ROME — The U.N. food agency says it has been able to negotiate access with the Taliban to distribute aid in one provincial capital in Afghanistan but hasn’t been able to resume food deliveries to three other provincial capitals it supplies.
The World Food Program, headquartered in Rome, has said that some 14 million people are facing severe hunger in the nation of some 39 million. A second drought in three years, combined with fighting, had afflicted Afghanistan even before the Taliban takeover of the country on Sunday.
Andrew Patterson, WFP’s deputy country director, told The Associated Press on Friday that after Faizabad, a provincial capital in the north, fell to the Taliban last week, the agency’s field office succeeded in negotiating access with the local Taliban command, and “we had (a food) truck on the road the next day.”
However, Patterson said the situation in Kandahar, Herat and Jalalabad so far hasn’t allowed the U.N. agency to resume distributing food in those areas.
According to WFP estimates, some 2 million children are malnourished in Afghanistan.
BRUSSELS — NATO foreign ministers vowed on Friday to center their efforts on assuring the safe evacuation from Afghanistan of citizens from the alliance’s member countries and allies, as well and Afghans deemed at risk after the takeover by the Taliban.
During a virtual meeting, the ministers also expressed concern over the “grave events” in Afghanistan and called for “an immediate end to violence” amid reports of Taliban atrocities and “serious human rights violations and abuses across Afghanistan.”
The ministers insisted that the new rulers in Kabul would have to make sure that the nation does not become a center for terrorism. They said that “under the current circumstances, NATO has suspended all support to the Afghan authorities.”
“Any future Afghan government must adhere to Afghanistan’s international obligations …. And ensure that Afghanistan never again serves as a safe haven for terrorists,” a statement from the alliance said.
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BERLIN — Germany’s foreign minister says the United States will use its Ramstein Air Base in western Germany as a temporary transit point to transport people from Afghanistan seeking protection to the United States.
Germany, like other Western countries, has sent military aircraft of its own to Afghanistan in recent days to evacuate German nationals and Afghans who worked for its forces prior to their withdrawal amid the Taliban surge.
Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement on Friday that the focus is on evacuating as many people from Kabul “as is possible under the very difficult circumstances” and that Germany is working closely with international partners.
Maas said: “We agree with all our partners on the ground that no place on our planes should remain empty.” He said that, as a result, U.S. flights will also take Germans or people named by German authorities to Ramstein, while Germany also will evacuate people from various nations on its own planes.
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PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron sent a message of “welcome” in a tweet on Friday to Afghans evacuated to France, following the arrival from Kabul of a third group of more than 200 people, mostly Afghans.
He also noted that health rules are not being forgotten, posting photos of Afghans surrounded by doctors and a man getting a COVID-19 test, obligatory for all arrivals.
All people coming to France from Afghanistan must observe a 10-day quarantine under pandemic restrictions because their country is on the French red list of color-coded risks for coronavirus, with red the highest, the Foreign Ministry noted Thursday.
To ensure that France and other nations can continue evacuations, Macron insisted in a phone call with President Joe Biden of the “absolute need for rapid and concrete coordination among allies,” according to a French statement Friday about the conversation the day before.
The U.S. military is in charge of the evacuations at Kabul airport, meaning that other countries must go through them to evacuate their own citizens and Afghans considered at risk in their homeland following the Taliban takeover of the country on Sunday.
ROME — A retired Italian general who commanded Italy’s initial contingent in western Afghanistan in 2001 says NATO’s retreat should have been planned for winter, after the end of the Taliban’s so-called “fighting season.’’
Gen. Giorgio Battisti, in an interview on Sky TG24 TV Friday, also said the U.S. air base at Bagram should have been left operating during withdrawal to help evacuate civilians.
“Probably, in my modest opinion, it was necessary to spread out the final withdrawal, assuming one wanted to completely leave Afghanistan,’’ Battisti said.
He contended that militarily it would have been better to pull out after the end of the traditional “fighting season,’’ which lasts from spring through much of autumn.
Instead, “they left in the middle of ‘fighting season,’ left, like thieves in the night, this immense base of Bagram,” the general said.
Noting that Bagram is some 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Kabul, he suggested it could have served as a “second escape valve” for thousands of citizens now clamoring to get into the one operational airport at Kabul or for those who can’t make it through Taliban checkpoints along the way.
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LONDON — Britain’s embattled foreign minister has defended his decision not to call while on vacation his Afghan counterpart about the evacuation of translators who had helped British forces.
Dominic Raab has come under increasing pressure to resign for failing to follow the advice of officials in his department to make a call to Hanif Atmar on Aug. 13, while he was vacationing on the Greek island of Crete.
Two days later, the Taliban took over Afghanistan, 20 years after they had been ousted from power, and Raab headed back to the U.K. after cutting his vacation short to deal with the crisis.
Raab on Friday posted a statement on Twitter to counter what he described as “inaccurate media reporting over recent days.” He said he prioritized “security” at Kabul airport and “delegated” the call to a junior minister in his department.
Raab said Atmar wasn’t able to take that call because of “the rapidly deteriorating situation.”
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WARSAW, Poland – Poland’s prime minister says his government has taken on the responsibility as a NATO member to organize the evacuation of some 300 Afghans who have cooperated with the military alliance.
Mateusz Morawiecki said Friday on Facebook that following his talks with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, Poland will be evacuating from Kabul 300 Afghans who “in recent years cooperated with” NATO. He did not elaborate what that cooperation entailed.
They will be brought to Poland and then on to other NATO countries, which Morawiecki did not name.
Morawiecki said that Poland is taking seriously its obligations within the alliance and that the evacuation was “not the last word” from Poland in the NATO response to the crisis in Afghanistan. Poland has been a NATO member since 1999.
In three previous flights, Poland has evacuated some 130 Afghans and another 100 are waiting at the Kabul airport, according to Michal Dworczyk, a top aide to Morawiecki. They were first flown on Polish military planes to Uzbekistan and then on national carrier LOT planes to Warsaw.
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COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Sweden’s Foreign Minister Ann Linde said that her ministry is aware of the “great difficulties in getting to the airport and through the gates” amid the chaos at the airport in the Afghan capital.
Linde was writing on Twitter on Friday about plans to evacuate Swedes and local hires in Kabul from the country following the Taliban takeover.
“All countries are experiencing this problem and we are working on possible solutions at the airport in cooperation with other countries,” Linde wrote.
She said her Foreign Ministry had staff at the Kabul airport with “resources needed for further evacuation work,” and added that “transport capacity is available.”
Linde stressed that “it is important to follow the information and always put safety first.”
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MADRID — Spain’s defense minister says the country’s military transport planes are leaving Kabul partly empty because chaos at the city’s airport is preventing Afghans from evacuating.
Defense Minister Margarita Robles said Friday that one Afghan family taken out by Spain had left behind a daughter they lost in the airport crush.
She told Spanish public radio RNE that an ideal solution would be to set up corridors into the airport, but that’s impossible because “nobody’s in control of the situation.”
She said that after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani left the country, the airport’s air traffic controllers and security staff walked out, rendering it inoperative until U.S. forces took it over.
She said the U.S. has given assurances that its forces won’t leave the airport until the last person awaiting evacuation is out.
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WARSAW, Poland – A Polish diplomat says the most difficult thing in evacuating Afghans is finding and extracting them from pressing crowds at the Kabul airport. Poland has so far evacuated a few hundred people in three flights.
Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Przydacz said Friday that sometimes consulate staff can identify the individuals in the crowd but that it was difficult for them to make their way through to the gate to be pulled into the airport.
“There are thousands of totally determined people in the crowd, in extremely difficult conditions pressing on the walls and gates of the airport,” Przydacz told reporters.
“From this desperate crowd, sometimes understandably aggressive crowd, our people are trying to extract those who are on our list,” Przydacz said.
“The transport logistics goes very smoothly but the greatest challenge now is how to find these people. Even if we know where they are, and sometimes our consuls can see them 40-50 meters (yards) away, they have no possibility of getting closer,” Przydacz said.
“These people must first of all, on their own, get as close as they can to the entrance to have not only eye contact but real contact with the consul, because very often these people are simply pulled by the hand, jerked from the crowd with the help of the soldiers,” Przydacz said.
A former ambassador to Afghanistan, Piotr Lukasiewicz, has appealed to Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on social media to send more evacuation planes to Kabul.
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WASHINGTON — The United States says it evacuated approximately 3,000 people from Kabul via military transport aircraft on Aug. 19.
In a Friday statement, the White House said multiple C-17 flights from Hamid Karzai International Airport evacuated nearly 350 U.S. citizens, as well as family members of U.S. citizens, asylum applicants and their families, and vulnerable Afghans.
“We have evacuated approximately 9,000 people since August 14. Since the end of July, we have evacuated approximately 14,000 people,” it said.
It added that in the last 24 hours, the U.S. military facilitated the departure of 11 charter flights, and that those numbers were not included in the other totals.
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COPENHAGEN, Denmark — The Danish Defense Ministry is urging interpreters who have worked with them and need evacuation from Kabul to urgently make contact.
In a message sent by Twitter Friday, it urged the interpreters to contact an included email address, saying: “Urgent – Urgent Contact Danish Authorities NOW.”
The tweet ended with “We will do our best to assist.”
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BERLIN — Germany says a civilian suffered a gunshot wound before being evacuated from Kabul on a German air force plane.
German government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer said Friday that the wounded person was not in a life-threatening condition, but didn’t immediately further details about the person or incident.
Meanwhile, Foreign Ministry spokesman Christofer Burger said Germany is providing 100 million euros in immediate funding for humanitarian aid inside Afghanistan and neighboring countries.
He said the money would exclusively go to aid organizations, particularly UNHCR, and not to the Taliban.
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KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan official familiar with talks with the Taliban says the group does not plan to make any decisions or announcements about the upcoming government until after the Aug. 31 U.S. withdrawal date passes.
The official, who is not authorized to give information to the media and thus spoke anonymously, says Taliban lead negotiator Anas Haqqani has told his ex-government interlocuters that the insurgent movement has a deal with the U.S. “to do nothing” until after the final withdrawal date passes.
He did not elaborate on whether the reference to doing nothing was only in the political field. Haqqani’s statement raises concerns about what the religious movement might be planning after Aug. 31, and whether they will keep their promise to include non-Taliban officials in the next government.
Until now the Taliban have said nothing of their plans to replace the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, or what a replacement would look like.
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VATICAN CITY — The Vatican’s newspaper is calling on the international community to welcome Afghan civilians fleeing the Taliban, expressing incredulousness “that before deciding to abandon the country no one thought through such a foreseeable scenario or did anything to avoid it.”
In a front-page article in the Friday edition of L’Osservatore Romano, deputy editor Gaetano Vallini said the West was obliged to urgently remedy the situation with concrete action and welcome refugees to avoid a “catastrophic humanitarian emergency.”
The commentary was an unusually blunt criticism of the U.S., though Washington wasn’t singled out by name. After expressing shock at the chaos created by the U.S.-led Western withdrawal, Gallini wrote: “It would be even more serious if such a decision was taken with the knowledge of such dramatic consequences.”
Pope Francis has expressed alarm at the chaos that has engulfed Afghanistan with the Taliban takeover. During his Sunday blessing, Francis asked for prayers for an end to the violence and for Afghan men, women and children to be able to live in “fully reciprocal” peace and security.
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KABUL, Afghanistan — Friday prayers were uneventful in the Afghan capital, with no Taliban gunmen seen guarding the entrances of mosques or enforcing dress code restrictions as they have in the past. Some mosques even saw higher numbers than normal in attendance.
The Islamic-fundamentalist Taliban issued guidance to imams around Afghanistan on Thursday, saying they should use the weekly sermons and prayers to appeal for unity, urge people not to flee the country, and to counter “negative propaganda” about them.
“The benefits of state should be explained to all,” a commission of Taliban monitoring religious affairs and mosques said in the guidance they circulated.
Kabul resident Jawed Safi was please to see the mosques secure. The Afghan government had previously posted guards at mosques to ward off attackers due to frequent bombings in the past.
“People were as normal, as in the past, but there were more of them,” Safi said, adding that there were “no restrictions so far.”
An imam in eastern Kabul, Bashir Wardak, said that Afghans should unite to stop the decadeslong bloodshed. “Allah has ordered us to peace and brotherhood so we must get united,” he said.
Abdul Boghdi, another imam in northern Kabul, said that “people together should collect money to help those displaced.”
One attendee, Qasim Ahmadi, saw people wearing jeans attend prayers as usual. “There should be no restrictions on us, we are already Muslims,” he said. “The Taliban should aim for an inclusive government in order to be successful.”
Thousand of internally displaced people are living on the streets and in the parks of Kabul, with limited access to drinking water and food. Some reports indicate that their situation has worsened since the Taliban overran the capital, causing donors to shy away.
