With the Afghanistan evacuation deadline looming large on August 31, a European Commission spokesman has said all EU staff have been flown out of the country, bar a handful of officials still on the ground at Kabul airport.
“All the staff who needed to be evacuated have been evacuated,” the spokesman told the journalists in Brussels on Tuesday, clarifying that he was talking about “the staff of the EU delegation and their families.”
The bloc currently maintains a “core presence” at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport “to manage what needs to be managed,” he added. The EU delegation may have left, but many Afghans who worked with the US-led coalition during its two-decade stay in the country and are now at risk from the Taliban are unlikely to also be able to exit Afghanistan.
On Tuesday, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas became yet another high-ranking Western official to acknowledge this, telling Bild newspaper that “even if [the evacuation] goes on until August 31 or even a few days longer, it won’t be enough to allow those who we, or the US, want to fly out.”
Kabul airport has become the only exit out of the country since Taliban radicals seized power in Afghanistan in mid-August after a lightning advance on the capital amid the mass withdrawal of US-led coalition forces.
There have been chaotic scenes and fatalities at the airfield as thousands of desperate Afghans tried to get aboard planes sent by the US, UK and other countries to evacuate foreign citizens and refugees.
The Taliban’s spokesman insisted on Monday that the end-of-August withdrawal deadline for the evacuations was “a red line” that won’t be prolonged. The group earlier threatened the US and its allies with an unspecified response if they violated the agreement.
However, US President Joe Biden hinted during the weekend that his administration was mulling the possibility of extending the evacuation window to get the remaining thousands of American citizens out of Afghanistan, while expressing hope that it won’t come to that.
An unconfirmed report by The Washington Post on Tuesday even claimed that CIA Director William Burns traveled to Afghanistan himself in a bid to persuade the Taliban leadership to allow evacuation flights from Kabul continue beyond the deadline.
The leaders of the G7 nations – the US, Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Canada and Japan – are scheduled to hold a virtual meeting later Tuesday to discuss the situation in Afghanistan, with the evacuations likely a key issue on the agenda.
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