Taliban troops stormed the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and the presidential palace after U.S. forces handed control of the airfield, located on the outskirts of Kabul, over to the Afghan government in early July. Afghan forces at the base surrendered to the Taliban on Sunday.
The Pul-e-Charkhi prison, the largest in Afghanistan, contained a maximum-security cell block for al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners. Afghan government troops surrendered control of the base without a fight.
The freed prisoners will no doubt accelerate a previous assessment of how quickly terrorist groups will reconstitute themselves in Afghanistan, Axios reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told senators.
When asked by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, Milley and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated they would need to revise a June assessment they sent to Congress warning of a “medium” risk of terrorist groups reconstituting themselves in the country within two years.
Twenty years after the Taliban being removed from power in a U.S.-led invasion, Afghanistan’s Washington-backed president Ashraf Ghani had left the country and the flag at the U.S. Embassy had been lowered. Taliban militiamen swept to into Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, on Sunday, facing little resistance from Afghan government forces. his final Facebook post was signed with “Long Live Afghanistan.”
The Taliban released a statement saying they had entered the capital of 6 million people and were working to restore law and order.
The militia’s fighters took the last remaining government stronghold of Mazar-e-Sharif on Saturday, followed on Sunday by the city of Jalalabad, which lies just east of Kabul.
Helicopters circled the U.S. embassy in Kabul Sunday as its diplomatic personnel were under evacuation orders. We have seen this before: the fall of Saigon in 1975 in the wake of the Vietnam War.
The comparison to Vietnam was not remotely accurate U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN’s State of the Union. “This is not Saigon. We went to Afghanistan 20 years ago with one mission, and that mission was to deal with the folks who attacked us on 9/11 and we succeeded in that mission,”
In an alert on Sunday, the U.S. embassy cautioned of reports that Kabul’s airport was “taking fire” and that “we are instructing U.S. citizens to shelter in place.” A U.S. military official told NPR the airport was closed to commercial aircraft as military evacuations continue.
**Notam G1264/21 Airspace is now uncontrolled and transit aircraft are being rerouted.**
Apparently the airspace over Kabul has also been closed to commercial traffic-which lets us speculate that the weapons left behind are probably still fully functional.
Earlier, the White House had ordered about 5,000 troops to be sent to Afghanistan to provide security and assist in evacuations of U.S. personnel. The Pentagon confirmed on Sunday another 1,000 would head there as well.
Our own government just empowered and armed an unbelievable quantity of our enemies.
The US just released over 5000 Al-Queda back into the fold, left them weapons including drones, and we “need to revise” a threat assessment?
No kidding.
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