American and NATO troops are packing up and leaving per President Biden ‘s orders…
The orders to the western military seems to leave the responses up to the Afghan military…
They will soon be on their own….
The Taliban does NOT seem to want any ‘deal’….
We ALL await the aftermath….
And hope there will no bloodbath left there in the Biden legacy…..
The attacks are largely focused on towns in provinces where the Taliban has had a strong presence for years. In Helmand, Zabul, Ghazni and Logar, the Taliban hold much of the rural territory, with urban centers as islands of government control. Recent militant attacks have allowed the fighters to encroach closer to those capitals, overtaking perimeter outposts and villages.
Unlike other Taliban offensives in recent months, these have not triggered a barrage of heavy U.S. air support, according to eight local officials in those four provinces and others. In Helmand, the Taliban attacks followed the handover of a U.S. base to Afghan control. In Farah, a member of parliament said he began seeing an increase in Taliban attacks once American surveillance drones disappeared from the sky in recent months along with a small unit of U.S. forces stationed at a base there.
U.S. Central Command declined to answer questions about the lack of air support and referred to statements made by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at a news conference Thursday. He said the withdrawal is the primary focus of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The Pentagon has not said when or if U.S. air support for Afghan ground forces would halt completely….
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The United States pressured the two sides to agree to a deal that included a cease-fire and a power-sharing arrangement, but it was unsuccessful. Talks are ongoing to reach a similar agreement before the withdrawal is complete…
“It was like a doomsday that I saw with my own eyes,” she told The Washington Post by phone soon after the blast. “Schoolgirls were fleeing back into school, crying and screaming.”
Violence has risen across Afghanistan since the start of the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces on May 1….
It begins in Afghanistan ….Student’s are not out of bounds….
One by one they brought the girls up the steep hill, shrouded bodies covered in a ceremonial prayer cloth, the pallbearers staring into the distance. Shouted prayers for the dead broke the silence.
The bodies kept coming and the gravediggers stayed busy, straining in the hot sun. The ceaseless rhythm was grim proof of the preceding day’s news: Saturday afternoon’s triple bombing at a local school had been an absolute massacre, targeting girls. There was barely room atop the steeply pitched hill for all the new graves.
The scale of the killing and the innocence of the victims seemed further unnerving proof of the country’s violent unraveling, as the Taliban make daily gains and the government seems unable to halt their advances or protect its people from mass killings. On Sunday there were mourners everywhere in the neighborhood of the bombing, home to the persecuted Shiite Hazara ethnic minority, but hardly any security to protect them….
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