About 200 foreigners, including Americans, fly out of Kabul
An estimated 200 foreigners, including Amer-icans, left Afghanistan on a commercial flight out of Kabul on Thursday with the cooperation of the Taliban - the first such large-scale departure since US forces completed their frantic withdrawal over a week ago.The Qatar Airways flight to Doha marked a breakthrough in the bumpy coordination between the US and Afghanistan's new rulers.
A dayslong standoff over charter planes at another airport has left hundreds of mostly Afghan people stranded, waiting for Taliban permission to leave. A senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to talk to the media, said the Taliban's foreign minister and deputy prime minister helped facilitate the flight.
Americans, US green card holders and other nationalities, including Germans, Hungarians and Canadians, were aboard, the official said. Qatari envoy Mutlaq bin Majed Al-Qahtani said another 200 passengers will leave Afghanistan on Friday.Ten US citizens and 11 green-card holders made Thursday's flight, State Department spokesman Ned Price said. Americans organizing charter evacuation flights said they knew of more US passport and green-card holders in Mazar-e-Sharif and elsewhere awaiting flights out.
The White House said before the flight that there were roughly 100 US citizens left in Afghanistan. But several veterans groups have said that that number is too low because many citizens never bothered to tell US officials they were in the country. And they said the figure overlooks green-card-carrying permanent US residents living in Afghanistan who want to leave.
Many thousands of Afghans remain desperate to get out, too, afraid of what Taliban rule might hold. The Taliban have repeatedly said foreigners and Afghans with proper travel documents could leave. But their assurances have been met with skepticism, and many Afghans have been unable to obtain certain paperwork.
