Afghans defy Taliban rule with protests; State Dept. ramps up evacuation processing

Sens. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) have plans to issue a bipartisan letter this week to President Biden calling for the urgent evacuation of Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants and the implementation of the recently passed language on SIVs, a source with knowledge of the letter told Power Up.

The letter, which is still being finalized with co-signers, calls on Biden to immediately and fully implement “the recently-passed legislation amending the process and eligibility for the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program and for the urgent evacuation of SIV applicants whose service to the U.S. mission has put their lives in jeopardy.”

Shaheen and Ernst are among several lawmakers on Capitol Hill leading the effort to pressure Biden to ensure the SIV program has the capacity to bring Afghans who assisted American forces to safety amid the U.S. withdrawal for months now.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CBS and NBC on Thursday that the United States does not know the total number of Americans in Afghanistan, but reiterated the administration’s promise to remove all those who wished to leave.

Asked by “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell how many Americans remained in Afghanistan, Sullivan said the government does not have a “precise answer.”

“That’s because we ask every American who comes to Afghanistan to register with the U.S. Embassy. But when people leave, they often don’t deregister, and even some who come never register in the first place,” he said.

U.S. officials are trying to reach all Americans in their database via multiple means of communication, he said.

“We will get any American who wants to get to the airport and who we get in contact with who says, ‘I want to get out and get on a plane,’ we will make that happen,” Sullivan told Lester Holt of “NBC Nightly News.”

A day after President Biden said U.S. troops might stay in Afghanistan beyond the Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline if U.S. citizens remained who wanted to be evacuated, Sullivan voiced optimism that the administration would finish flying American civilians out before that date.

“We can move thousands of people every single day between now and the end of the month,” he told O’Donnell. “We have plenty more seats on flights than we believe that there are possibly Americans still in Afghanistan, and there is plenty of time to get to the airport.”

He told NBC that the United States had made contact with the Taliban and “is working at the moment to get Americans and Afghans at risk to the airport,” but added, “we can’t count on anything.”

The Taliban has established checkpoints on routes to the airport and has harassed and attacked Afghans who tried to reach it in recent days.

Sullivan acknowledged that the massive evacuation underway is “a risky operation” and that the United States was worried about the potential for a terrorist attack by a group like the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan.

“We will keep working to minimize the risks and maximize the number of people on planes,” he said on NBC.

Afghanistan’s economy faces calamity in the aftermath of the Taliban capture of Kabul, with the United States freezing the country’s financial reserves, residents unable to withdraw their money from bank accounts and billions of dollars of international aid put on hold.

The dangerous economic climate poses a major dilemma for the Biden administration as it tries to maintain leverage over the Taliban without exacerbating the severe economic conditions that threaten to immiserate millions of Afghan citizens. Biden administration officials are monitoring the situation closely and have said they will resume the flow of humanitarian aid, but they have not signaled how they plan to proceed.

Senior officials in Afghanistan’s toppled government have warned in recent days that parts of the nation’s economy are on the brink of devastation, given the country’s high dependence on international funding. Wahid Majrooh, acting minister of public health in Afghanistan, told The Washington Post that he is “deeply, deeply concerned” about cuts in funding for the national health-care system — and that he’s already facing shortages of critical medical supplies.

Leaders of the Group of Seven nations will continue to do “everything possible to evacuate vulnerable persons” from Afghanistan and called on the Taliban to guarantee safe passage to the Kabul airport, Dominic Raab, the British foreign secretary, said Thursday.

Raab chaired a meeting of the G-7 foreign and development ministers Thursday to discuss developments in Afghanistan.

The officials “affirmed our commitment in particular to the urgent need for the cessation of violence, respect for human rights including for women, children and minorities, inclusive negotiations about the future of Afghanistan, and the need for all parties to respect international humanitarian law,” Raab said in a statement.

The group was “deeply concerned” by reports of Taliban fighters taking violent retribution in parts of Afghanistan.

The ministers will work with partners to “seek to secure an inclusive political settlement, enable life-saving humanitarian assistance and support in Afghanistan and the region, and prevent any further loss of life in Afghanistan and to the international community from terrorism,” Raab’s statement said.

The officials discussed the need to cooperate on evacuations from Afghanistan, according to Raab. They asked the Taliban to guarantee safe passage to foreign nationals and Afghans to the Kabul airport, which has been flooded this week by people seeking to escape the country. Taliban fighters have harassed and attacked Afghans attempting to reach the airport.

The ministers also discussed “the importance of the international community providing safe and legal resettlement routes,” the statement said.

Some G-7 nations, including Canada and the United Kingdom, have pledged in recent days to take thousands of Afghan refugees. But President Emmanuel Macron of France — another G-7 member — has called for Europe to “protect ourselves against significant irregular migration flows” after the Taliban takeover.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian tweeted Thursday that France’s top priorities for the G-7 were to accelerate coordination on evacuations from Kabul and to “strengthen our cooperation to anticipate the consequences of the Afghan crisis.”

The State Department said Thursday that it has processed a group of 6,000 people who will soon board planes out of Kabul’s international airport.

That amounts to an increase compared with previous daily evacuation numbers, as the department surges consular officers to Kabul, Qatar and Kuwait to help with the massive airlift, State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters.

On previous days this week, the United States processed 2,000 people per day for evacuation as U.S. citizens and Afghans seeking to flee the country complained of chaos around the airport and Taliban checkpoints preventing them from getting to their flights.

Price said the department is “aware of congestion around the airport” and is “working closely with the Department of Defense to facilitate safe and orderly access for consular processing on the airport compound.”

He said the department was nearly doubling the number of consular officers in Kabul, but did not say how many would be deployed in total.

Taliban fighters killed a relative of a journalist working for a German broadcaster Wednesday — an ominous signal that the Taliban was not following through on pledges to avoid retribution and to respect the media.

The relative was shot by Taliban fighters who were going house-to-house to hunt for the Deutsche Welle (DW) journalist in western Afghanistan, according to DW. The journalist now works in Germany. Other family members were able to flee from the fighters.

"The killing of a close relative of one of our editors by the Taliban in Herat yesterday is inconceivably tragic, and testifies to the acute danger in which all our employees and their families in Afghanistan find themselves,” DW’s director general, Peter Limbourg, said. “It is evident that the Taliban are already carrying out organized searches for journalists, both in Kabul and in the provinces. We are running out of time!”

The Taliban seriously injured another of his relatives. They have also raided the homes of at least three of the organization’s journalists, DW reported. Two men also shot and killed a translator who frequently contributed to the German newspaper Die Zeit, according to DW.

DW and other major German media organizations published an open letter Sunday calling on the German government to establish an emergency visa program for their Afghan staff.

"They too have shared our belief in the free press as an indispensable element of a stable, peaceful, balanced democracy — a value that the German government strongly supported in Afghanistan over the past 20 years," the letter read.

DW has sent names and contact information of staff members to the German Foreign Ministry so that they can be put on evacuation flights. But reaching the airport — and getting on planes once people are there — has proved difficult in recent days, as the Taliban have set up checkpoints on access routes and attacked or harassed Afghans on the way to the airport.

As Afghanistan marked the anniversary of its 1919 independence from British rule on Thursday, the streets of Kabul looked different than in years past: Taliban fighters, now in control of the country, drove along the capital’s thoroughfares to mark a new sort of independence.

“We at the same time as a result of our jihadi resistance forced another arrogant power of the world, the United States, to fail and retreat from our holy territory of Afghanistan,” the Taliban said, according to the Associated Press.

Still, as the Islamist militant group hailed the day as cause for celebration, others saw it as an opportunity for resistance. Kabul residents took to the streets, waving the Afghan flag to protest the Taliban’s rule.

The return of Taliban rule to Afghanistan will mean a return to sharia law, the group’s interpretation of Islamic religious law, a senior Taliban commander declared on Wednesday after the Islamist militant group swept the country, ousting the U.S.-backed government.

The takeover has sparked fear and speculation about the future of Afghanistan.

“There will be no democratic system at all,” Taliban commander Waheedullah Hashimi said in an interview with Reuters. “We will not discuss what type of political system should we apply in Afghanistan because it is clear. It is sharia law and that is it.”

Here are some of the basics.