200 passengers leave Kabul in first evacuation airlift after US pullout from Afg
Some 200 passengers, including US citizens, left Kabul airport on Thursday, on the first flight carrying foreigners out of the Afghan capital since a US-led evacuation ended on August 30.
The flight to Doha comes as the Taliban continue their transition from insurgents to governing power, less than a month after they marched into Kabul and ousted former president Ashraf Ghani.
Thursday afternoon’s Qatar Airways flight took some 200 people from Kabul’s airport — the first since a mammoth, chaotic airlift of more than 120,000 people came to a dramatic close with the US pullout.
An Afghan-American dual citizen, waiting to board the flight with his family, said the US State Department had called him in the morning and told him to go to the airport.
