Five hundred tons of medical supplies due to be delivered to Afghanistan this week have been held up (WaPo) by the Kabul airport’s closure to commercial flights, the World Health Organization (WHO) said. The WHO appealed for empty evacuation planes to bring supplies to Kabul, saying Afghanistan’s current emergency stocks are only expected to last a week and a half.
Twenty people have been killed in the chaos at the Kabul airport, an official from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) said. These include seven Afghans who died in a stampede at the airport’s gate on Saturday and one Afghan guard killed in a firefight (WaPo) with unidentified gunmen today. U.S. President Joe Biden said the United States could push back (WaPo) its August 31 deadline to complete evacuations and withdraw all U.S. troops. A Taliban spokesperson said an extension of the deadline would “provoke a reaction.” Washington has enlisted U.S. commercial airlines to help with evacuations from locations outside Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Taliban fighters retook three districts (Reuters) captured by opposition forces in the northern Baghlan Province
Analysis
“The Taliban now control what happens to public health, health services, and social determinants of health in Afghanistan—a harrowing reality for the Afghan people,”
“The United States and the international community are already shutting the flow of money, leaving Afghanistan in the stranglehold of sanctions that were designed to cut the Taliban off from the global financial system. Analysts say the looming shock threatens to amplify a humanitarian crisis in a country that has already endured years of war,” the New York Times’ Alan Rappeport writes.
