The Taliban will reportedly allow 200 Americans and other foreigners to leave on a flight to Qatar from the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.
A U.S. official spoke to Reuters about the departure, which is expected on Thursday and came after pressure from U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad.
The Qatari official said it wasn’t an evacuation flight as all of the passengers hold foreign passports and, if required, visas for their destinations, and have been ticketed by the airline. Qatar facilitated the transportation of the passengers to the airport in a convoy of minibuses parked Thursday morning in a Kabul hotel, one of them with a bullet hole through the windshield. The buses entered the airport shortly after 2 p.m. local time.
At the international terminal, passengers were divided by nationality, with Americans—all of them appearing to be of Afghan origin—mostly too traumatized by the ordeal of recent weeks to speak to a reporter. Qatari soldiers were providing security. (WSJ)
There are still thousands of Afghans who hold Special Immigrant Visas due to having helped the U.S. military and civilian effort that are still stranded.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken finally acknowledged that the Taliban is not allowing chartered flights to leave.
“We’ve made clear to all parties—we’ve made it clear to the Taliban—that these charters need to be able to depart,” he said.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Taliban officials told those arranging charter flights that they could only allow those with valid documentation to leave from Kabul, not Mazar-i-Sharif, prompting U.S. officials to tell Americans in at the Northern Afghanistan airport to come back to Kabul.
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