ABC News released some details of a harrowing mission undertaken by a team of former special ops troops to rescue an Afghan colleague and his family who was being hunted by the Taliban and threatened with death. The rescue of this one man and his family evolved into the rescue of over six hundred other Afghan special forces troops and their families.
It's an incredible story of human loyalty, bravery and the very best of the American spirit. It's almost certain to be written about in books and depicted on movie screens.
Here's an excerpt:
With the Taliban growing more violent and adding checkpoints near Kabul's airport, an all-volunteer group of American veterans of the Afghan war launched a final daring mission on Wednesday night dubbed the "Pineapple Express" to shepherd hundreds of at-risk Afghan elite forces and their families to safety, members of the group told ABC News.The White House has set what appears to be an entirely arbitrary date of August 31st (today) to have all troops out of Kabul. Once they're gone anyone, American, Afghan or European, still remaining in the country will either have to find their own way out or risk eventually being discovered by the Taliban or ISIS.
Moving after nightfall in near-pitch black darkness and extremely dangerous conditions, the group said it worked unofficially in tandem with the United States military and U.S. embassy to move people, sometimes one person at a time, or in pairs, but rarely more than a small bunch, inside the wire of the U.S. military-controlled side of Hamid Karzai International Airport.
As of Thursday morning, the group said it had brought as many as 500 Afghan special operators, assets and enablers and their families into the airport in Kabul overnight, handing them each over to the protective custody of the U.S. military.
That number added to more than 130 others over the past 10 days who had been smuggled into the airport encircled by Taliban fighters since the capital fell to the extremists on Aug. 16 by Task Force Pineapple, an ad hoc groups of current and former U.S. special operators, aid workers, intelligence officers and others with experience in Afghanistan who banded together to save as many Afghan allies as they could.
"Dozens of high-risk individuals, families with small children, orphans, and pregnant women, were secretly moved through the streets of Kabul throughout the night and up to just seconds before ISIS detonated a bomb into the huddled mass of Afghans seeking safety and freedom," Army Lt. Col. Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret commander who led the private rescue effort, told ABC News.
Yet, there's no special reason for the August 31st deadline.
Military experts insist that it could've been made clear to the Taliban that we would stay in Kabul until we had gotten everyone out even if this meant inserting more troops, and that the Taliban would interfere with this rescue at their peril. For reasons that are unclear, however, the Biden White House was loath to delay our exit.
To the extent many are being rescued from certain death it's because people like those described above, but others, too, Americans and Europeans, are acting independently of the White House, and sometimes against orders, to save all those they can. It's a fascinating story and one which, in the midst of what appears to be a debacle, Americans can be proud of. Read the rest of it at the link. UPDATE: This video is another example of how Americans are working independently of the government to rescue, in this case, over five thousand of their fellow Americans and Afghans from Kabul. The last five minutes or so are quite powerful, especially as an indictment of the incompetence of how this evacuation has been handled by the Biden administration:
