Team News Riveting
Major General Christopher Donahue was the last soldier to leave Afghanistan as US troops boarded a C-17 aircraft at the Kabul airport just before the self-imposed deadline ended paving way for the Taliban to triumphantly march into Kabul’s international airport.
The final withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan was “greeted” with celebratory gunfire by the Taliban in Kabul. Taliban fighters took control of Kabul’s airport before dawn on Tuesday after the last US plane left hours before, marking the end of America’s longest war which claimed the lives of an estimated 240,000 Afghans and nearly 2,500 US troops and cost an estimated US$2 trillion.
“It is a historical day and a historical moment,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told a news conference at the airport. “We are proud of these moments, that we liberated our country from a great power.”
The final US withdrawal came one minute before the August 31 deadline set by President Joe Biden, an exit under the persistent threat of terrorist attacks. It claimed the lives of 13 American service members and more than 200 Afghans, who were killed in a suspected Islamic State suicide bombing at the Kabul airport on Thursday.
Despite assurances to the contrary by Biden and other top administration officials, Americans and Afghan allies were left behind and the State Department could not provide precise figures. Though US on Monday said it was working to assist hundreds of Americans still in Afghan. Advocacy groups said as many as 60,000 Afghan interpreters, drivers and others who assisted the US military, CIA and diplomatic personnel over the years, along with their families, remain in the country and fear retribution from the Taliban.
The last US military personnel departed Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport on a C-17 Globemaster cargo plane at 3:29 p.m. Eastern time, or 11:59 p.m. Kabul time.
Donahue, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, XVIII Airborne Corps, based in Fort Bragg, N.C., was the last soldier to board the aircraft. In the photo, Donohue is alone and stone-faced, carrying his firearm, with a Kabul airport hangar behind him as he gets ready to climb aboard the aircraft that left just before a self-imposed US deadline to evacuate.
The photo is shot through a night-vision lens, giving the scene an eerie green tint.
Donahue was deployed to Afghanistan this month to help secure the Kabul airport as the US drew nearer to Tuesday’s withdrawal deadline. A former special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, Donahue previously served as the commander of special operations joint task force-Afghanistan in support of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel.
Over his long military career, he has been deployed 17 times to carry out operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, North Africa and Eastern Europe.
