- US Secretary of State Anthony Brinken stated that the Taliban will allow people to leave Afghanistan.
- Hundreds of people are still trapped in the country.
- Brinken welcomed the support of Qatari officials.
U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Brinken said on Tuesday that the Taliban reiterated their commitment to allow Afghans to leave Afghanistan freely after meeting with Qatari officials on the accelerated evacuation.
US President Joe Biden is under increasing pressure. There are reports that hundreds of people, including Americans, have been banned from flying out of an airport in northern Afghanistan for a week.
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The Taliban told the United States that “they will let people with travel documents leave freely,” Brinken said at a press conference in Doha, where he and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met their Qataris.
“We will let them stick to this,” he added.
Qatar stated that since Washington’s chaotic withdrawal from the country at the end of August, Kabul’s airport has been basically closed, but it is expected to reopen soon to open an important channel for Afghans seeking to leave.
“The entire international community is expecting the Taliban to honor this promise,” Brinken said, referring to a UN Security Council resolution urging safe passage.
Transit point
When Biden’s senior cabinet members arrived on Monday for dinner with Qatari ruler Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, they expressed Washington’s gratitude to Doha for assisting Afghanistan’s airlift.
In the final days of the 20-year war that the Taliban took over the United States, nearly half of the more than 120,000 people evacuated from Afghanistan were transit stations in Qatar.
Doha is the Taliban’s international diplomatic base, although Brinken’s aides said he has no plans to meet with them because Washington is waiting to judge the organization’s authority to determine the level of participation.
The United States assisted four Americans from the same family in the land evacuation from Afghanistan on Monday. This was the first evacuation arranged by Washington since the withdrawal of the army.
A State Department official said that the Taliban were aware of the operation and did not intervene.
But NGOs said that between 600 and 1,300 people-including girls and American citizens-were trapped at the airport in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.
Marina Legry, the founder and executive director of a small American NGO active in Afghanistan, told AFP that the Taliban would not let anyone pass.
Blinken said that the Taliban did not stop people with valid travel documents, but not all charter passengers have documents, denying that Mazar-i-Sharif had a “hostage-like situation”.
He said that since the United States has no ground personnel, there are inevitably obstacles to charter flights.
threat
“We have no way to verify the accuracy of the manifests, the identities of the passengers on these planes, the aviation safety agreements or where they plan to land-and other issues. These are real concerns,” he said.
“We are working hard to solve these problems,” he said.
US officials stated that they no longer control Afghanistan’s airspace and that the main airport in Kabul occupied by the US military in August has fallen into disrepair.
The Qatar technical team has been deployed to Kabul to assess the feasibility of the airport and began to prepare for the resumption of operations to allow evacuation and the arrival of much-needed humanitarian supplies.
The State Department stated that Brinken praised “Qatar for providing extraordinary support in facilitating the safe transit of American citizens, our partners, and other Afghans at risk” in meetings with Gulf rulers.
Austin acknowledged that the withdrawal created obstacles, but said the United States is committed to preventing threats from Afghanistan.
“There is no doubt that (withdrawal) will make it more difficult to identify and respond to threats from the region,” Austin said.
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