The calamitous scenes at Kabul’s airport, where thousands of people are scrambling to escape the Taliban before an August 31 deadline, prove the US is not concerned with the fate of ordinary Afghans, Islamist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar told The National.
With days before the US ends its 20-year presence in Afghanistan and with tens of thousands of Afghans soon to be left stranded, Mr Hekmatyer said the facts speak for themselves.
The US “encouraged Afghans to run to the airport even without proper documents, to show the world that Afghans need them the most and to defame the Taliban”, he alleged. Reports indicate that many have been turned away by US troops because they lack visas or other paperwork.
“The fact is that the Americans do not care about Afghans at all,” Mr Hekmatyar said.
Hours after his interview with The National, an ISIS suicide bomber and at least one gunman unleashed what is believed to be the deadliest bombing in the history of the Afghanistan war, killing about 200 people, including 13 US troops.
Mr Hekmatyar, who delivered a sermon in a Kabul mosque on Friday to mourn the dead, has a long and dark history in Afghanistan and has himself faced plenty of criticism for his role in the suffering of Afghans during the civil war.
His Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin party gained notoriety in 1992 when forces loyal to Mr Hekmatyar launched a hail of rockets on Kabul, laying much of it to waste. The battle killed 50,000 people.
An agreement between warring factions briefly installed Mr Hekmatyar as prime minister in 1996, before his government was overthrown by the newly formed Taliban movement.
Mr Hekmatyar was given refuge in Iran, where after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US, he reportedly collaborated with Al Qaeda and eventually formed a working relationship with the Taliban.
His forces became a deadly thorn in the side of the US-backed Afghan government, first under Hamid Karzai, then Ashraf Ghani.
But after signing a peace agreement with the Ghani administration in 2016 in exchange for amnesty, he became an influential power broker in the conservative wing of Afghan politics.