‘Taliban keep beating fleeing Americans’

Desk report: US citizens are trying to flee Kabul after the Taliban took over. The United States has said in a statement that the Taliban had beaten the fugitives. At a briefing at the Pentagon on Friday, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin briefed members of Congress, according to a report in the New York Post. At the briefing, Secretary of Defense Austin called the Taliban’s beating of U.S. citizens “unacceptable.” However, he did not elaborate on how US troops took US citizens safely to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. During the briefing, he expressed hope that all US troops and civilians would be repatriated from Afghanistan by August 31. However, Austin could not confirm whether it would be possible to take everyone back within this period. Also present at the briefing were U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Brinken and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Millie. U.S. lawmakers have demanded an answer as to why U.S. citizens were withdrawn from Afghanistan amid chaos. Their questions were answered at the briefing on Friday. President Joe Biden said Friday morning that U.S. troops and civilians were being withdrawn peacefully. But in the afternoon Austin Lloyd spoke differently. This made clear the lack of coordination between the US President and the Secretary of Defense. Meanwhile, some international media outlets have reported that the Taliban have beaten US citizens overnight since the fall of Kabul. Sasha Inbar, an Afghan woman journalist living in the US, said the same thing on her Twitter account. Earlier, during the Taliban regime from 1996 to 2001, women in Afghanistan were required to wear a burqa covering their entire body, including their face and hair. Girls were not allowed to go to school if they were more than 10 years old. In the name of Sharia law, they introduced all kinds of terrible punishments like lashes and stoning to death. In 2001, US forces overthrew the Taliban to rid Afghanistan of terrorism. But peace has not come there in two decades.