A U.S. official spoke to\u00a0Reuters<\/a>\u00a0about the departure, which is expected on Thursday and came after pressure from U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad.<\/p>\n The Qatari official said it wasn\u2019t an evacuation flight as all of the passengers hold foreign passports and, if required, visas for their destinations, and have been ticketed by the airline. Qatar facilitated the transportation of the passengers to the airport in a convoy of minibuses parked Thursday morning in a Kabul hotel, one of them with a bullet hole through the windshield. The buses entered the airport shortly after 2 p.m. local time.<\/p>\n At the international terminal, passengers were divided by nationality, with Americans\u2014all of them appearing to be of Afghan origin\u2014mostly too traumatized by the ordeal of recent weeks to speak to a reporter. Qatari soldiers were providing security. (WSJ<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There are still thousands of Afghans who hold Special Immigrant Visas due to having helped the U.S. military and civilian effort that are\u00a0still stranded<\/a>.<\/p>\n On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken finally acknowledged that the Taliban is not allowing chartered flights to leave.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve made clear to all parties\u2014we\u2019ve made it clear to the Taliban\u2014that these charters need to be able to depart,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n According to The Wall Street Journal, Taliban officials told those arranging charter flights that they could only allow those with valid documentation to leave from Kabul, not Mazar-i-Sharif, prompting U.S. officials to tell Americans in at the Northern Afghanistan airport to come back to Kabul.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Makes me wonder what the payoff was. Taliban Agrees to Let Hundreds of Americans, Other Foreigners Leave Afghanistan The Taliban will reportedly allow 200 Americans and other foreigners to leave on a flight to Qatar from the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. A U.S. official spoke to\u00a0Reuters\u00a0about the departure, which is expected on Thursday … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-immigration","category-moslems-jihadis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71886"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71887,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71886\/revisions\/71887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}