Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team denied U.S. officials endangered would-be evacuees by identifying them for the Taliban in an apparent attempt to coordinate safe passage that resulted in the militants obtaining “a kill list.”
“The idea that we are providing names or personally identifiable information to the Taliban in a way that exposes anyone to additional risk — that is simply wrong,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters.
State Department officials have scrambled to evacuate thousands of U.S. citizens and tens of thousands of Afghans at risk of violence from the Taliban, ahead of the expected Aug. 31 deadline for American troops to leave the country. That operation has taken place under the eyes of the Taliban, who seized control of Kabul earlier this month and maintain a cordon around the perimeter of the capital city’s international airport.
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“We have developed and implemented effective tactics to be in a position to facilitate the safe passage of individuals to the Kabul airport,” Price said.
Biden offered a less forceful account of those measures during a press conference Thursday, shortly after Politico reported U.S. officials identified American citizens and Afghan nationals eligible for admission to the airport in a list given to the Taliban.
“There have been occasions when our military has contacted their military counterparts in the Taliban and said this, for example, ‘This bus is coming through with X number of people on it, made up of the following group of people,’” Biden said. “’We want you to let that bus or that group through.’”
Price touted their success in bringing “the vast majority” of the U.S. Embassy’s local staff to the airport.
“These are individuals who one might expect the Taliban would seek to [target for] retribution,” Price argued. “But again, we have developed these tactics, we have implemented them effectively.”
The initial report was anchored in details attributed to a mix of congressional staff and U.S. officials, including one who surmised, “Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list.”
Biden’s team maintained that in the “limited cases we have shared information with the Taliban that has successfully facilitated evacuations from Kabul,” as a White House national security council spokeswoman said.
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“The notion that we are just providing [the Taliban] with names upon names of individuals who may stay behind in Afghanistan, or in a way that would expose anyone to additional risk — that is simply, simply false,” Price concluded.
