August 17, 2021, Afghanistan-Taliban news

The US Air Force Office of Special Investigations is opening an investigation into human remains found in the wheel well of a C-17 that took off from Kabul's international airport, the Air Force said in a statement.

The remains were discovered after the plane landed at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.  

The crew made the decision to take off because of the deteriorating security situation at the airport after hundreds of Afghans breached the perimeter and surrounded the C-17. Video of Afghans running with the plane went viral, as did video of appearing to show Afghan civilians falling from the side of the plane in mid-air after desperately trying to hold on.

Note: This is a different flight from the C-17 which was packed with 640 people on board as it flew out. That flight left Sunday night.

In the two decades since they were ousted from power, the Taliban have been waging an insurgency against the allied forces and the US-backed Afghan government.

The Taliban are led by Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada, a senior religious cleric from the Taliban's founding generation.

He was named as the Taliban's leader in 2016 after the group's previous leader, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, was killed in a US airstrike in Pakistan.

At the time, Thomas Ruttig of the Afghanistan Analysts' Network said the new Taliban leader might be able to "integrate the younger and more militant generation."

Another key player in the group is Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a Taliban co-founder and deputy leader. Baradar has arrived in Afghanistan, a spokesperson for the Taliban's political bureau said Tuesday.

It marks the first time Baradar has set foot in the country for 20 years and comes 11 years after he was arrested in neighboring Pakistan by the country's security forces.

He was a prominent member of the Taliban regime when it was last in power, and his return will fuel concerns that the nature of the new government will mirror that era. Baradar currently heads the group's political committee, and recently met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

Across Afghanistan, people are waiting to find out what kind of regime they will live under — and whether those who supported the US-backed government over the past 20 years will face retribution from the Taliban.

After the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 until 2001, the Sunni Islamist organization put in place strict rules. Women had to wear head-to-toe coverings, weren't allowed to study or work and were forbidden from traveling alone. TV, music and non-Islamic holidays were also banned.

Through televised briefings, statements and press conferences, Taliban officials made assurances on Tuesday that retribution was not on the cards.

The group's deputy leader Maulvi Mohammad Yaqub told fighters not to "enter into homes of people or confiscate their cars," in an audio message distributed widely through Taliban channels.

But those promises have been met with skepticism by the international community, and instances of intimidation have already begun.

Read more about the Taliban and their control of Afghanistan here.

CNN's Julia Hollingsworth, Rob Picheta, Celine Alkhaldi, Nada Bashir and Nina Avramova contributed to this post.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has expressed his government’s intention to temporarily host evacuated Afghan nationals who have worked for the European Union.

The Prime Minister’s remarks come after a virtual meeting of EU foreign ministers to discuss the current situation in Afghanistan.

In an earlier statement, EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said Member States would make “every possible effort” to ensure the security of all Afghan nationals who have worked with the EU, including offering them shelter within Europe.

The State Department is dispatching career diplomat John Bass – who formerly served as US Ambassador to Afghanistan – to Kabul “to lead logistics coordination and consular efforts,” spokesperson Ned Price said Tuesday.

The current top envoy in Afghanistan, Ross Wilson, will remain as well and “will continue to lead our diplomatic engagement.”

Price noted that State Department “staff on the ground is communicating with American citizens in Kabul who are not at the airport with instructions on when and how to get there.”

“We have communicated to the first tranche of American citizens who have requested evacuation assistance,” he said.

“All remaining embassy staff will be assisting departures from Afghanistan and the department is surging resources and consular affairs personnel to augment the relocation of American citizens and Afghan special immigrants, special immigrants and elsewhere, adding personnel to assist with P1, P2 adjudication processing,” he said. “We successfully relocated many of our locally employed staff and are in direct contact with the remainder to determine who is interested in relocation and the process for doing so.”

Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of US Central Command, visited Hamid Karzai International Airport on Tuesday, according to a release from US Central Command. 

Ahead of his visit today, the US general met with Taliban senior leaders in Doha Sunday and cautioned the leaders “against interference in our evacuation, and made it clear to them that any attack would be met with overwhelming force in the defense of our forces,” the release said.  

McKenzie engaged with “US military leaders on the ground” at HKIA today, the release said.

McKenzie said US military air traffic controllers and “ground handlers are rapidly scaling up operations to ensure the smooth flow of military reinforcements to the airport and the evacuation of US and partner civilians in coordination” with the State Department, the release said. 

The airfield is currently secure and “open to civilian air traffic,” the release said. 

US Central Command oversees US military operations in the Middle East.

Former Trump defense secretary Mark Esper said that President Biden "owns" the situation unfolding in Afghanistan during an exclusive interview with CNN's chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour.

"Of course there were more options between the two binary choices presented by the President. Just better planning and extending the timeline and taking a more thoughtful approach and not relying on simple assumptions, would have prevented this disastrous outcome that we're seeing unfolding... before us right now. It's a humanitarian crisis that I fear will grow worse in the coming days and weeks," Esper said.

Esper told Amanpour that the Afghan people deserved better leadership over the past 20 years and "to put this all on" Afghan forces is "shifting the blame".

"We saw them fight with the United States and allied support," he said.

Amanpour pressed Esper on the negotiations the Trump administration started with the Taliban in 2020 and how that impacted the current situation on the ground: "This was started under your administration, the President you served. Can you take us into the conversations that were underway that even imagined that this would result in anything other than what we have seen today?"

Esper said that he ultimately agreed with the overall policy of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, but added, "Just because negotiations began under the Trump administration does not ignore the fact that, again, President Biden owns this situation, implementation of his withdrawal that we now see unfolding before us."

Esper continued, "That said, the Trump administration signed an agreement with the Taliban in February of 2020. It was a political agreement. It was based on a premise that I, and many others inside and outside the government, shared and that was that the only way forward was going to be a political agreement. Not a military solution imposed by the United States and the Afghan government. But a political solution and the Taliban signed up to that."

That agreement included US troop reductions and the Taliban agreeing to make sure Afghanistan does not become a safe haven for terrorists. "I was very clear at the time that this agreement had to be conditions based. That both sides need to meet their ends of the agreement," Esper said.

"I thought, that despite it not being a perfect deal, or great deal, it was a good enough deal," he noted.

Esper said that he believed Trump's continued efforts to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan "undermined the agreement" and that is why he objected to Trump's push to pull troops by Christmas 2020. Esper said he believed that US forces should not go below 4,500 troops until conditions were met by the Taliban.

"That said, President Biden coming into office, he was not necessarily bound to continue the Trump plan. He was not necessarily bound to implement the political agreement. He could have taken.... a different path. He could have tried to go back to the table with the Taliban and renegotiate," Esper said.

Watch here:

White House press secretary Jen Psaki pushed back against criticism from members of President Biden’s own party on the rapid deterioration of security in Afghanistan, telling CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Tuesday that she would “note and reiterate to anyone who's a critic that any President has to make difficult choices as commander in chief.”

Psaki told Collins that the Biden administration, “did assess early on, when the President asked for a clear-eyed assessment that there would be impacts, and there would be consequences of making the choice he made,” but acknowledged, as President Biden did during remarks from the East Room Monday, “that this is happened more rapidly than we anticipated here, than anyone anticipated — I think that accounts for members of Congress and people who are on the ground in Afghanistan.”

Pressed in a follow up, Psaki told Collings that the President still has faith in his national security team, with whom he “works in lockstep.”

A second German armed forces aircraft carrying 125 people left Kabul for Uzbekistan on Tuesday, with two further flights scheduled for later in the day, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas confirmed in a news conference in Berlin.

“One hundred more Germans are already in the military-secured area of the airport. The airlift will first lead to Tashkent in Uzbekistan and in the next step to Germany with special Lufthansa flights,” he added.

The German foreign minister said some Afghan workers had faced difficulties passing through Taliban security checkpoints to reach Kabul airport for evacuations flights, but noted that the situation on the ground “has stabilized.”

“With the Bundeswehr soldiers who are on the ground, we have organized a lock together with the United States, a gate at the airport, where the persons concerned can come, be received there and from there be taken to the secured area of the airport,” Maas said.

“The situation is much more dangerous because there is no promise of being let through at the relevant Taliban checkpoints,” he added.

Speaking in a later news conference, German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer confirmed that the German military will operate three evacuation flights a day from Kabul, noting that a further 180 people are still waiting at the airport to be evacuated Tuesday evening.

The defense minister added that Germany’s ambassador to Afghanistan will travel to Doha to begin talks with the Taliban to secure the safe passage of Afghan workers via the German evacuation program.

Uganda will temporarily host 2,000 refugees fleeing the Taliban in Afghanistan after granting a request from the United States government, according to the Minister of State for Relief, Disaster Preparedness and Refugees Esther Anyakun Davina. 

The refugees, who will arrive in batches of 500 at a time, are expected to arrive as early as Tuesday, Davina told CNN. With help from the UN Refugee Agency and other government organizations, the hundreds of refugees will be documented and screened before being resettled elsewhere after three months.

Uganda is Africa's largest refugee host country, and fourth globally, with 1.4 million refugees, according to the UN Refugee Agency.