Team News Riveting
America’s intelligence agency CIA’s Director William Burns met secretly with the Taliban’s top figure in Kabul on Monday.
The development comes amid a chaotic US effort to evacuate American citizens and its allies well in advance of an August 31 deadline, sources said. Details of the meeting could not be known immediately, but the CIA chief’s crisis diplomacy comes as the Biden administration is considering whether to extend the evacuation of people from Kabul airport beyond the deadline for the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The Taliban on Monday rejected any extension. It warned America of dire consequences if any effort was made to change the deadline.
The Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment on Burns’s meeting with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar, which was earlier reported by the Washington Post. The meeting is the highest-level face-to-face encounter between the Taliban and a top Biden administration official since the militants seized the Afghan capital. The discussion came amid chaos to evacuate people from the Kabul international airport ahead of an August 31 deadline.
Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers said on Tuesday they wanted all foreign evacuations from the country completed by the deadline. The hardline Islamist group sought to assure the thousands of Afghans crowded into Kabul airport in the hope of boarding flights they had nothing to fear and should go home.
“We guarantee their security,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told a news conference in the capital after Taliban fighters seized the Capital city.
