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KABUL, Afghanistan — Tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan waited nervously on Saturday to see whether the United States would deliver on President Joe Biden’s new pledge to evacuate all Americans and all Afghans who aided the war effort. Meanwhile, the Taliban leader arrived in Kabul for talks with the group’s leadership on forming a new government. Time is running out ahead of Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline to withdraw most remaining U.S. troops, and the president on Friday night did not commit to extending it. He faces growing criticism as videos depict pandemonium and occasional violence outside the airport,...

President Joe Biden stood firm Friday in his decision to remove all U.S. troops from Afghanistan and attempted to invoke optimism for the evacuation of all Americans and Afghan allies despite scenes of chaos and despair over the past week. But throughout his remarks, the president made several claims at odds with reports from the ground in Afghanistan and even officials within his administration and seemed unaware of criticism from American allies. 'I have seen no question of our credibility from our allies around the world.' An easily disputable statement from Biden came in response to a question that asked...

Military personnel fired tear gas to control the crowds of Afghans trying to gain access to Kabul airport Friday, a day after the Pentagon said that order was being restored at the site and evacuation flights from Afghanistan would be accelerating. Soldiers have also fired into the air to disperse the crowd, according to a senior Western official. It was unclear as to whether the soldiers were American; British, Afghan and other Western troops are also stationed at the airport. There was no immediate comment from the U.S. military. Soldiers are also going just outside the airport perimeter, which is...

The Taliban is killing people in Afghanistan they find with copies of the Bible on their mobile phones, a Christian non-profit announced on Tuesday. The Taliban, a radical Islamist terrorist organization, seized leadership of the country on Sunday after surrounding the nation’s capital, Kabul, prompting former President Ashraf Ghani to flee. The Taliban ruled Afghanistan until 2001, when the United States invaded the country, and established a brutal regime that regularly persecuted political dissidents, religious minorities, women, and anyone considered to be violating Islamic law, or sharia. According to SAT-7, an organization that broadcasts Christian programs to churches and Christians...

Harrowing footage has emerged of Afghan mothers throwing their babies over barbed wire at Kabul Airport as they begged British troops to save them from the Taliban. “The mothers were desperate, they were getting beaten by the Taliban. They shouted, ‘Save my baby!’ and threw the babies at us. Some of the babies fell on the barbed wire,” a Parachute Regiment officer told the UK’s Independent.

A UN document says the Taliban is intensifying its hunt for all people who worked and collaborated with Nato and US forces. The confidential paper was produced by the Norwegian Centre for Global Analyses, which provides the UN with intelligence information. “The Taliban are arresting and/or threatening to kill or arrest family members of target individuals unless they surrender themselves to the Taliban,” the document, seen by the BBC said. It said that those at particular risk were people with positions in the military, police and investigative units. “The Taliban have been conducting advance mapping of individuals prior to take...

The Hague, Netherlands: The first Dutch evacuation flight since the Taliban takeover left Kabul without a single Dutch or Afghan national on board after passengers were blocked by US troops, the Netherlands said Wednesday. The US military allowed the Dutch jet to stay on the tarmac in the Afghan capital for just 30 minutes before ordering it to take off on Tuesday, foreign minister Sigrid Kaag said. Around 40 people were able to board the plane but none were Dutch or Afghan, with many people unable to get to the plane on time as they were stuck outside the US-guarded...

President Donald J. Trump strongly condemned President Joe Biden and the catastrophe unfolding in Kabul, Afghanistan since the weekend, in an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity on Tuesday. Trump told "Hannity" that Biden has humiliated the United States more than any other president in history, explicitly eclipsing fellow Democrat Jimmy Carter's Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979. "It is a terrible time for our country. I don't think in all of the years our country has ever been so humiliated. I don't know what you call it – a military defeat or a psychological defeat, there has never been anything...

Britain was the second-largest supplier of troops to Afghanistan, and the United States’ rapid withdrawal from the country has left some embittered. LONDON — In Britain, the chaotic departure from Afghanistan has drawn comparisons not to helicopters flying out of Saigon but to an earlier debacle: the 1956 Suez crisis, in which a humiliated Britain was forced to pull out of Egypt, having failed to dislodge its nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The problem is, Britain had very little to say about the timing or tactics of the most recent withdrawal, even though it suffered the second-most casualties in the...

It’s a foreign-policy humiliation unlike anything our country has endured since the Iran hostage crisis. The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country [of Afghanistan] is highly unlikely,” President Biden confidently proclaimed in July. “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy.” One month later, the scenario Mr. Biden deemed impossible has become a horrifying reality. In recent days, the world has watched panicked civilians cling to U.S. military aircraft in a desperate attempt to escape the chaos unleashed by Mr. Biden’s reckless...

As the Taliban began seizing provinces across Afghanistan in recent weeks, the CIA’s intelligence assessments began to warn in increasingly stark terms about the potential for a rapid, total collapse of the Afghan military and government, current and former U.S. officials told NBC News. In the end, the CIA’s description of what a worst-case scenario could look like “was pretty close to what happened,” one former official briefed on the matter said. The White House won’t confirm whether President Joe Biden ever received such a dire forecast from his national security team. The president himself appeared to dispute a month...

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Thousands of Afghans rushed onto the tarmac of Kabul's international airport Monday, so desperate to escape the Taliban capture of their country that they held onto an American military jet as it took off and plunged to death in chaos that killed at least seven people, U.S. officials said. The crowds of people rushing the airport came as the Taliban enforced their rule over the wider capital after a lightning advance across the country that took just over a week to dethrone the country's Western-backed government. While there were no major reports of abuses, many stayed home...

American Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a CNN interview on Sunday that the administration of President Joe Biden “can work with and recognize” a Taliban government in Afghanistan that respects women and “doesn’t harbor terrorists.” The Taliban, the jihadist organization that ruled Afghanistan prior to the U.S. invasion of that country in 2001, completed its takeover of the country on Sunday, surrounding Kabul and negotiating the departure of the previous Afghan government. Ex-President Ashraf Ghani reportedly fled Sunday after delivering a bizarre televised speech in which he claimed to be working to regroup the Afghan military to fight...

While the Biden administration has already attempted to shift blame to Donald Trump for the scenes coming out of Afghanistan, Biden owns both the decision to leave and the catastrophic withdrawal he oversaw as commander-in-chief.“When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. forces,” Biden said in a statement released Saturday.“Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice — follow...

First Jake Tapper went after Blinken and now Savannah Guthrie going after Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan. What’s going on here, media? lol She even broke out Biden’s presser from early July where he basically got EVERYTHING wrong about Afghanistan. Right? Hey, we’re as shocked as you are. Watch:

WASHINGTON (AP) — America’s top general said Sunday that the United States could now face a rise in terrorist threats from a Taliban-run Afghanistan. That warning comes as intelligence agencies charged with anticipating those threats face new questions after the U.S.-backed Afghan military collapsed with shocking speed. Less than a week after a military assessment predicted Kabul could be surrounded by insurgents in 30 days, the world on Sunday watched stunning scenes of Taliban fighters standing in the Afghan president's office and crowds of Afghans and foreigners frantically trying to board planes to escape the country. Gen. Mark Milley, the...

Taliban officials declared victory and the restoration of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan after occupying the presidential palace in Kabul on Sunday. Appearing in a Twitter video alongside other Taliban leaders, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the group’s cofounder, pronounced victory in the battle for the nation. “We have achieved an unexpected victory,” he said. “Now is the time to test, to show how we serve our people and ensure their future in the best possible way.” Baradar said the Taliban have appointed him to be “leader of Afghanistan” and take the reigns of government. Pakistani authorities arrested Baradar in 2010,...

The chop of U.S. military helicopters whisking American diplomats to Kabul’s airport on Sunday punctuated a frantic rush by thousands of other foreigners and Afghans to flee to safety as well, as a stunningly swift Taliban takeover reached Afghanistan’s capital. U.S. reports of gunfire at the airport threatened to shut down one of the last avenues of escape in an ever-more chaotic and compressed evacuation. NATO allies that had pulled out their forces ahead of the Biden administration’s intended Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline were rushing troops back in this weekend to airlift their citizens, while the Pentagon was sending in...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden and other top U.S. officials were stunned on Sunday by the pace of the Taliban’s nearly complete takeover of Afghanistan, as the planned withdrawal of American forces urgently became a mission to ensure a safe evacuation. The speed of the Afghan government’s collapse and the ensuing chaos posed the most serious test of Biden as commander in chief, and he was the subject of withering criticism from Republicans who said that he had failed. Biden campaigned as a seasoned expert in international relations and has spent months downplaying the prospect of an ascendant Taliban...

CNN Breaking News @cnnbrk President Biden is expected to address the nation in the next few days about the crisis in Afghanistan, an administration official says https://cnn.it/3g2QVo8 Image 4:18 PM · Aug 15, 2021