Militants are not known to have pilots or technical personnel needed to fly aircraft; Russian choppers also seen in footage; not clear if any of the helicopters are airworthy
The Taliban have released footage showing captured US-made Afghan military helicopters at Kandahar airport, until recently one of the most important US bases in the country.
Interior minister says transfer will be ‘peaceful’; Afghan troops surrender at Bagram air base; American University employees burn documents to prevent identification of students
The Taliban was poised to take control of Afghanistan on Sunday as fighters entered the outskirts of Kabul and said they were awaiting a “peaceful transfer” of the city after promising not to take the capital by force.
Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fled the country on Sunday as Taliban militants entered the capital city of Kabul.
Ghani flew to neighboring Tajikistan, a senior Afghan Interior Ministry official told Reuters. However, the Afghan president’s office said it “cannot say anything about Ashraf Ghani’s movement for security reasons.”
“That’s it. It’s over,” a U.S. official told Fox News regarding the withdrawal.
“The former president of Afghanistan left Afghanistan, leaving the country in this difficult situation. God should hold him accountable,” Abdullah Abdullah, head of the Afghan National Reconciliation Council, said in a video posted online. The council was tasked by Ghani with handling government negotiations with the Taliban.
Acting Interior Minister Abdul Satar Mirzakwal said security forces would be deployed in Kabul to ensure order, in comments translated by the Washington Post.
“There is an agreement that there will be a transitional administration for orderly transfer of power,” Mirzakwal said.
There were no reports of fighting in the capital, an Interior Ministry official told Reuters. However, armed Taliban militants were seen in the streets of Kabul and in Afghan security vehicles, NBC News correspondent Richard Engel wrote on Twitter.
“We want to enter Kabul with peace, and talks” with the Afghan government “are underway” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. is taking steps to evacuate remaining Embassy staff and other personnel, in comments to ABC’s This Week. “This is manifestly not Saigon,” Blinken insisted, referring to the evacuation from the U.S. Embassy in Vietnam in 1975.
The Taliban offensive that began in May accelerated as militants took over a number of provincial capitals in Afghanistan over the past week.
“There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the—of the United States from Afghanistan,” President Biden said on July 8. “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
The Taliban have moved closer to retaking full control of Afghanistan, with the capital Kabul now the only major city left in government hands.
On Sunday the militants took control of Jalalabad, a key eastern city, without a fight.
It means they now control all roads to neighbouring Pakistan.
It’s been years since Haji and his wife have had a good night’s sleep.
“All night, my wife wakes up,” says Haji. “She’s scared. If [she hears] somebody is coming, she calls me, ‘Haji, someone is coming!'”
His wife says the first thing she does is hide the children.
The centers of Logar, Paktika, Kunar and Paktia provinces and 10 districts fell to the Taliban in the last 24 hours, according to sources as the group’s advances continue.
Sources said the Taliban has released all prisoners in these provinces while local officials have relocated to the army bases in the four provincial capitals.
With the Taliban sweeping through provincial capitals, and massing near Kabul, the Afghan government is thus far vowing to resist. In this Q&A, Crisis Group experts Laurel Miller and Andrew Watkins explain that outside powers’ priority should now be to minimise further human suffering.
The United States and its Syrian Kurdish allies control up to 90 percent of Syria’s oil-producing lands, depriving the war-torn country of its much-needed source of fuel and hard currency income. While Iran sends emergency fuel supplies to Syria to help deal with shortages, its ships have been regularly attacked by Israeli saboteurs en route.
The Syrian Arab News Agency has reported that 55 vehicles including tankers loaded with oil and escort vehicles have made their way out of Syria into Iraq via the al-Waleed border crossing over the past 24 hours.
Introduction by the editor and translator: To preface, I am well aware that the opinion line taken in this guest post will come across as very controversial. That said, I would urge those who claim they want to listen to local Syrian voices about the situation in Idlib to take seriously this guest post, written by a friend from the village of Qalb Lawze in the Jabal al-Summaq area of north Idlib province. The current status quo in Idlib may well be better than the alternatives, but one should also recognise the costs at which it has come. Among other things, Uyghurs who have no business being in Syria have seized and occupied homes of many of the original inhabitants of Qalb Lawze. The original Druze inhabitants of Qalb Lawze who have remained were long ago forced to declare conversion to Sunni Islam, and even so the Uyghurs, who belong to a jihadist faction called Katibat al-Ghuraba’ al-Turkistan, have treated them with disdain and hostility, and their abuses have not been held to account.
This essay is taken from the foreword of George Caffentzis’s Civilizing Money: Hume, his Monetary Project and the Scottish Enlightenment.
1.
George Caffentzis writes that his project of the philosophy of money began in August 1971 when President Nixon severed the link between the dollar and gold. He further developed the project through SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and URPE (Union of Radical Political Economics). It began to take form in his writing with Zerowork (when our paths crossed). Did the end of gold mean the end of work and did the end of work mean the end of capitalism? It achieved a major breakthrough with the Wages for Housework campaign. Owing to the crisis of the oil market and then the dangers of nuclear energy he formulated an approach to the philosophy of money in which class analysis was combined with philosophical epistemology and the specifics of historical conjuncture. The first volume of what was to become a trilogy was completed in Calabar, Nigeria, at the time of structural adjustment under the IMF (International Monetary Fund).[1] Political presentism and autobiographical reflection enliven the philosophic pages. He has venerable examples of such combination from Clarendon’s The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1702-1704) to Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789).