Taliban Assistance to the US “Saving Lives” amid Bomb Blasts That Killed 28 of Its Fighters

Prior to Thursday’s bomb attacks which killed 13 service members and over 62 Afghan civilians, US officials said that “daily communication” with “Afghan [Taliban] partners” had expedited the evacuation of thousands of people from the country. 

Speaking exclusively to POLITICO, three US and congressional officials outlined the reliance on the Islamist group for the security of the airport while revealing that Taliban fighters had been handed “a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies” which the US wished to evacuate from the country. 

The outsourcing of security duties to the Taliban, however, was lambasted by one anonymous US official who lamented that “all those Afghans” had been “put on a kill list.”  

“It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”

Amid reports that the Taliban had gone “door to door” in the search for Afghan collaborators wishing to leave the country, President Joe Biden said in a Thursday news conference that he was unsure of the existence of such lists before conceding there “had been occasions when our military has contacted their military counterparts in the Taliban.” 

“[Our military have] said this, for example, this bus is coming through with X number of people on it, made up of the following group of people. We want you to let that bus or that group through," he said. "So, yes there have been occasions like that. To the best of my knowledge, in those cases, the bulk of that has occurred and they have been let through. I can't tell you with any certitude that there's actually been a list of names. There may have been. But I know of no circumstance. It doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, that here's the names of 12 people, they're coming, let them through. It could very well have happened.”

On Thursday evening, a crowd of local and foreign civilians located at Kabul International Airport’s ‘Abbey’ and ‘Baron’ gates were targeted by two suicide bombers. The attacks left 103 people dead, including 13 US service members. According to Taliban representatives, at least 28 fighters also perished in the bombings, with the Islamist group assuring that additional guard posts would be set up at “all airfields around the country” in the wake of the attacks. 

Following the bombings, former President Donald Trump released a statement sending his “deepest condolences to the families of our brilliant service members whose duty to the USA meant so much to them.” The former President has been highly critical of the Biden administrations handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, labelling the situation, in an exclusive interview with Breitbart, as the “single most embarrassing moment in the history of our country.”

“Because everybody knows - a child would know - you take the military out last. You get everybody out, then you get all the equipment - you take your $83 billion worth of equipment - then you blow up the bases. And perhaps you stay at... You take a certain area that you may want to keep, like Bagram, and keep the base - Bagram - because it’s next to China and Iran. It costs billions and billions of dollars to build. And maybe you keep that for other reasons. But everybody knows that you take your military out last. And they took the military out first.”