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(KABUL, Afghanistan) — As Taliban forces advance on more provincial capitals, the U.S. is warning that its fighters are committing atrocities that could amount to war crimes and the State Department will soon announce that it is significantly reducing its staff levels at the U.S. embassy in Kabul, according to a U.S. official.

State Department Spokesman Ned Price said that while the embassy in Kabul will remain open, they will be reducing their civilian footprint due to the “evolving security situation.” He added that they expect to draw down to a core diplomatic presence in Afghanistan.

To facilitate this decision, the Pentagon “will temporarily deploy additional personnel to Hamid Karzai International Airport.”

Price said they will continue to relocate qualified Afghans who assisted the American mission, such as interpreters and others who worked for the U.S. government, and flights will ramp up in the coming days.

The U.S. embassy in Kabul has also urged Americans to evacuate Afghanistan immediately, amid fears that the capital could fall into Taliban hands in a matter of weeks.

A military analysis said the city could be isolated in 30 to 60 days and be captured in 90 days, a U.S. official told ABC News, but that timeline seemed even more accelerated Thursday as the Taliban claimed Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city.

While the Taliban have previously denied reports that its fighters have executed Afghan troops, the U.S. embassy said Thursday it was “hearing additional reports of Taliban executions of surrendering Afghan troops” and said they were “deeply disturbing and could constitute war crimes.”

Extrajudicial killings are a war crime according to international law.

In addition, the Taliban have detained “several members of the Afghan government, including both civilian leaders and officers of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces … in several locations,” the embassy said in a statement Thursday.

Those arrests “contradict the Taliban’s claim to support a negotiated settlement” and “contrast the Taliban’s own rhetoric providing for the safety of Afghan leaders and troops in areas recently seized by the Taliban,” the embassy added.

Critics have condemned the Biden administration for putting any stock in what Taliban leaders say or do in Doha, Qatar, where the militant group’s political leadership is based. Negotiations there with the Afghan government have been all but dead since they launched last September, but U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad is there this week in a last-ditch effort to revitalize them.

Khalilzad was meeting separately with Taliban and Afghan government negotiators Thursday, according to a State Department spokesperson.

But critics said the administration should not put faith in a group that the U.S. says is actively committing atrocities.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ABC News those reported atrocities were “deeply, deeply troubling,” but the administration has not taken any action to punish the group for them.

The Taliban have previously denied reports that they have killed Afghan troops — but CNN obtained video last month showing 22 Afghan commandos being executed after they’d surrendered.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Tuesday that the administration has “not taken any tool off the table except for this military presence on the ground,” but would use them “if it’s appropriate.”

It’s unlikely that the tools Price referenced — including U.S. sanctions — would have any impact at this point.

In the meantime, the U.S. embassy issued its second alert to urge all American citizens left in Afghanistan to immediately evacuate the country.

“Given the security conditions and reduced staffing, the Embassy’s ability to assist U.S. citizens in Afghanistan is extremely limited even within Kabul,” the embassy said in its alert.

Just like in a similar alert Saturday, the embassy reiterated Thursday that U.S. citizens should enroll in its emergency notification system “in the event of a future official evacuation flight.”

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(YAKUTSK, Russia) — Gigantic wildfires are burning across Siberia on a record scale that is larger than all the fires raging this summer around the world combined.

The massive blazes in Russia are fueled in part by extreme heat waves and record droughts that scientists are blaming on warmer temperatures linked to climate change.

The worst hit region is Yakutia, a vast semi-autonomous republic around 3,000 miles east of Moscow that in winter is one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth. The fires have been burning since late spring in Yakutia and are already among the largest ever recorded.

The region is enduring a historic drought that is feeding the fires. The huge quantities of smoke has drifted as far as Alaska and the North Pole. Local authorities are struggling to contain the infernos, saying they have only a fraction of the manpower and equipment needed.

In the region’s capital Yakutsk last week, in an office cluttered with equipment, Sviatoslav Kolesov looked short of sleep as he showed the latest situation on a map marked with bright orange patches marking the miles of land burning.

A senior pilot-observer with Yakutia’s branch of the federal Aerial Forest Protection Service, Kolesov has been directing his small teams to contain the titanic fires and keep them away from villages outside Yakutsk.

“I’ve been working since 1988 and I have never seen such a summer,” Kolesov said. “Now is crazy. There are too many fires and pretty much all of them are major.”

A state of emergency has been declared in Yakutia over the fires that are estimated by local authorities to cover around 1.5 million hectares. For over a month, thick, acrid smog has hung over hundreds of miles over the region, frequently blanketing the capital and in places blocking out the sun.

Siberia’s warm summers and forest fires are part of life here but not on this magnitude. Since 2017, the region has had unusually dry summers and last year saw record temperatures, including the highest ever recorded in the Arctic.

Until 2017 the republic could expect one or two major fires a year, said Pavel Arzhakov, an instructor from the Aerial Forest Protection Service, who was overseeing efforts at a large fire about 150 miles west of Yakutsk.

But this year, he said, there are 30 to 40 major fires.

Greenpeace Russia estimates the fires have burned around 62,000 square miles across Russia since the start of the year. The current fires are larger than the wildfires in Greece, Turkey, Canada and the United States.

Russia’s emergency services says it is fighting nearly 200 fires across the country. But there are also dozens more that the agency is leaving to burn because they are not deemed a risk to population centers.

This year may pass Russia’s worst fire season in 2012 and Greenpeace has warned the biggest fire in Yakutia alone threatens to become unprecedented in scale.

“It’s possible it will be the biggest fire in the whole history of mankind. For now it’s competing with several famous historic fires in the U.S. in the 19th century,” he told Euronews.

The fire teams in Yakutia are in a vastly unequal fight with the blazes. Teams from the Aerial Forest Protection Service set up camps in the taiga and are trying to contain the fires with trenches and controlled burns. They have little equipment and firefighting planes are used only rarely.

Authorities have sent some reinforcements from other regions. At one camp, a team had flown around 2,000 miles from Khanty-Mansiyisk and have now been in Yakutia’s forest about a month.

“We’re putting the kraken back in the cage,” joked one fire fighter, Yura Revnivik as his team set a controlled burn, trying to direct a fire toward a nearby lake.

But there are nowhere near enough people for the scale of the fires, local firefighters said. Hundreds of local people have volunteered to try to fill the gap. Afanasy Yefremov, a teacher from Yakutsk, said he was spending his weekends trying to help.

“I have lived 40 years and I don’t remember such fires,” he said. “Everywhere is burning and there aren’t enough people.”

Local firefighters in Yakutia in part blamed the scale of the fires on authorities’ failure to extinguish the blazes early on, a consequence they said in part of cuts to the federal forestry fire service.

The fires are worrisome far beyond Russia. They are releasing huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Yakutia’s fires have already produced a record amount of carbon emissions, according to the European Union’s Copernicus satellite monitoring unit.

The 505 megatons of emissions released since June would be more than Britain’s entire carbon dioxide emissions for the whole of 2019.

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(NEW YORK) — As the Taliban sweeps across Afghanistan and claims at least nine provincial capitals in just days, a new U.S. military analysis warns that the country’s capital, Kabul, could become isolated in 30 to 60 days and could fall to the militant group in 90 days, a U.S. official confirmed to ABC News.

The warning is even more dire than a previous intelligence assessment — a sign of how quickly the Taliban have gained momentum on the battlefield, surprising the Biden administration, according to two U.S. officials.

President Joe Biden announced in April that he would withdraw all remaining U.S. forces from Afghanistan, saying it was time to end America’s longest war and let the Afghan people, including the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Afghan government, decide the country’s future.

But that future is increasingly grim, with fears of the government’s collapse and all-out civil war. There are growing concerns for the U.S. personnel that will remain at the embassy in Kabul and the 650 U.S. troops who will stay to protect it, with planning underway for some time now about a possible evacuation, according to two other U.S. officials, who spoke to ABC News on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive plans.

“Our posture has not changed. As we do for every diplomatic post in a challenging security environment, we evaluate threats daily and make decisions on how best to keep those serving at our embassy safe,” a State Department spokesperson told ABC News.

The Taliban’s spokesperson in Doha, Qatar, said Wednesday, “Anyone who attacks international embassies and institutions will be punished.” But the group’s fighters have committed atrocities across the country in districts they’ve retaken, according to U.S. and Afghan officials, including extrajudicial killings of police officers, airmen, women’s rights activists, journalists and more.

The U.S. embassy’s Emergency Action Committee is “no doubt … meeting every day to review the current level of threat and whether any additional steps need to be taken to increase security, reduce the number of personnel, or, if deemed necessary, initiate a full evacuation,” said Mick Mulroy, the former top Pentagon official for the Middle East who served in the CIA and U.S. Marines in Afghanistan.

The question is at what point does one become necessary.

“When does the situation make the continuation of the diplomatic mission untenable? When does it not make sense that 99.99% of the personnel in the embassy are for security? When will putting the remaining U.S. personnel at risk for a mission that has essentially ended not be worth it? These are the questions they will be asking, probably every day,” said Mulroy, now an ABC News contributor.

While two U.S. officials said evacuation planning has been reviewed for some time, State Department spokesperson Ned Price declined to comment on any plans. Instead, he told reporters Wednesday, “We have and will continue to make our own decisions based on, first and foremost, the threat assessment, the safety and security of our people.”

In the meantime, the U.S. embassy has continued to quietly draw down some staff since it went on ordered departure on April 27 — leaving only emergency personnel behind and allowing it to shift certain roles out of Afghanistan “whose functions can be performed elsewhere,” according to a State Department spokesperson.

But the Pentagon is pushing back on the “narrative” that the Taliban will seize the capital and other major cities, with its spokesperson John Kirby saying Wednesday, “No potential outcome has to be inevitable, including the fall of Kabul, which everybody seems to be reporting about.”

Kirby declined to comment on the U.S. military analysis, but he told reporters that while the Taliban “keep advancing,” there is still fight left in the Afghan security forces that the U.S. built, trained and equipped.

“The narrative that in every place, in every way, the Afghan forces are simply folding up and walking away is not accurate,” he said.

One U.S. official told ABC News, however, that those Afghan forces have an uphill battle, as momentum swings the Taliban’s way with their capture of nine provincial capitals — winning over heavy weaponry from Afghan troops, freeing their prisoners from government facilities, and building a powerful narrative about the government’s collapse.

The Afghan military strategy to hold onto major population centers meant deploying its best troops — special operations forces — to top cities like Herat, Lashkar Gah and Kandahar, according to this official. But while the Taliban have been held at bay there, the group’s fighters targeted other opportunities, winning critical successes across the country’s northern provinces.

“Right now what we see is an issue of leadership. It’s both political and military leadership. We need to see Afghans’ leaders united,” Price told reporters at the State Department.

Rallying that leadership has been part of U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad’s job in Doha, where he is trying to pressure both the Taliban and Afghan government delegations to resume peace negotiations — and urge the Taliban to accept a reduction in violence and a ceasefire.

Khalilzad held meetings Tuesday and Wednesday with both delegations and fellow envoys from the United Nations and key countries, including Pakistan, Qatar, China and Russia. On Thursday, he’s expected to meet the Taliban and Afghan government teams “separately to encourage them to engage productively in Afghan peace negotiations and not squander this historic opportunity to end 40 years of conflict,” the State Department spokesperson told ABC News.

Afghan Foreign Minister Mohammad Haneef Atmar said Wednesday that it is the U.S. and other powers that need to do more to “accelerate the negotiation process” and pressure the Taliban to participate in good faith, “backed up by real political, economic, maybe even enforcement measures.”

Critics continue to denounce the Biden administration for pursuing these negotiations — saying the Taliban has demonstrated it has no interest in talks. But Price said the U.S. continues to see diplomacy as the only way forward — calling the week’s meetings a “necessary, but insufficient step” and conceding progress “has been painfully slow.”

In the meantime, the humanitarian crisis for Afghan civilians continues to spiral. Over 18 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance across the country, around 400,000 have fled their homes to seek refuge and the U.N.’s humanitarian response remains vastly underfunded with a shortfall of almost $800 million, its spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Wednesday.

But Biden himself seems un-phased by the violence, telling ABC News Tuesday, “I do not regret my decision.”

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