbors and relatives insisted that the engineer and his family members, many of whom had worked for the Afghan security forces, had no connection to any terrorist group.

They provided documents related to his long employment with the American charity, as well as Mr. Naser’s application for a Special Immigrant Visa, based on his service as a guard at Camp Lawton, in Herat.

“He was well respected by his colleagues and compassionate towards the poor and needy,” Steven Kwon, the president of NEI, said of Mr. Ahmadi in an email. He wrote that Mr. Ahmadi had just recently “prepared and delivered soy-based meals to hungry women and children at local refugee camps in Kabul.”

Najim Rahim, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

Credit…Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In the final hours of the American military presence in Afghanistan, hope dwindled among the Afghans seeking to escape the country via the international airport in Kabul, the focal point of the U.S. evacuation effort since the Taliban takeover of the city just over two weeks ago.

As the U.S. military races toward a Tuesday deadline to withdraw from America’s longest war, sporadic violence has been reported in the Afghan capital, underscoring the perils ahead for a country already buffeted by insecurity, a humanitarian crisis and a terrorist threat.

After days of chaos at the airport as thousands scrambled to leave the country, by Monday evening a sense of calm and resignation had descended.

A few hundred people were waiting outside the airport perimeter, but were kept at a significant distance by Taliban fighters guarding the area. A few planes — mostly C-17s, large military transport aircraft — took off and turned west into the setting sun. Around 1,200 people had been airlifted from Kabul in the previous 24 hours, a White House spokeswoman said early Monday morning.

American fighter jets and drones could be seen circling overhead. Taliban fighters said they were preparing for the possibility that the American troops would be gone by day’s end, hours before the deadline.

The U.S. military shot down rockets aimed at the Kabul airport earlier on Monday, a day after it said that one of its drones had struck a vehicle full of explosives. The U.S. has warned that more attacks like the one last week outside the airport, which killed nearly 200 people, are possible before it withdraws.

The Islamic State Khorasan, an ISIS affiliate known as ISIS-K, claimed responsibility for that bombing, which also killed U.S. troops. The group claimed responsibility for Monday’s rocket fire, too, according to The Associated Press.

Thousands of Afghans who had hoped for a way out of the country are facing the reality that they are unlikely to find one before the withdrawal ends.

One former interpreter for U.S. Special Forces, who asked to be identified only by his nickname, Mike, had approval for a Special Immigrant Visa but was unable to get into the airport. The visa program was created to offer a quick way to bring Afghan interpreters and contractors to safety in the United States, but many will be unable to fly out as part of the current evacuation.

“I’m still in Kabul, and I don’t know what to do,” Mike said in a phone interview. “Of course we are disappointed that we’re left behind. We have sacrificed a lot.”

He described the frustration of knowing that many others had left without the same documentation, and his fear of returning home to a village where everyone knows he worked for the Americans.

“We wake up in the middle of the night and think about what’s going to happen to our life and to our children,” he said.

Credit…Ahmad Masood/Reuters

Over the past two decades, the Afghan broadcaster Tolo has been known for provocative programs like “Burka Avenger,” in which an animated superheroine uses martial arts to vanquish villains trying to shut down a girls’ school.

Millions of Afghans have also tuned in to its racy Turkish soap operas, its popular “6 P.M. News” and the reality show “Afghan Star,” featuring female singers dancing energetically on Afghanistan’s version of “American Idol.”

Since the Taliban captured Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, on Aug. 15, however, Tolo’s usual lineup has been supplemented by something else: educational programming about Islamic morality. Whether its menu of pop music and female television hosts survive in the Taliban’s new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan will be a barometer of the insurgents’ tolerance for dissenting views and values.

“To be honest, I’m still surprised we are up and running,” said Saad Mohseni, Tolo’s co-owner, an Australian-Afghan former investment banker who started Moby Group, which owns Tolo, in 2002. “We know what the Taliban stand for.”

Keen to gain international legitimacy, the Taliban have been seeking to rebrand themselves as more moderate since they stormed Kabul, offering former rivals amnesty and urging women to join the government. They have vowed to support media freedom, on the condition that outlets subscribe to “Islamic values.” A Taliban spokesman even appeared on a Tolo news program hosted by a female anchor just days after the group captured Kabul.

But journalists and human rights advocates say there are ominous signs that a violent media clampdown is underway.

Taliban fighters hunted a journalist from the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle who had already left the country, fatally shooting a member of his family and seriously injuring another, according to the broadcaster.

Ziar Khan Yaad, a Tolo journalist, and a cameraman were beaten by five Taliban fighters at gunpoint while out reporting last week.

The Taliban have also barred at least two female journalists from their jobs at the public broadcaster Radio Television Afghanistan. And the woman who hosted the Taliban spokesman on a Tolo news program is no longer at the network.

She fled the country.

Credit…Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

In the fear-filled days after the Taliban stormed into Kabul, she was hailed as the brave young woman who questioned one of the militants on live television, providing hope that Afghan women might not lose all their freedoms.

But days later, like others who feared the militants’ wrath, Behishta Arghand, a former news presenter with Tolo news, fled the country, landing with her parents and four siblings in a sparsely furnished villa in a walled compound on the outskirts of Doha, Qatar.

Ms. Arghand, 24, spoke proudly of her interview and said she hoped the Taliban would follow through on their vows to allow more openness than when they ruled the country before the United States invasion 20 years ago.

“We don’t have any government now,” she said in an interview. “We just hope they do what they promise. But now everyone is scared of the Taliban.”

Ms. Arghand recalled the shock she felt when she learned that the Taliban had entered Kabul, and the fear that gripped the Afghan capital the next day. Still, she said, she went to work to make a point about the role of women in public life.

“I wanted to show the Taliban that we want to work,” she said. “We want to be in the media. It’s our right in society.”

Ms. Arghand said she was presenting the news on Aug. 17 when she got a feeling that there was a guest in the studio. She soon realized it was Mawlawi Abdulhaq Hemad, a member of the Taliban’s media team.

She had only a few moments to prepare.

VideoA female news anchor interviewed a Taliban official on an Afghan television station. The group’s takeover has raised fears of a return to repressive policies and human rights violations for women and girls.CreditCredit…Tolo News

Her producers, she said, told her to try to draw out information without challenging her guest. But once on the air, she challenged him anyway, asking about reports that the Taliban had conducted house-to-house searches in the city.

After the interview, her phone was flooded with messages from friends and relatives who were both proud and terrified that she had questioned her guest so directly.

Not long after, she and her family fled, fearing that remaining in Kabul was too dangerous.

Ms. Arghand is now staying in a house with no television or internet. She doesn’t know how long she’ll be there. She doesn’t know where she’ll go next.

But she dreams of returning home someday to help women.

“If I am alive, I will do a lot for my home,” she said. “My country needs my generation.”

Credit…Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

The suicide bomb blast that killed more than 170 people crowded outside Abbey Gate at Kabul’s airport on Thursday also sundered a family gathered there, hoping to flee.

Ahmad Wali Stanekzai’s wife, Zakya, died from injuries sustained in the explosion. He couldn’t find his three children — Mina, Ahmad Faisal and Masiullah — who disappeared in the bedlam after the explosion.

Masiullah, a teenager, was dazed from the blast and called his aunt, Ferishta Stanekzai, who lives in Virginia.

“He said, ‘I don’t know about my mom, dad, brother and sister, what happened to them, but I am here alone, and there is firing, and I don’t know where I should go,’” Ms. Stanekzai said in an interview on Sunday.

Ms. Stanekzai began working the phones with the help of Lt. Gen. John A. Bradley, a retired Air Force officer who has been trying to extricate several hundred Afghans in the two weeks since the Taliban captured Kabul. This account is based on interviews with Ms. Stanekzai and General Bradley, who have been in contact with Mr. Stanekzai and other relatives and neighbors.

Mr. Stanekzai’s family had traveled to the airport in Kabul in a desperate attempt to get on a flight. They had documentation from General Bradley, but no official clearance to board a plane. As they tried to navigate a path out of the country, the Islamic State Khorasan, the terrorist group’s Afghan affiliate, attacked the gate.

“Finally we contact my brother, and he says that ‘I don’t know about my two kids, but I lost my wife,’” Ms. Stanekzai said.

Mr. Stanekzai began searching the hospitals in Kabul for his missing children, and in time reunited with his oldest son. But he couldn’t find his other two children, and he and Ms. Stanekzai contacted dozens of friends and neighbors to scour the city.

In time, they learned that the children had boarded an airplane with a neighbor, Imran Ibrahim. But Mr. Stanekzai did not know the flight’s destination.

Ms. Stanekzai eventually reached Mr. Ibrahim. He and the children had landed in Germany, where the children received treatment for injuries from the Kabul blast at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, near Ramstein Air Base.

But Mr. Stanekzai and Masiullah are still in Kabul, with no way out, as President Biden’s Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline fast approaches. They are just two of the tens of thousands of Afghans with connections to the United States who are desperate to escape.

General Bradley said he and family members had appealed to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner of Virginia, and retired military leaders to reach out to Mr. Biden or other officials who could help the Stanekzais secure a flight out of Kabul.

A White House staffer and an aide to Senator Warner said they were working on it, but so far a flight has not been approved, General Bradley said.

“The security situation is making things very difficult,” Rachel Cohen, Mr. Warner’s communications director, said in an email on Sunday, adding, “This is a priority for us.”

Mr. Stanekzai and his son have stayed in a home in Kabul, leaving briefly to hold an Islamic funeral for his wife.

Reaching the airport means enduring Taliban checkpoints, chaotic streets and the possibility of another terrorist attack.

“I understand how difficult it is, since we’ve already lost so many precious young American lives in this operation, but I feel that it is an obligation of our country to reunite this family,” General Bradley said in an interview on Sunday.

Ms. Stanekzai said her brother and nephew were concerned that their time was running out.

“‘What will happen if we don’t get out?’” Ms. Stanekzai said her nephew asked in a recent conversation. “‘I just want to be with my brother and sister.’”

Credit…Hosay

Hundreds of students, their relatives and staff of the American University of Afghanistan gathered at a safe house on Sunday and boarded buses in what was supposed to be a final attempt at evacuation on U.S. military flights, the students said.

But after seven hours of waiting for clearance to enter the airport gates and driving around the city, the group met a dead end: Evacuations were permanently called off. The airport gates remained a security threat, and civilian evacuations were ending Monday.

“I regret to inform you that the high command at HKIA in the airport has announced there will be no more rescue flights,” said an email sent to students from the university administration on Sunday afternoon, which was shared with The New York Times.

“The scholar pilgrims who were turned away today while seeking safe passage to a better future need the help of the U.S. government, who gave them the hope they must not lose,” the American University president, Ian Bickford, said.

The email asked the 600 or so students and relatives to return home. The U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan must be completed by a Tuesday deadline, so the military is turning from evacuating civilians to bringing its own personnel home.

The group was then alarmed after learning that their names had been shared with the Taliban fighters guarding the airport checkpoints. Mr. Bickford said that the university had given the names only to the U.S. military.

“They told us: We have given your names to the Taliban,” said Hosay, a 24-year-old sophomore studying business administration who was on the bus on Sunday. “We are all terrified. There is no evacuation, there is no getting out.”

Hosay earned a scholarship that covered half of her tuition. She wanted to get an M.B.A. and start an all-female engineering firm.

When the Taliban took over Kabul on Aug. 15, one of the first sites they captured was the sprawling, modern American University campus. Men in traditional Afghan outfits swinging AK-47 rifles brought down the university flag and raised the flag of the Taliban, according to student and social media photos.

The Taliban posted a picture of themselves on social media standing at the entrance of a university building with an ominous message, saying this was where America had trained infidel “wolves” to corrupt the minds of Muslims.

The photograph was widely shared among Afghans and sent students and alumni into hiding. They had reason to be scared. In 2016, the Taliban attacked the campus with explosives and guns in a terrorist assault that lasted 10 hours and killed 15 people, including seven students.

The university shut down its campus on Aug. 14 as word reached administrators that the Taliban were on the outskirts of Kabul. Mr. Bickford and foreign staff left Kabul for Doha that night.

Mr. Bickford said in an interview last week that he was working with the State Department to evacuate about 1,200 students and alumni. But on Friday, after the deadly attack on the airport, Mr. Bickford said the effort had become much more complicated.

Mr. Bickford said the university was committed to ensuring all enrolled students would finish their degrees remotely.

The American University of Afghanistan opened in 2006, receiving most of its funding from the United States Agency for International Development, which gave $160 million. It was one of the U.S.A.I.D.’s largest civilian projects in Afghanistan.

Students said they had struggled emotionally over the past two weeks after they went from being college students to fugitives overnight.

Several students interviewed repeated a poetic saying in Dari: “Our hopes and dreams have turned into dust.”

Mohammad, a 31-year-old father of three and part-time government ministry worker, had three more courses left to finish his degree in business administration.

His job and salary are now gone. His degree is in jeopardy.

“It’s as if you throw a glass on a cement floor and your life shatters in a split second,” he said Sunday from a safe house.

Yasser, a 27-year-old political science student, said he had been told in an email from the university on Saturday to report to a safe location for evacuation. But after President Biden said there were security threats to the airport, the plan was scrapped and everyone was sent home.

Early Sunday morning, Yasser received another email from the university asking him to go to a safe house at 7:45 a.m. The students were told to bring only a backpack with two outfits. Videos shared with The New York Times show hundreds of students carrying backpacks and waiting on the roadside. Dozens of buses are lined up.

The chitchat among students abruptly ends, and someone gasps. Someone cries. The students have just been told that evacuations have been called off.

“It was a frightening day,” Yasser said. “We went there anticipating to be rescued and returned home defeated.”

Credit…Pool photo by Francis Malasig

China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, urged the United States to engage with the Taliban and provide urgently needed aid to Afghanistan.

In a phone call on Sunday, Mr. Yang warned Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, that the Chinese government’s cooperation on Afghanistan would depend on the United States and its attitude toward Beijing. The Chinese foreign ministry posted an account of the call on its website.

Mr. Wang told Mr. Blinken that the Biden administration should also maintain contacts with the Taliban to prevent Afghanistan from falling deeper into chaos. Before the Taliban seized control of Kabul earlier this month, Beijing had held talks with senior Taliban officials about the future of Afghanistan, which shares a narrow border with China.

“There has been a fundamental change in domestic developments in Afghanistan, and all sides need to engage in contacts with the Taliban,” Mr. Wang said, according to the foreign ministry’s account. “The United States, in particular, must work with the international community to provide Afghanistan with economic, public welfare and humanitarian aid, assisting the new political structure in Afghanistan in maintaining normal government operations and safeguarding social stability and public security.”

So far, the Chinese government has not specified what aid and other support it may provide Afghanistan, nor any conditions it has for recognizing a new Taliban-dominated government in Kabul. But Mr. Wang suggested that Beijing’s willingness to work alongside the Biden administration on such issues was conditional on tamping down broader tensions between the two big powers.

The United States has criticized the Chinese government over its security crackdown in Hong Kong, repression of largely Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region, and warnings to Taiwan, the democratically governed island that Beijing regards as a part of China.

“Recently, China and the U.S. have opened up communication over Afghanistan, climate change and other issues,” Mr. Wang said. “China will consider how to engage with the U.S. based on U.S. attitudes toward China. If the U.S. also hopes for Chinese-U.S. relations to return to a normal track, then stop persistently maligning and attacking China and harming Chinese sovereignty, security and development interests.”

Credit…Safa

As gunfire rang out in Kabul, an Afghan college graduate named Batool tried not to show her fear.

For days, she and about 150 other Afghan women — mostly students and alumni of Asian University for Women in Bangladesh — had essentially lived on a convoy of buses that they hoped would get them into the Kabul airport, the center of the U.S. military’s last-ditch evacuation efforts.

University officials and volunteers had secured them visas and chartered a plane for them, but several times, the buses failed to make it past Taliban and military checkpoints.

Fear about being in the open intensified after a deadly terrorist attack on Thursday and a night on the buses listening to gunfire outside.

“We accepted that we will either die or we will leave,” said Batool, 25. “Every single one of us wanted to follow our dreams and continue our education.”

Finally on Saturday, with university leaders and other volunteers pleading their case to American officials, 148 women passed the final checkpoint. Told to leave their luggage behind, they were allowed to bring only their phones and phone chargers.

Their passage past that checkpoint and onto a plane capped a frantic, round-the-clock campaign by a university officials and others to get the women out after the sudden collapse of Kabul to the Taliban two weeks ago.

As the Taliban advanced, school officials quickly created a masters program so alumni could obtain student visas, said a university founder, Kamal Ahmad.

To keep track of the buses at all times in the chaotic scene around the airport, the school used a geocommunications app that was also used to help evacuate an Afghan girls robotics team.

Lawyers with the firm Mayer Brown helped the effort, according to Marcia Goodman, a partner for the firm who said they had “reached out to to contacts and friends of contacts, including military on the ground and government officials at various levels.”

But they ran into issues booking a charter plane out of Kabul, and feared paying up to $450,000 for a single flight that might fail to pick the students up.

In the desperate effort to enter the airport, overwhelming fatigue was itself a threat to the evacuation plans.

When Safa, 20, and two friends separated from the group at the airport to tell their families they had made it past the checkpoints, they fell asleep from exhaustion as their phones charged in a hall.

When they woke up an hour later, they discovered to their horror that they had missed the flight. “We were not able to say anything,” Safa said. “We were not able to cry. We were just in shock what to do.”

Eventually, military officers put them on a flight to Doha, Qatar.

Safa has decided to “never sleep again,” she joked during a telephone interview.

Leaving Afghanistan brings mixed feelings, she said,

At the evacuation’s lowest moments, she felt resigned to giving up her dream of finishing her degree and working in public health.

“It was killing me inside,” she said. “Why I should give up? Why should I bury it? I deserve to be happy. I deserve my old dreams.”

Now, she said, she intends to finish her public health degree and return one day to Afghanistan, after the Taliban have left.

“I want to serve my country,” she said. “I can see my future, and I will be able to turn my dreams in reality.”

Most of the students are now in Spain, Batool said, with the next leg of their journey to the United States. They are not sure when they will make it to Bangladesh.

Safa said she felt “grateful” to the university but was worried for the family left behind.

“I saved my life,” she said, “but still I can’t say I have a good feeling.”

Credit…Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The United States and 97 other countries said on Sunday that they would continue to take in people fleeing Afghanistan after the American military departs this week, and that they had secured an agreement with the Taliban to allow safe passage for those who are leaving.

The Taliban’s chief negotiator, Sher Mohammed Abas Stanekzai, had announced on Friday that the group would not stop people from departing, no matter their nationality or whether they had worked for the United States during the 20-year war.

A joint statement released on Sunday on behalf of more than half of the world’s governments and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said that they had “received assurances from the Taliban” that people with travel documents showing they were clear to enter any of those countries could safely depart.

The countries also pledged to “continue issuing travel documentation to designated Afghans” and cited a “clear expectation of and commitment from the Taliban” to their safe passage.

“We note the public statements of the Taliban confirming this understanding,” the statement said.

Notably missing from the statement were Russia and China, two permanent members of the United Nations Security Council who have pledged to help the Taliban rebuild Afghanistan.

The statement did not warn of any consequences should the Taliban renege on the agreement, although a senior State Department official said it was meant to convey an implicit message about incentives — namely, foreign aid to the government — that the international community would use to enforce it.

The chief American envoy to Taliban peace talks, Zalmay Khalilzad, tweeted on Saturday that the Taliban’s assurances were “positive” and that “we, our allies and the international community will hold them to these commitments.”

Relief agencies say that tens of thousands of Afghans fear being left behind and living under Taliban rule. That includes people who have worked for the American military or the U.S. Embassy since 2001 and are eligible to immigrate to the United States.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told ABC News on Sunday that 300 Americans were still waiting to be evacuated from Kabul.

“We are very actively working to help them get to the airport, get on a plane and get out of Afghanistan,” Mr. Blinken said.

When he was asked about the assurances from the Taliban, Mr. Blinken said that the U.S. government was not under any illusions.

“I’m not saying we should trust the Taliban on anything,” he said. “I’m simply reporting what one of their senior leaders said to the Afghan people.”

Neil Vigdor contributed reporting.

VideoPresident Biden joined the families of 13 U.S. service members killed in a bombing at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan last week, as their remains were brought to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The fallen included 11 Marines, a Navy medic and an Army member.CreditCredit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

A gray C-17 transport plane landed in Delaware shortly after 8 a.m. on Sunday. It carried the remains of 11 Marines, a Navy medic and an Army staff sergeant, who collectively could be the last Americans to die in the war in Afghanistan.

Just before 8:40, a second plane, a white-and-blue Boeing jetliner, parked next to the transport. It carried the president who had given the orders to end that war after nearly 20 years, prompting the mass evacuation effort that those 13 service members were carrying out when a bomber from the Islamic State Khorasan group detonated his charges at the Kabul airport last week.

President Biden’s first trip in office to witness the transfer of remains at Dover was a reminder of the length and cost of the Afghanistan war, and of his unique attachment to it as a legislator, a vice president and now a commander in chief.

Mr. Biden made an unannounced flight to Delaware for a rare presidential appearance at a transfer of remains of service members killed overseas. They were on their way from Afghanistan, via Kuwait and Germany, to final rest in communities across the nation that have supplied sons and daughters to fight two decades of what was once called the war on terror.

First came the Army, then the Marines, then the Navy. The carry teams, as they are called, worked in three-minute cycles, marching before a host of dignitaries including the president, the secretaries of state and defense, and several top military brass. They carried the remains from the transport and lifted them through the back cargo doors of four gray vans.

Credit…Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters

One of the last photos that Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee shared with her family from Afghanistan shows her in dusty body armor with a rifle, her long blond hair pulled back, her hands in tactical gloves. Amid the chaos of Kabul, those hands are carefully cradling a baby.

It was a moment captured on the front lines of the airport, where Marines worked feverishly to shepherd tens of thousands of evacuees through chaotic and dangerous razor wire gates. It showed how, even in the tumult, many took time to comfort the families who made it through.

In a short message posted with the photo, the sergeant said, “I love my job🤘🏼.”

Sergeant Gee never made it out.

“She believed in what she was doing. She loved being a Marine,” her brother-in-law, Gabriel Fuoco, said. “She wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else.”

Sergeant Gee, 23, of Roseville, Calif., was one of two women in uniform killed at the gate. The other was Marine Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25, of Lawrence, Mass. Sergeant Rosario was commended by her unit in May for excellence in a supply chief job usually given to someone of higher rank.

“Her service was not only crucial to evacuating thousands of women and children, but epitomizes what it means to be a Marine: putting herself in danger for the protection of American values so that others might enjoy them,” Marine First Lt. John Coppola said about Sergeant Rosario in a statement.

For most of military history, women were not allowed in combat. The few admitted to the Marines largely did clerical work. In 2001, at the start of the war in Afghanistan, women in the Marines were not assigned to gate duty, said Kate Germano, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel.

But decades of insurgency wars fought in conservative Muslim countries forced the military to evolve.

The Marine Corps slowly, often grudgingly, opened all combat jobs to women. They now make up about 9 percent of the force. It’s still a small percentage compared with other military branches, Ms. Germano said, “but every year, more women are out front, bearing the burden more equally with men.”

Credit…John Moore/Getty Images

The Biden administration has nearly completed a policy to govern counterterrorism drone strikes and commando raids outside conventional war zones, but the abrupt collapse of the Afghan government and a recent flurry of strikes in Somalia have raised new problems, according to current and former officials.

The administration has hoped to finish its playbook by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. It was envisioned as part of a broader recalibration, as President Biden seeks to wind down the “forever war” on terrorism and reorient national security policy to how the world has changed since 2001.

But his team’s ability to meet that deadline is now in doubt amid rapidly changing events and uncertainties about the future. Many of the same officials who would develop and approve an updated drone plan for Afghanistan are focused on the emergency evacuation operations in Kabul, officials said.

In January, Mr. Biden had set out to establish his own overarching policy for drone strikes targeting terrorist threats emanating from countries where the United States does not have troops on the ground. His administration viewed with suspicion President Donald J. Trump’s decision in 2017 to loosen a version of such rules that President Barack Obama had imposed in 2013.

Credit…Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

A plane carrying 12.5 metric tons of medical supplies landed in Afghanistan on Monday afternoon, the first such shipment to arrive since the Taliban seized control of the country, the World Health Organization said in a news release.

The supplies include trauma kits and interagency emergency health kits, collections of critical medicine and equipment that the W.H.O. said could meet the basic health needs of 200,000 people, treat 6,500 trauma patients and complete 3,500 surgeries. They will be delivered to 40 health facilities in 29 provinces across Afghanistan.

The W.H.O. used a plane provided by the government of Pakistan, which landed at the Mazar-i-Sharif airport in northern Afghanistan, the first of three flights planned with Pakistan International Airlines.

“After days of nonstop work to find a solution, I am very pleased to say that we have now been able to partially replenish stocks of health facilities in Afghanistan and ensure that — for now — W.H.O.-supported health services can continue,” Dr. Ahmed Al-Mandhari, the W.H.O.’s regional director for the Eastern Mediterranean, said in the release.

Afghan people face a slew of health concerns, including the extremely contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus, which has become all but an afterthought during the turmoil after the Taliban takeover.

“In the midst of a pandemic, we’re extremely concerned by the large displacement of people and increasing cases of diarrhea, malnutrition, high blood pressure, probable cases of Covid-19 and reproductive health complications,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the W.H.O., said earlier this month. “There is an immediate need to ensure sustained humanitarian access and continuity of health services across the country, with a focus on ensuring women and girls have access to female health workers.”

Before Afghanistan’s government unraveled, its ministry of public health reported a third wave of coronavirus infections, with a record number of positive cases and deaths.

W.H.O. officials said in an email earlier this month that they were concerned that Covid-19 spikes exacerbated by the movement and mixing of newly displaced people, the low rate of vaccination among Afghans and the lack of medical supplies could further strain a health system struggling to keep up with trauma and emergency care.

Tags Afghanistan, Live, News, Times, Updates, York

Politics

Biden pledges an enormous federal response for ‘so long as it takes’

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Post date August 30, 2021

Dartanian Stovall looks at the house that collapsed with him inside during the peak of Hurricane Ida in New Orleans, Louisiana on August 30, 2021.

Michael DeMocker | USA TODAY network via Reuters

WASHINGTON – The federal government is doing everything in its power to help Louisiana and Mississippi rescue residents and recover from Hurricane Ida, President Joe Biden told the governors of those states on Monday.

“We’re here to help you get back on your feet,” said Biden during a virtual briefing at the White House with Democratic Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, Republican Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves and others.

The hurricane hit land on Sunday as a strong Category 4 storm that supplied electricity to up to 2 million people in Louisiana and Mississippi. By Monday morning, one death had already been attributed to the storm. Edwards told MSNBC that he expected that number to grow significantly.

The massive federal response to the storm reinforces one of the pillars of Biden’s stance toward the presidency: his belief that the government is uniquely equipped to mobilize aid for millions of people.

“The people of Louisiana and Mississippi are resilient, but at moments like these we can see the power of government to meet people’s needs and serve people when the government is ready to respond. That’s our job, ”said Biden.

Five thousand National Guardsmen have been deployed across the southeast, Biden said, and more than 25,000 electrical crews and linemen from 30 states are “rolling in to assist”.

To assess the damage to electrical lines, Biden said he directed the Federal Aviation Administration to work with electrical companies to deploy surveillance drones in the affected areas.

Biden also authorized the Defense and Homeland Security departments to provide satellite imagery that could help assess the damage.

To help more people access cellular services, Biden said the Federal Communications Commission will enter into a cooperative framework agreement between cellular operators so that people can use each company’s roaming services.

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Biden was attended the briefing by former Louisiana MP Cedric Richmond, who stepped down from the House of Representatives in January to join the Biden administration as director of the White House Public Relations Office.

The president directed the governors to contact Richmond directly if they needed anything from the White House.

Ida first hit land over Port Fourchon, Louisiana, as a Category 4 storm with winds of 250 mph, one of the strongest storms to hit the region since Hurricane Katrina, which hit the area 16 years ago to the day.

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell was also on-screen at the White House meeting, as was Cynthia Lee Sheng, President of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana.

Reeves and Edwards both thanked Biden for signing pre-landing federal emergency letters for their states, freeing up federal funds and resources to respond to the emergency.

“We have all the help you will need,” said Biden. “We’ll stand by you and the people of the Gulf while it takes you to recover.”

Officials downgraded Ida to a tropical storm on Monday en route inland, where it was expected to bring heavy rainfall, tornadoes and the potential for severe flooding later this week as it migrates up the Tennessee Valley and into the mid-Atlantic.

Rainfall could be 24 inches across parts of southeast Louisiana to the extreme south of Mississippi.

This was Biden’s second meeting in four days with governors of the storm-hit states. On Friday he met virtually with Edwards, Reeve and GOP Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey.

Tags Biden, federal, Long, Pledges, Response, Takes, Vast

Entertainment

Sequins and Soul-Looking within the Aggressive Dance World

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Post date August 30, 2021

One of the few black people in leadership roles in the industry is Sonia James Pennington, a founder of the National Dance Showcase competition. “I watch colored studio directors come to one of our events and see that I’m African American and there is a feeling of, ‘I can breathe out,'” she said. “If we could normalize diversity at all levels, everyone would benefit.”

Lately some established competitions and congresses have taken small steps forward. Break the Floor Productions, which hosts some of the biggest events in the industry, has launched an educational YouTube series highlighting black dance artists. The trophies for the winners of the New York City Dance Alliance national competition no longer mention gender. Large-scale reform, however, seems a long way off.

It was this slow pace of change that led Olivia Zimmerman, 23, to develop the Embody Dance Conference. Starting this weekend, the new dance convention – whose competition will debut next year – aims to create “a safer and more inclusive dance community”.

Zimmerman grew up at competitions and congresses and worked as a competition director for a dance studio. Embody, who started out as her college job, is thoroughly ambitious. This weekend’s event at Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut will feature seminars for dancers on anti-racism, mental health and gender. (TikTok dance star Charli D’Amelio will discuss the effects of social media on mental health.) Cogliandros the Dance Safe will lead workshops. Classes will not divide students by gender, and students will give their pronouns. Accommodation will be provided for dancers with disabilities.

The faculty will include transgender artists, including Frederick; several colored people; and mental health professionals including dance artist and therapist Breanna Myers. And – perhaps most revolutionary of all – while Embody is currently a company with a not-for-profit arm, Zimmerman plans to eventually run the entire company as a not-for-profit organization.

Only a few hundred people signed up for Embody’s first convention. But Zimmerman hopes to pilot a model that other events can then customize. “It’s not proprietary,” she said. “We’re not trying to make money by ‘being the change’. I want everyone to follow suit so that in five years we will only be one convention. “

Tags competitive, Dance, Sequins, SoulSearching, world

Politics

Biden Receives Our bodies of Troopers Killed in Kabul Bombing

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Post date August 30, 2021

The transfers began in the late morning and stretched nearly 40 minutes, finishing after noon. Time and again, service members in varying shades of green fatigues carried flag-draped transfer cases down the ramp of the transport, which faced Air Force One on the runway. First came the Army, then the Marines, then the Navy. The carry teams, as they are called, worked in three-minute cycles, marching before a host of dignitaries including the president, the secretaries of state and defense, and several top military brass. They carried the remains from the transport and lifted them through the back cargo doors of four gray vans.

The president stood with his hand over his heart as they passed by. When sets of Marines returned to the belly of the C-17, hands empty, to retrieve the next set of remains, Mr. Biden widened his stance and clasped his hands by his belt or behind his back. Often he bowed his head with his eyes squeezed shut, as if in prayer.

Across from him sat rows of family members of the fallen, so many of them that the Dover base could not house them all in its rooms built specially for next of kin.

The fallen service members returning Sunday to Dover were Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Darin T. Hoover, 31, of Salt Lake City; Marine Corps Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25, of Lawrence, Mass.; Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, 23, of Sacramento, Calif.; Marine Corps Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22, of Indio, Calif.; Marine Corps Cpl. Daegan W. Page, 23, of Omaha; Marine Corps Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez, 22, of Logansport, Ind.; Marine Corps Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza, 20, of Rio Bravo, Texas; Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz, 20, of St. Charles, Mo.; Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum, 20, of Jackson, Wyo.; Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, 20, of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.; Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui, 20, of Norco, Calif.; Navy Hospitalman Maxton W. Soviak, 22, of Berlin Heights, Ohio; and Army Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss, 23, of Corryton, Tenn.

The president and the first lady, Jill Biden, met with the families of those service members midmorning on Sunday. They then participated in 13 transfers — 11 for families who chose to allow the news media to observe the remains of their loved ones returning home, and two for families who chose to keep their transfers private.

Tags Biden, Bodies, bombing, Kabul, Killed, receives, Soldiers

World News

Ida now a tropical storm as greater than 1 million Louisiana utility clients are left with out energy

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Post date August 30, 2021

Hurricane Ida hit land in Louisiana on Sunday as a Category 4 storm at wind speeds of 250 mph, one of the strongest storms to hit the region since Hurricane Katrina, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

The Karnofsky Shop suffers severe damage after Hurricane Ida hit New Orleans with strong winds in Louisiana on August 30, 2021.

Devika Krishna Kumar | Reuters

Ida has since been downgraded to a tropical storm and is expected to move further inland across southeast Louisiana and southwest Mississippi this morning, the National Hurricane Center said. The maximum sustained winds have decreased to almost 60 mph (95 km / h) with higher gusts.

Late Sunday, President Joe Biden approved a major disaster statement for Louisiana, freeing up federal funds for recovery efforts.

New Orleans Police Detective Alexander Reiter looks at the rubble of a building that collapsed during Hurricane Ida in New Orleans on Monday, August 30, 2021.

Gerald Herbert | AP

The storm is expected to subside over the next day or so, and the NHC said Ida is expected to turn into a tropical depression by tonight. The NHC warned that a life-threatening storm surge is expected in Grand Isle, Louisiana, up to the Alabama-Florida border, including Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Maurepas and metropolitan New Orleans.

The NHC said winds are likely to damage trees and cause power outages as Ida continues inland across southeast Louisiana. Heavy rains are expected in southeast Louisiana, the Mississippi coast and southwest Alabama through Monday and could trigger “significant to life-threatening floods and urban floods.”

According to PowerOutage.us, more than 1 million utility customers in Louisiana were without power as of early Monday. On Sunday evening, New Orleans said the entire city had lost power after “catastrophic transmission damage”.

Ida landed on the anniversary of Katrina, the dangerous Category 3 storm that devastated Louisiana and Mississippi 16 years ago, killing more than 1,800 people and causing $ 125 billion in damage.

Ida’s strength and path will be a major test of flood control from New Orleans to Katrina, including levees, flood walls, and gates built to protect against storms. Katrina had broken levees and caused catastrophic flooding in New Orleans.

Ida has also raised concerns about the city’s hospitals, which are already overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients and have little space for evacuated patients. In Galliano, Louisiana, as the storm raged ashore, the battle for patient care was exacerbated after part of the roof of the Lady of the Sea General Hospital was demolished.

Ida intensified so quickly that officers did not have time to order mandatory evacuations. New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell ordered a mandatory evacuation for a small portion of the city outside the levee system, but said there was no time to enact one for the entire city.

Emergency shelters in Louisiana are operating at reduced capacity due to the pandemic, although state officials are working to secure hotel rooms for evacuees.

All Sunday flights were also canceled due to the approaching storm, New Orleans Airport announced on Saturday.

Water seeps into a beach house when Hurricane Ida hits land in Grand Isle, Louisiana, United States on August 29, 2021 in this still image from a social media video. Christie Angelette on REUTERS THIS PICTURE WAS SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. MANDATORY CREDIT

Christie Angelette | Christie Angelette on REUTERS

President Joe Biden has declared a state of emergency in Louisiana and Mississippi, a move that empowers the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to coordinate all disaster relief efforts.

“The storm is a life-threatening storm,” said the president on Sunday at a briefing at FEMA headquarters. “The devastation is likely to be immense. Everyone should listen to instructions from local and state officials.”

Cars drive through flood waters along Route 90 as outer bands of Hurricane Ida arrive in Gulfport, Mississippi on Sunday, August 29, 2021.

Steve Helber | AP

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards called for a presidential statement on Sunday afternoon for a major disaster for Biden after the storm hit the state’s coastline.

“Hurricane Ida is one of the strongest storms to have ever hit Louisiana,” Edwards said in a statement. “Our goal is to help our local authorities and the citizens of the state as quickly as possible.

A resident picks up sandbags home from a city-operated sandbag distribution point on Dryades YMCA along Oretha Castle Haley Blvd., Friday, Aug. 27, 2021 in New Orleans as residents prepare for Hurricane Ida.

Max Becherer | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans attorney via AP

Harmful winds will spread to southwest Mississippi on Sunday night and early Monday, likely causing widespread tree damage and power outages, as well as heavy rains and expected across the central Gulf Coast, the Hurricane Center said.

As the storm moves inland, the Hurricane Center is forecasting significant flooding in parts of the lower Mississippi, Tennessee Valley, upper Ohio Valley, central Appalachian Mountains and the mid-Atlantic by Wednesday, according to the Hurricane Center.

Ida is the first major storm to hit the Gulf Coast during the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season. The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season was the most active on record, with 30 named storms including 13 hurricanes.

Scientists warn of increasingly dangerous hurricane seasons as climate change fuels more frequent and catastrophic storms. NOAA expects between 15 and 21 named storms, including seven to ten hurricanes, in the 2021 season.

This story evolves. Please check again for updates.

– CNBC’s Melodie Warner and Christine Wang contributed to this report.

Tags customers, Ida, left, Louisiana, million, Power, Storm, tropical, utility

Politics

State Division in touch with the final People left in Afghanistan

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Post date August 30, 2021

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken holds a press conference on Afghanistan at the State Department in Washington, DC on August 25, 2021.

Alex Brandon | Swimming pool | Reuters

WASHINGTON – The State Department said Thursday it is in contact with the 1,000 or so US citizens remaining in Afghanistan and that two-thirds of them are actively trying to leave the country.

Another 500 Americans have been evacuated in the past 24 hours, according to a State Department spokesman who requested anonymity to discuss the still-fluid numbers.

Collectively, this group of 1,500 U.S. citizens makes up the last of the roughly 6,000 Americans Secretary of State Antony Blinken said were in Afghanistan when the massive U.S. airlift began on August 14.

“The US government does not follow the movements of the Americans when they travel around the world,” said Blinken on Wednesday. “There could be other Americans in Afghanistan who have never signed up with the embassy, who have ignored public evacuation instructions, and have not yet identified themselves.”

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“We have also found that many people who contact us and identify themselves as American citizens, even by completing and submitting repatriation assistance forms, are in fact not US citizens, which may take some time to verify.” “

On Thursday, the State Department said that around 500 more people “pretending to be Americans in Afghanistan who want to leave,” and US diplomats tried to contact them.

But the official said the department was skeptical of some of these last-minute claims:

“In our experience, many of them will not turn out to be US citizens in need of our help,” the official said.

Of the roughly 660 US citizens who have been contacted by the State Department in the past day or two and are actively attempting to leave Afghanistan, “many, if not most, of these people are almost or already out of the country,” the spokesman said.

The US is now also aware of “dozens more” American citizens “who do not want to leave Afghanistan for a number of reasons”.

The latest State Department figures underscore one of the most complex parts of the US withdrawal: the hunt down of every last American civilian in a country that lacks reliable internet and phone services.

American humanitarian workers and Christian missionaries have been active in Afghanistan for 20 years, often working in remote communities far from the big cities.

It was unclear how exactly the State Department tracked these last 1,000 people. Officials also didn’t say what would become of citizens who fail to leave the country before President Joe Biden’s August 31 deadline for military withdrawal.

Efforts to locate and remove individual US citizens became even more dangerous on Thursday when a suicide bombing outside the gates of Kabul airport killed 12 American soldiers and wounded 15 others.

A splinter group of ISIS in Afghanistan, ISIS-K, claimed responsibility for the attacks, in which at least 60 Afghan civilians were killed.

Biden will speak on Thursday at 5:00 p.m. to discuss the terrorist attacks and ongoing evacuation efforts.

Tags Afghanistan, Americans, contact, Department, left, state

Entertainment

H.E.R. to Make Appearing Debut in Coloration Purple Film Musical

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Post date August 30, 2021

Alice Walker is celebrated The colour purple will be adjusted again. Decades after Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation received an award, a film is in the works inspired by the similarly acclaimed stage musical, which originally ran from 2005 to 2008 and then again from 2015 to 2017, will also be HER’s acting debut. see

HER was reportedly cast as the aspiring singer Squeak The Hollywood Reporter. The role was played by Rae Dawn Chong in the 1985 film and Krisha Marcano in the original Broadway run. Corey Hawkins was also recently added to the cast, shared in news by meetingalthough his role has not yet been announced.

The plan is to be direct Black is king Co-director Blitz Bazawule, while Oprah Winfrey, whose portrayal of Sofia in the Spielberg film earned her an Oscar nomination, was signed as producer. However, it will be a while before this film musical hits theaters as the release date is currently set for December 20th, 2023. In the meantime, keep scrolling to find out more about the. to experience Color Purple poured so far.

Tags Acting, Color, debut, Movie, Musical, Purple

World News

Afghanistan Updates: Rockets Launched at Kabul Airport After U.S. Strikes

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Post date August 30, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The U.S. military shot down rockets aimed at the Kabul airport on Monday morning as violence near the field threatened efforts by the United States to meet Tuesday’s deadline to withdraw from Afghanistan and end America’s longest war.

A U.S. official said the rockets were brought down by a counter-rocket system after five were fired at the airport, and that there were no initial reports of casualties. The airport remained open, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational details.

The move by the U.S. military underlined the precariousness of the security situation in the Afghan capital and the dangers of an imminent security vacuum, with just two days remaining before President Biden’s Tuesday deadline to complete the withdrawal from America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan.

It followed another U.S. strike on Sunday, when a U.S. military drone strike blew up a vehicle laden with explosives in Kabul on Sunday, officials said.

Afghans said the drone strike killed as many as nine civilians, including children, and the U.S. military said it was investigating.

The Sunday strike thwarted an imminent threat to Hamid Karzai International Airport from the Islamic State Khorasan, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command said.

Defense officials in a statement Sunday evening acknowledged the possibilities that civilians may have been killed after the strike.

Bill Urban, the CentCom spokesman, said he was aware that there had been powerful subsequent explosions resulting from the destruction of a vehicle, that may have caused additional casualties. “We are aware of reports of civilian casualties following our strike on a vehicle in Kabul today,” he said. “We are still assessing the results of this strike.”

He added: “We would be deeply saddened by any potential loss of innocent life.”

Credit…Aamaj News Agency, via Reuters

The chief Taliban spokesman and people in Kabul who posted on social media said that both a house and a vehicle had been hit in a neighborhood just west of the airport and that several civilians had been killed, as well.

Samim Shahyad, a 25-year-old journalism student, said the strike killed his father, his two brothers, four of his young cousins, his niece and his sister’s fiancé. Three of the dead were girls 2 years old or younger, he said, and his aunt and uncle lost all three of their children.

“The American aircraft targeted us,” he said. “I do not know what to say, they just cut my arms and broke my back, I cannot say anything more.”

A doctor at a nearby hospital said four bodies were taken there, two of them those of children.

A senior U.S. military official responded that the military was confident that no civilians had been in the targeted vehicle but acknowledged that the detonation of the explosives in it could have caused “collateral damage.”

Video of the scene showed a tangle of metal barely recognizable as the remains of a vehicle, and just a few feet away, the charred, pockmarked wreck of another vehicle, an S.U.V. Mr. Shahyad said his father had been pulling into their garage when the explosion hit.

Earlier Sunday, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul had said that there was a “specific, credible threat” to the airport area, where a suicide bombing on Thursday killed as many as 170 civilians and 13 members of the American military. The Islamic State Khorasan claimed responsibility for the attack. Mr. Biden had warned on Saturday that another attack was “highly likely” in the coming hours.

Credit…Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

The United States is unlikely to keep diplomats in Afghanistan after the U.S. military departs on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Sunday, ending a 20-year mission of one of the largest American embassies in the world.

Officials said it was expected that the U.S. mission to Afghanistan would open a diplomatic mission in a country elsewhere in the region, in part to continue helping the surge of expected refugees obtain necessary departure documents. That effort could be based in Pakistan or the United Arab Emirates, an official said, given the large Afghan diaspora in both countries. American diplomats have also for years held peace talks with the Taliban in Qatar, where there is a large U.S. military base that is being used now as a way station for tens of thousands of Afghans who have been evacuated.

After saying last week that the Biden administration was reviewing options for the future of the embassy in Kabul, Mr. Blinken told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that “in terms of having an on-the-ground diplomatic presence on Sept. 1, that’s not likely to happen.”

“But what is going to happen is that our commitment to continue to help people leave Afghanistan who want to leave and who are not out by Sept. 1, that endures,” Mr. Blinken said. “There’s no deadline on that effort. And we have ways, we have mechanisms to help facilitate the ongoing departure of people from Afghanistan if they choose to leave.”

The Taliban had wanted the United States and other foreign diplomats to remain in Kabul as acknowledgment of the Taliban’s legitimacy as Afghanistan’s rulers.

Ending the American diplomatic presence in the country will be a blow to the U.S. diplomatic corps. Hundreds of American diplomats served in Afghanistan after the embassy was reclaimed by Marines in December 2001 during the U.S.-led invasion. It had been closed since 1989, when the Soviet military withdrew from Afghanistan after a 10-year war.

The diplomatic mission’s staffing levels ballooned during a so-called civilian surge that coincided with an increase in military troops that began in 2010. The embassy compound in Kabul later expanded, with hundreds of millions of dollars in additional office space, employee apartments, fortified gates and blast walls over 15 acres, about the size of Liberty Island in New York Harbor.

Just weeks before the embassy closed on Aug. 15, as the Taliban took over the capital, its staff stood at about 4,000 employees, around 1,400 of whom were American diplomats, contractors and officials from other U.S. agencies.

Nonessential employees had been flown out months before, and by the time the American flag was lowered two weeks ago, only a small core of diplomats remained to be evacuated to a secure compound at the international airport where they could be protected by the military. Now, with the military departing — as part of an agreement with the Taliban — the State Department saw little choice but to also withdraw its diplomats.

DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. — President Biden landed in Delaware on Sunday morning to join the families of the 13 members of the U.S. military who were killed in a bombing last week in Afghanistan.

The service members include 11 Marines, a Navy medic and a member of the Army. They were killed at the airport in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, by a bomber from the Islamic State Khorasan group as they attempted to help people escape the country before American troops complete their withdrawal.

The president and first lady, Jill Biden, met with the families on Sunday morning. They then participated in 13 transfers — 11 for families who chose to allow media to observe the remains of their loved ones returning home, and two for families who chose to keep their transfers private.

The fallen service members returning Sunday to Dover were: Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Darin T. Hoover, 31, of Salt Lake City; Marine Corps Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25, of Lawrence, Mass.; Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, 23, of Sacramento, Calif.; Marine Corps Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22, of Indio, Calif.; Marine Corps Cpl. Daegan W. Page, 23, of Omaha; Marine Corps Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez, 22, of Logansport, Ind.; Marine Corps Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza, 20, of Rio Bravo, Texas; Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz, 20, of St. Charles, Mo.; Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum, 20, of Jackson, Wyo.; Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, 20, of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.; Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui, 20, of Norco, Calif.; Navy Hospitalman Maxton W. Soviak, 22, of Berlin Heights, Ohio; and Army Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss, 23, of Corryton, Tenn.

Mr. Biden stood at attention with his right hand over his heart as service members in varying shades of green fatigues — first for the Army, then the Marines, then the Navy — carried flag-draped transfer cases containing remains of the fallen from the belly of a gray C-17 transport plane to a fleet of four gray vans with their back doors open.

The carry teams, as they are called, worked in three-minute cycles, with the public set of 11 transfers lasting just under 40 minutes total, including a prayer at the beginning.

In between transfers, the president spread his legs wider, clasped his hands at his belt or behind his back, and frequently closed his eyes and bowed his head.

A large group of federal dignitaries were on hand for the transfers, including Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III; Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken; Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and several members of Congress. One observer, who the White House later identified as Martha Carper, the wife of Senator Tom Carper, Democrat of Delaware, appeared to faint midway through one of the transfers.

The White House did not announce the trip in advance. It is the first time Mr. Biden has witnessed the return of service members killed in the line of duty since assuming the presidency. The men and women killed in the Kabul attack were the first American service members killed by hostile forces since March 2020. Mr. Biden witnessed a transfer as vice president in 2016.

“The 13 service members that we lost were heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice in service of our highest American ideals and while saving the lives of others,” Mr. Biden said in a written statement released on Saturday. “Their bravery and selflessness has enabled more than 117,000 people at risk to reach safety thus far.”

Credit…Hosay

Hundreds of students, their relatives and staff of American University of Afghanistan gathered at a safe house on Sunday and boarded buses in what was supposed to be a final attempt at evacuation on U.S. military flights, the students said.

“The scholar pilgrims who were turned away today while seeking safe passage to a better future need the help of the U.S. government who gave them the hope they must not lose,” the American University president, Ian Bickford, said.

The email asked the 600 or so students and relatives to return home. The U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan must be completed by a Tuesday deadline, so the U.S. military is turning from evacuating civilians to bringing its own personnel home.

The group was then alarmed after the U.S. military, following protocol, shared a list of names and passport information of hundreds of students and their families with the Taliban guarding the airport checkpoints, the university president said.

“They told us: we have given your names to the Taliban,” said Hosay, a 24-year-old sophomore studying business administration who was on the bus on Sunday. “We are all terrified, there is no evacuation, there is no getting out.”

Hosay earned a scholarship that covered half of her tuition. She wanted to get an M.B.A. and start an all-female engineering firm.

When the Taliban took over Kabul on Aug. 15, one of the first sites the group captured was the sprawling, modern American University campus. Men in traditional Afghan outfits and swinging AK-47 rifles raised the flag of the Taliban and brought down the university flag, according to student and social media photos.

The Taliban posted a picture of themselves on social media standing at the entrance of a university building with an ominous message, saying they were where America trained infidel “wolves” to corrupt the minds of Muslims.

The university shut down its campus on Aug. 14 as word reached that the Taliban were on the outskirts of Kabul. The American University president, Ian Bickford, and foreign staff left Kabul for Doha that night.

Mr. Bickford said in an interview last week that he was working with the State Department to evacuate about 1,200 students and alumni. But on Friday after the deadly attack on the airport, Mr. Bickford said that effort had become much more complicated.

Mr. Bickford said the university was committed to ensuring all enrolled students would finish their degrees remotely.

The American University of Afghanistan opened in 2006 with most of its funding from the United States Agency for International Development, which gave $160 million. It was one of the U.S.A.I.D.’s largest civilian projects in Afghanistan.

For over two weeks, students and alumni said they struggled emotionally as their status changed from college students to fugitives overnight.

Several students interviewed repeated a poetic saying in Dari: “Our hopes and dreams have turned into dust.”

Mohammad, a 31-year-old father of three and part-time government ministry worker, had three more courses left to finish his degree in business administration.

His job and salary are now gone. His degree is in jeopardy.

“It’s as if you throw a glass on a cement floor and your life shatters in a split second,” he said Sunday from a safe house.

Yasser, a 27-year-old political science student, said he was told in an email from the university on Saturday to report to a safe location for evacuation. But after President Biden said there were security threats to the airport, the plan was scrapped and everyone was sent home.

Early Sunday morning, Yasser received another email from the university asking him to go to a safe house at 7:45 a.m. The students were told to bring only a backpack with two outfits. Videos shared with The New York Times of the evacuation show hundreds of students, carrying backpacks waiting on the roadside. Dozens of buses are lined up.

The chitchat among students abruptly ends and someone gasps. Someone cries. The students have just been told that evacuations have been called off.

“It was a frightening day,” Yasser said. “We went there anticipating to be rescued and returned home defeated.”

Credit…Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

The suicide bomb blast that killed more than 170 people crowded outside Abbey Gate at Kabul’s airport on Thursday also sundered a family gathered there, hoping to flee.

Ahmad Wali Stanekzai’s wife, Zakya, died from injuries sustained in the explosion. He couldn’t find his three children — Mina, Ahmad Faisal, and Masiullah — who had disappeared in the bedlam after the explosion.

Masiullah, a teenager, was dazed from the blast and called his aunt, Ferishta Stanekzai, who lives in Virginia.

Ms. Stanekzai began working the phones, with the help of Lt. Gen. John A. Bradley, a retired Air Force officer who has been trying to extricate several hundred Afghans in the two weeks since the Taliban captured Kabul. This account is based on interviews with Ms. Stanekzai and General Bradley, who have been in contact with Mr. Stanekzai and other relatives and neighbors.

Mr. Stanekzai’s family were among the Afghans General Bradley tried to help. They had traveled to the airport in Kabul in a desperate attempt to get on a flight with documentation from General Bradley, but with no official clearance to board a plane. As they tried to navigate a path out of the country, the Islamic State Korasan, the terrorist group’s Afghan affiliate, attacked the gate.

“Finally we contact my brother, and he says that ‘I don’t know about my two kids, but I lost my wife,’” Ms. Stanekzai said.

In time they learned that the two children had boarded an airplane with a neighbor, Imran Ibrahim. But Mr. Stanekzai did not know the flight’s destination.

Ms. Stanekzai eventually reached Mr. Ibrahim. He and the children had landed in Germany, where the children received medical treatment for injuries from the Kabul blast at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, near Ramstein Air Base.

But Mr. Stanekzai and Masiullah are still in Kabul, with no way out, as President Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline fast approaches. Their plight is just one example of the tens of thousands of Afghans with connections to the United States desperate to escape.

General Bradley said he and family members have appealed to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner of Virginia, and retired military leaders to reach out to President Biden or other officials who can help the Stanekzais secure a flight out of Kabul.

A White House staffer and an aide to Senator Warner said they were working on it, but so far a flight out for the Stanekzais has not been approved, General Bradley said.

“The security situation is making things very difficult,” Rachel Cohen, Mr. Warner’s communications director, said in an email on Sunday, adding that “this is a priority for us.”

Mr. Stanekzai and his son have stayed in a home in Kabul, leaving briefly to hold an Islamic funeral for his wife.

Reaching the airport means enduring Taliban checkpoints, chaotic streets and the possibility of another terrorist attack.

Ms. Stanekzai said that her brother and nephew were concerned that their time was running out.

“‘What will happen if we don’t get out?’” Ms. Stanekzai said her nephew asked in a recent conversation. “‘I just want to be with my brother and sister.’”

Credit…Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters

In a short message posted with the photo, the sergeant said, “I love my job🤘🏼”

Sergeant Gee never made it out.

“She believed in what she was doing, she loved being a Marine,” her brother-in-law, Gabriel Fuoco, said. “She wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else.”

For most of military history, women were not allowed in combat. The few admitted to the Marines largely did clerical work. In 2001, at the start of the war in Afghanistan, women Marines were not assigned to gate duty, said Kate Germano, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel.

But decades of insurgency wars fought in conservative Muslim countries forced the military to evolve.

The Marine Corps slowly, often grudgingly, opened all combat jobs to women. They now make up about 9 percent of the force. It’s still a small part of the force compared to other military branches, Ms. Germano said, “But every year, more women are out front, bearing the burden more equally with men.”

Credit…Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The United States and 97 other countries said on Sunday that they would continue to take in people fleeing Afghanistan after the American military departs this week and had secured an agreement with the Taliban to allow safe passage for those who are leaving.

The joint statement released on Sunday on behalf of more than half of the world’s governments and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said that they had “received assurances from the Taliban” that people with travel documents showing they were clear to enter any of those countries could safely depart.

The countries also pledged to “continue issuing travel documentation to designated Afghans” and cited a “clear expectation of and commitment from the Taliban” of their safe passage.

“We note the public statements of the Taliban confirming this understanding,” the statement said.

Notably missing from the statement were Russia and China, two permanent members of the United Nations Security Council who have pledged to help the Taliban rebuild Afghanistan.

The chief American envoy to Taliban peace talks, Zalmay Khalilzad, tweeted on Saturday that the Taliban’s assurances were “positive” and that “we, our allies, and the international community will hold them to these commitments.”

That stood in stark contrast to the tens of thousands of Afghans who relief agencies said feared being left behind and living under Taliban rule. That includes those who worked for the American military or the U.S. Embassy since 2001 and were eligible to immigrate to the United States.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told ABC News on Sunday that there were 300 Americans who were still waiting to be evacuated from Kabul.

“We are very actively working to help them get to the airport, get on a plane and get out of Afghanistan,” Mr. Blinken said.

When he was asked about the assurances from the Taliban, Mr. Blinken said that the U.S. government was not under any illusions.

“I’m not saying we should trust the Taliban on anything,” he said. “I’m simply reporting what one of their senior leaders said to the Afghan people.”

Neil Vigdor contributed reporting.

Credit…Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Two nonprofit organizations that have been trying, with disappointing results, to help scores of prominent Afghan women and their families escape their country have been finding increasingly formidable obstacles in their paths.

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, the founder and chief executive of the Washington, D.C.,-based International Civil Society Action Network, said the group has been trying to find room on charter flights for the Afghans, who include journalists, human rights activists and others. But the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport on Thursday has made those efforts much more difficult.

“In the last day or two, I am getting a lot of women telling me goodbye. Women starting to give up,” said Deeyah Khan, an International Civil Society Action Network board member and a documentary filmmaker. “The least we can do is make sure they don’t stand completely alone.”

Too Young to Wed, a nonprofit based in Peekskill, N.Y., that was founded by the photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair, has also been trying to organize charter flights to evacuate prominent Afghan women since the Taliban took over Afghanistan.

As of Saturday, Ms. Sinclair said the group had only been able to help about 60 women and their families leave the country on flights and is now considering trying to organize evacuations by land that would involve a long, dangerous journey to border areas.

“It is heartbreaking and terrifying that this generation of women leaders have to fear their lives, for simply having dreams and wanting to have a purpose in life as a woman,” Ms. Sinclair said.

The two organizations have received calls and messages from Afghan women who are unsure what to do and how to keep their family members safe.

The Taliban’s chief spokesman has said that “there will be no violence against women” under the new regime. Zabihullah Mujahid promised this week that “no prejudice against women will be allowed” and said that they could participate in society — “within the bounds of Islamic law.”

But in social media posts and interviews, many Afghan women say the Taliban have already imposed some restrictions. Some women who were employees of the former government have stopped going to work, fearing retribution.

“I am waiting for some kind of miracle to take me out of this country,” said Hosay, 24, a college student in Kabul who wanted to create an engineering company led by women engineers. “My future under the Taliban is a dead end.”

Credit…Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

Two congressmen who made an unauthorized trip to the airport in Kabul last week defended themselves on Sunday amid accusations that their visit was an unwelcome distraction from the evacuation effort.

“Those accusations are just not true,” one of the congressmen, Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“At the end of the day, I don’t care what pundits in Washington are saying,” he added. “They’ve been wrong about this war for 20 years.”

Mr. Moulton and the other congressman, Representative Peter Meijer, Republican of Michigan, visited the airport days before a suicide bombing there killed as many as 170 civilians and 13 members of the American military.

Speaking on CNN on Sunday, Mr. Meijer said that he and Mr. Moulton were “uniquely positioned” among members of Congress to make the trip, given their backgrounds.

“Not only have we both served with the military in Iraq, we’d also spent time in Afghanistan as civilians,” Mr. Meijer said. He added, “We were uniquely situated to be able to get in, get out, be as quiet as possible, but also take away as much information as possible.”

More than 70 House members are veterans, according to the Republican minority on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

The two lawmakers also continued to criticize the Biden administration’s handling of the evacuation, while acknowledging that their trip to Kabul had changed their minds about President Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline for a full withdrawal, which they had previously urged the administration to extend.

“We realized that we did not have that leverage,” Mr. Meijer said. “We were wholly dependent on the cooperation of the Taliban.”

He added, “This is the least worst of the options that are before us.”

Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

The Department of Defense on Saturday identified the 13 members of the U.S. military who were killed in the attack on the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Thursday as they worked to evacuate people to safety. They hailed from across the country — from California to Wyoming to Tennessee — and had an average age of just over 22. Eleven were Marines, one was a Navy medic and another was a member of the Army.

Here is what we know about them.

Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Darin T. Hoover, 31, of Salt Lake City.

Credit…U.S. Marines, via Reuters

Staff Sergeant Hoover was a born leader, his father Darin Hoover said, who loved the United States and was on his third tour in Afghanistan. “He led his men into that, and they followed him, but I know — I know in my heart of hearts, he was out front,” Mr. Hoover said. “And they would’ve followed him through the gates of hell if that’s what it took, and, ultimately, that’s pretty much what he did.”

Marine Corps Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25, of Lawrence, Mass.

Credit…U.S. Marines, via Reuters

Sergeant Rosario should be “recognized as the hero that she was,” her family told the mayor of Lawrence. Her former junior R.O.T.C. instructor recalled her as an “absolute warrior” in high school, and Marine First Lt. John Coppola said in a statement that she had been “crucial to evacuating thousands of women and children.” The Dominican Republic’s embassy in the U.S. said that she was Dominican-American.

Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, 23, of Sacramento, Calif.

Credit…via Gabriel Fuoco

In Sergeant Gee’s most recent post on Instagram, less than a week ago, she stands next to a long line of people waiting to file into a military plane at the Kabul airport. “Escorting evacuees onto the bird,” she wrote. In another post, in which she is holding a child in Kabul, she wrote, “I love my job.” A fellow sergeant wrote on Facebook that Sergeant Gee’s car was still in the lot at a Marine Corps base in North Carolina: “I drove it around the parking lot every once in a while to make sure it would be good for when she came home.”

Marine Corps Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22, of Indio, Calif.

Credit…Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, via Reuters

Corporal Lopez’s mother told a reporter in Southern California that her son had recently carried an Afghan toddler several miles to safety, and asked people to light a candle in his honor. Corporal Lopez’s parents both work for the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department in California, his father as a captain and his mother as a deputy. “Like his parents who serve our community, being a Marine to Hunter wasn’t a job; it was a calling,” the Riverside Sheriffs’ Association wrote in a statement.

Marine Corps Cpl. Daegan W. Page, 23, of Omaha.

Credit…U.S. Marines, via Reuters

Corporal Page grew up in Red Oak, Iowa, and in the area around Omaha, and joined the Marines after high school, his family said in a statement. He had four siblings and was a member of the Boy Scouts, played club hockey, hunted with his father and had a “soft spot in his heart for dogs,” they said. “To his younger siblings, he was their favorite jungle gym and to his friends, he was a genuinely happy guy that you could always count on,” the family said, adding that he was being mourned by his parents, stepparents, siblings, grandparents and his girlfriend.

Marine Corps Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez, 22, of Logansport, Ind.

Credit…U.S. Marines, via Reuters

Corporal Sanchez lived in a small city about an hour and a half north of Indianapolis and had graduated from Logansport High School. The mayor of Logansport said that Corporal Sanchez “still had his entire life ahead of him” and that the young man had sacrificed himself by “putting himself into harm’s way” as part of the mission in Kabul. Gov. Eric Holcomb of Indiana vowed “to honor him in every way” possible. “Few among us answer a call of duty so dangerous as Corporal Sanchez volunteered to do,” he said.

Marine Corps Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza, 20, of Rio Bravo, Texas.

Credit…U.S. Marines, via Reuters

Lance Corporal Espinoza’s mother told a local television station that she had received a call at 2:30 a.m. informing her of her young son’s death. “I am proud of him because of what he did but as a mother, you know, it’s hard,” his mother, Elizabeth Holguin, told the station, KGNS-TV, as she teared up. The station reported that Lance Corporal Espinoza’s sister had just turned 13. The corporal was born in Laredo, Texas, his family said, and he had been stationed in Jordan for two years before being transferred to Kabul about a week ago. “He always knew” how much his parents loved him, Ms. Holguin said.

Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz, 20, of St. Charles, Mo.

Credit…U.S. Marines, via Reuters

Lance Corporal Schmitz, who lived in a suburb of St. Louis, had been stationed in Jordan on his first deployment before being transferred to Afghanistan for the evacuation mission about two weeks ago, his father, Mark Schmitz, told KMOX radio in St. Louis. “It’s something he always wanted to do and I’ve never seen a young man train as hard as he did to be the best soldier he could be,” Mr. Schmitz said, adding that the family was both devastated and furious. “Somebody just came along and took the easy way out and ended everything for him and for us — and for those others that were killed,” he said.

Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum, 20, of Jackson, Wyo.

Credit…via the McCollum Family

Lance Corporal McCollum had dreamed of becoming a Marine ever since he was 3 years old, his father, Jim, said in an interview. He, too, was recently transferred from Jordan to Afghanistan, and Mr. McCollum began checking his phone for a little green dot on a messaging app that showed that his son was online — and OK. When news came that 13 Americans had died in the attack, he again checked for the dot and sent him a message with no response. “In my heart yesterday afternoon, I knew,” Mr. McCollum said, adding that his son was “a beautiful soul.”

Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, 20, of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.

Credit…U.S. Marines, via Reuters

Lance Corporal Merola was “one of the best kids ever,” said Cheryl Merola, his mother. He was “kind, loving” and “would give anything for anybody,” she told KCBS-TV. His grandmother told the station that Lance Corporal Merola would frequently say he wanted to come home to his family. He had been transferred to Afghanistan about a week and a half ago, and left a voice mail message with his mother saying he would not be able to talk to her for a while and that he loved her. Los Osos High School in Southern California, from which he recently graduated, held a moment of silence for him at a football game on Friday.

Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui, 20, of Norco, Calif.

Credit…U.S. Marines, via Reuters

Lance Corporal Nikoui was a young martial arts champion whose father told Reuters that he had watched television nonstop for updates on the attack until he learned the devastating news from three Marines at his door. “He was born the same year it started, and ended his life with the end of this war,” Steve Nikoui said. He told The Daily Beast that his son loved his Marine family and wanted to “make a career out of this,” and added that he was frustrated that President Biden had sent his and others’ children into harm’s way. “They sent my son over there as a paper pusher and then had the Taliban outside providing security,” he said.

Navy Hospitalman Maxton W. Soviak, 22, of Berlin Heights, Ohio.

Credit…U.S. Marines, via Reuters

Mr. Soviak grew up playing football in a small northern Ohio community where his death has left a “Maxton-sized hole” in his loved ones’ lives, his sister Marilyn wrote in an Instagram post. He was a Navy medic who had graduated from high school in 2017. “Everybody looked to Max in tough situations,” said Jim Hall, his high school football coach, who described Mr. Soviak as a deeply loyal friend. “He was energetic. He wore his emotions on his sleeve. He was a passionate kid. He didn’t hold anything back.”

Army Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss, 23, of Corryton, Tenn.

Credit…U.S. Army, via Associated Press

Staff Sergeant Knauss was “a motivated young man who loved his country,” his grandfather Wayne Knauss told WATE-TV in Knoxville, Tenn. “He was a believer so we will see him again in heaven.” He had been in the military for five years, his grandfather said, and his stepmother told the station that he had planned to move to Washington when he returned to the United States. One of his former teachers said he had been “quiet but confident” in school and that he had written an essay that said his role models were people who stand up against power to help people. “He wrote that nine years ago as a 14-year-old boy, not knowing the man he was going to become,” Angela Hoffman, the teacher, told the station.

Jack Healy and Dave Philipps contributed reporting.

Credit…Tom Brenner for The New York Times

With a final race to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan underway, Republican senators forcefully rebuked President Biden and his predecessor on Sunday for a decision that they warned could dangerously undermine two decades of American counterterroism investment.

The senators, among the loudest defenders of the war, praised American troops who lost their lives last week while helping evacuate Americans and their Afghan allies from the country by an Aug. 31 deadline. But they said the situation could have been avoided had President Donald J. Trump not struck a rapid withdrawal agreement with the Taliban or had Mr. Biden more rigorously planned for the war’s drawdown.

“This is one of the worst foreign policy decisions in American history, much worse than Saigon,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Republican in the Senate. “Just because we decided to quit fighting doesn’t mean the terrorists go away, so they are still out there, they are invigorated, they are emboldened.”

Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. McConnell argued that the United States’ approach to Afghanistan — including stationing thousands of troops in the country to prop up the Afghan military — had been working, preventing deadly attacks against the homeland at a relatively modest cost in recent years.

Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, called the deadly scramble playing out around the Kabul airport a “humanitarian and foreign policy tragedy.” He dinged Mr. Trump for agreeing to release thousands of Taliban prisoners and Mr. Biden for abandoning Bagram Air Base.

“Recognize that we are in the position we are in right now because of terrible decisions made by two administrations,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“The war is not over, we are just in a weaker position,” Mr. Romney continued. “The idea that somehow we could pull out of a dangerous place where radical violent jihadists are organizing, that we could pull out of that and that is going to stop them — that’s fantasy.”

Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska and a member of the Intelligence Committee, said of the Biden administration, “Their plan has basically been happy talk.”

“Joe Biden put our forces at risk by having no plan for how to evacuate,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” “We are absolutely at risk.”

Credit…Pool photo by Jonathan Brady

Britain announced on Sunday that the last of its soldiers and staff, including the country’s ambassador to Afghanistan, had boarded evacuation flights out of Kabul, essentially ending its two-decade military involvement in the war.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson, praising their efforts in a national address posted to Twitter, said that the troops and officials had worked around the clock “to a remorseless deadline in harrowing conditions” to airlift more than 15,000 people, including Britons and Afghans, to safety in less than two weeks.

The ambassador, Laurie Bristow, who had stayed in Kabul, the Afghan capital, to help with the evacuation process, confirmed in a video on Sunday morning that he had landed at a military air base in Oxfordshire, northwest of London.

“We’ve had to leave Afghanistan for now, and the embassy will operate from Qatar for the time being,” he said, adding that London would put pressure on the Taliban to allow the transport to Britain of other Afghans and Britons left behind.

“We’ll do everything we can to protect the gains of the last 20 years,” Mr. Bristow added.

It was not immediately clear how many British citizens and Afghans with permission to travel to Britain were still in Afghanistan.

Ultimately, 150,000 British service members did a tour of duty in Afghanistan, 457 troops died, and thousands more were wounded, Mr. Johnson said. Two Britons and the child of a Briton were among those killed in a suicide bombing outside the gates of the international airport in Kabul on Thursday.

Critics have denounced the sudden withdrawal from the country, but Mr. Johnson said that Britain had followed the lead of the United States and that the efforts over the past two decades had saved lives.

“In the last 20 years, not a single terrorist attack has been launched from Afghan soil against the U.K. or any other Western country,” he said in a letter addressed to members of the armed forces, adding that troops had “kept Al Qaeda from our door for two decades.”

Britain would remain a presence in the region, Mr. Johnson said, adding that humanitarian assistance would double to 286 million pounds, or about $393 million. “We will use every lever we have — political, economic, diplomatic — to help the people of Afghanistan and to protect our country from harm,” he said.

Dan Bilefsky contributed reporting.

Tags Afghanistan, airport, Kabul, launched, Rockets, Strikes, Updates

Politics

U.S. Strikes Explosive-Laden Car in Kabul

Post author By
Post date August 30, 2021

WASHINGTON – A US military drone attack blew up a vehicle laden with explosives in Kabul on Sunday, Defense Department officials said hours after President Biden warned that another terrorist attack on the Afghan capital’s airport was “very likely” .

The strike, which took place two days before the deadline for Mr Biden’s withdrawal from the country, removed an imminent threat to Hamid Karzai International Airport from the Khorasan Islamic State group, a US Central Command spokesman said. The group claimed responsibility for the suicide attack on the airport on Thursday, in which 13 American soldiers and up to 170 civilians were killed.

The spokesman, Captain Bill Urban, said Central Command was aware of reports of civilian casualties following Sunday’s strike.

“We know that there was significant and powerful follow-up explosions as a result of the destruction of the vehicle, suggesting a large amount of explosive material inside that may have caused additional losses,” he said. “It is unclear what might have happened and we are investigating further.”

He added: “We would be deeply saddened by the possible loss of innocent people.”

Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said civilians were killed in the attack and a house was attacked. “We are investigating the reason for the air strike and the exact number of victims,” he said.

The attack followed a reprisal Friday for the suicide bombing, which was among the deadliest in nearly two decades since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. Earlier on Sunday the US embassy in Kabul said there was a “specific, credible threat” to the airport site. State Department officials have issued several similar warnings in the past few days.

Five rockets were fired and launched by a counter-missile system at Hamid Karzai Airport Monday morning, a US official said, adding that there were no initial reports of casualties. The airfield remained open, said the officer.

Updated

Aug. 29, 2021, 7:31 p.m. ET

As American forces complete their withdrawal, the Pentagon has shifted its focus from screening and airlifting Afghan and American civilians to getting its personnel home. At the same time, US intelligence sources are refining destinations for possible drone attacks on suspected Islamic State fighters, particularly suicide bombers who want to attack the airport.

Sunday’s attack, carried out by an MQ-9 Reaper drone from a base in the United Arab Emirates, showed the extent to which US intelligence agencies have refined their target list, defense officials said. A Hellfire missile fired from the Reaper hit the vehicle about two miles from the airport, a military official said.

Based on the secondary explosions after the drone attack, the military estimated one to three people with explosive vests in the vehicle. There may be other explosives in the car that made it a vehicle-borne bomb in itself, two defense officials said.

Understanding the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan

Map 1 of 5

Who are the Taliban? The Taliban emerged in 1994 amid the unrest following the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including flogging, amputation and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here is more about their genesis and track record as rulers.

Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who for years have been on the run, in hiding, in prison and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they say they are.

What is happening to the women of Afghanistan? When the Taliban was last in power, they banned women and girls from most jobs or from going to school. Afghan women have gained a lot since the Taliban was overthrown, but now they fear that they are losing ground. Taliban officials are trying to reassure women that things will be different, but there are indications that they have begun to reintroduce the old order in at least some areas.

In the past 24 hours, the US has evacuated approximately 2,000 people in military transport aircraft, including more than 100 American citizens. The military found that around 250 Americans were still in Kabul who had expressed a wish to leave the country.

Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, said in a speech on Fox News Sunday that the number of American citizens in Kabul could be close to 300. “There are some people who have chosen not to go so far and that is their right,” “he said.

“You will not be stuck in Afghanistan,” added Sullivan after Tuesday. “We’ll make sure we have a mechanism to get them out of the country in case they decide to come home in the future.”

Military officials said they had no evidence that Mr Biden would ask the military to stay beyond Tuesday to get more Americans or vulnerable Afghans out of the country.

However, Sunday’s drone attack showed how dangerous the last two days of America’s 20 Years War would be, Defense officials admitted. The attack follows Friday’s attack on a vehicle in Nangarhar province near the Pakistani border that Pentagon press secretary John F. Kirby said killed two “senior” Islamic State fighters – one as ” Planner ”and one as a“ mediator ”.

Tags ExplosiveLaden, Kabul, Strikes, vehicle