(LONDON) — Six people are dead, including the suspect, following a shooting in Plymouth, England, Thursday night.
Police responded to a “serious firearms incident” in the Keyham section of the city in southwest England at about 6:10 p.m. local time, according to Devon and Cornwall police.
When they arrived, they found two men and two women dead from gunshot wounds, police said. They also found a man who is believed to be the shooter dead at the scene. All five were pronounced dead from gunshot wounds.
A third woman was taken to a local hospital, where she later died, police said.
Police said the next of kin for all of the deceased have been notified. Police did not say how the suspect died, but he was dead prior to police arriving.
Names and ages of the victims have not been released.
“There have been a number of fatalities at the scene and several other casualties are receiving treatment,” police said in a statement earlier in the evening. “A critical incident has been declared. The area has been cordoned off and police believe the situation is contained.”
Johnny Mercer, a member of Parliament representing the region, said the shooting was not believed to be terror-related.
Devon and Cornwall police reiterated in a statement announcing the deaths that the case was not related to terrorism.
Police said they are not searching for any further suspects related to the shooting.
There was no speculation about a motive and no information on how the victims were connected to the shooter, if at all.
Priti Patel, the country’s home secretary, tweeted, “The incident in Plymouth is shocking and my thoughts are with those affected. I have spoken to the Chief Constable and offered my full support.”
Devon and Cornwall police said an investigation of the incident is ongoing.
(LONDON) — Multiple people were killed and a number of others were injured in a shooting in Plymouth, England, Thursday night.
Police responded to a “serious firearms incident” in the Keyham section of the city in southwest England at about 6:10 p.m. local time, according to Devon and Cornwall police.
“There have been a number of fatalities at the scene and several other casualties are receiving treatment,” police said in a statement. “A critical incident has been declared. The area has been cordoned off and police believe the situation is contained.”
Johnny Mercer, a member of Parliament representing the region, said the shooting was not believed to be terror-related.
Police said no suspect is on the loose.
It is not clear how many people were killed or injured and police have not speculated on a motive.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Forget about industry pundits: Lorde will be the first to tell you that her highly anticipated new album Solar Power, due out August 20, won’t be as successful as her previous records, the Grammy-winning Pure Heroine and the Grammy-nominated Melodrama.
Speaking to The New York Times, she laughs, “There’s definitely not a smash [on the album]. It makes sense that there wouldn’t be a smash, because I don’t even know really what the smashes are now.”
In the past, “Royals” was certainly a smash, but Lorde swore she’d never try to approach that level of success again. “What a lost cause,” she tells the NYT. “Can you imagine? I’m under no illusion. That was a moonshot.”
Like Melodrama, Lorde made Solar Power with producer and Bleachers front man Jack Antonoff, but she resents any attempt to lump her in with the other female artists he’s worked with, like Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and St. Vincent.
“I haven’t made a Jack Antonoff record,” the singer said. “I’ve made a Lorde record and he’s helped me make it and very much deferred to me on production and arrangement. Jack would agree with this. To give him that amount of credit is frankly insulting.”
She calls that narrative “retro” and “sexist,” adding, “No one who’s in a job that isn’t my job has a relationship like the one I have with Jack. He’s like a partner to me. We’re in a relationship.”
“It’s not a romantic relationship, but we’ve been in it for seven years, and it’s a really unique thing,” she adds. “And so I don’t begrudge people maybe not being able to understand it.”
Lorde feels the same way about the album, apparently; of Solar Power, she says, “I would almost value people not understanding it at first.”
(WASHINGTON) — The State Department will begin reducing its staff levels at the U.S. embassy in Kabul and the Pentagon will send troops in to help facilitate those departures, as Taliban forces advance on more provincial capitals.
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.
“What this is not — this is not abandonment. This is not an evacuation. This is not the wholesale withdrawal,” Price said Thursday. “What this is, is a reduction in the size of our civilian footprint. This is a drawdown of civilian Americans who will, in many cases, be able to perform their important functions elsewhere, whether that’s in the United States or elsewhere in the region.”
In a briefing at the Pentagon, the Defense Department’s top spokesman announced that it’s sending 3,000 troops from three infantry battalions — two Marine and one Army — to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport to help out with the removal of American personnel from the U.S. embassy.
They’ll be there “temporarily” and will begin shipping out in the next 24 to 48 hours. These numbers are on top of the 650 already in Kabul protecting the airport and the embassy.
An additional 1,000 personnel will be sent to assist with the processing of Afghans who worked as interpreters, guides and other contractors and applied for Special Immigrant Visas.
Furthermore, a brigade of 3,000 to 3,500 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne will be sent to Kuwait to pre-position in case they are needed further.
Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters that after a meeting with business leaders Thursday afternoon she would leave to “continue the briefings that we’ve been receiving.”
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.
This is a developing news story. Please check back for updates.
(LONDON) — Hawa Doucouré and her teammates on the Les Hijabeuses soccer team have a simple message to send while playing the game they love: “Hands off my hijab.”
It’s a message they hope is received not only by the French Football Federation, but the country’s government as well.
“We are strong together and we will fight to the end,” Doucouré, 19, told ABC News. “We will fight until every woman can play the sport that she wants to play, how she wants to play it.”
The Hijabeuses, a collective of French soccer players, have spent the last year fighting to be included in official competitions. While FIFA, the world governing body for football, has permitted the Muslim veil on the field since 2014, the French Football Federation continues to ban it in club matches and international games, telling ABC News that it “promotes and defends the values of secularism, living together, neutrality and the fight against all forms of discrimination.”
The players’ calls for change are part of a larger movement against the country’s ban on religious symbols and garb, including niqabs and burqas. The latest controversy surrounds an amendment proposed earlier this year that bans minors from wearing a hijab in public.
France currently bans public workers and school students from wearing religious symbols, except at universities. The proposals that were also discussed included bans on Muslim mothers wearing hijabs on school trips and Muslim women wearing burkinis, or full-body swimsuits. They were eventually cut from the bill in one of the legislative rounds.
Rim-Sarah Alouane, a lawyer and researcher of religious freedom living in Toulouse, noted, “These conversations will keep on happening.”
“There was a time when the French had unveiling ceremonies and you had a bunch of French women surrounding a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf celebrating the fact that she would remove her headscarf, usually by force, to say, ‘Now you’re welcome in our society,'” said Alouane.
There is currently no law in France specifically banning hijabs in sports competitions. The Hijabeuses said they have yet to hear back from the French Football Federation about why it has gone beyond the rule of law to restrict the wearing of hijabs in official sports competitions even as FIFA permits them.
The French government said it’s passing these laws in the name of safety and secularism, and that the law strengthens its ability to adhere to principles of neutrality in government institutions. However, critics of the law argue that it will further stoke racism and discrimination in France, which is home to the largest population of Muslims in Western Europe. The country has seen an alarming rise in Islamophobia in recent years in part due to a rash of recent terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists and the subsequent strengthening of far-right politics.
Doucouré and her teammates are part of a movement of female athletes around the world challenging patriarchal norms to dress a certain way during competition.
At the Tokyo Olympics, Germany’s women’s gymnastics team wore full-length bodysuits instead of the more revealing leotards. Norway’s women’s beach handball team, meanwhile, wore shorts instead of bikinis at the Beach Handball EURO 2021 competition.
Germany’s women’s gymnastics team had complied with the existing rules under the International Gymnastics Federation, and thus faced no consequences. Norway’s women’s beach handball team, however, were fined 1,500 euros (about $1,700) by the Disciplinary Commission at the Beach Handball EURO 2021 for “improper clothing,” according to a statement from the European Handball Federation. The singer Pink later offered to pay the fine for the team.
Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir, a former Division I college basketball player, said that when it came to deciding between wearing Muslim garb or continuing to play basketball, she chose her faith. She went on advocate for Muslim women in sports and, in 2017, her efforts paid off when the International Basketball Federation amended its rules to allow head coverings — while also noting that there were no health safety concerns in doing so.
Now, she says that not only are Muslim women allowed to wear head coverings, “but Jewish men can wear yarmulkes, and Sikh men who wear turbans can all participate. So, this rule change was big for just the greater good.”
It’s a struggle that Abdul-Qaadir said has been a “rough” part of her “journey” in her sporting career. Doucouré said times have changed for Muslim women.
“Nowadays, women are visible,” said Doucouré. “We are not like the kind of hijabi they think we are. They have the idea of the hijabi that struggles in the house, who does housework, who don’t have a life. When they see young women wearing it — doing sports, educated — they don’t want to see that because it’s a contradiction with the vision they have of the hijab.”
(LONDON) — The head of London’s Metropolitan Police, Dame Cressida Dick, was asked on Thursday about the new civil lawsuit against Prince Andrew filed Monday in a New York court by Virginia Giuffre, an alleged victim of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Giuffre is accusing Prince Andrew of sexually abusing her at locations including Epstein’s Manhattan mansion before she turned 18.
London’s chief of police said her team was “open to working with authorities from overseas” and are themselves reviewing their position, saying that “no one is above the law.” She also confirmed that there’s currently no investigation open.
Dick was speaking on her monthly radio phone-in program on LBC, a London radio station.
Nick Ferrari, the interviewer, asked her, “What investigation is taking place into the allegations of Virginia Roberts concerning Prince Andrew?”
She replied: “I’m not going to talk about individuals, but what I can say is that I think what you’re referring to is associated with Jeffrey Epstein, who I will talk about since he is deceased.
“The position there is that we have had more than one allegation that is connected with Mr. Epstein, and we have reviewed those, assessed those and we have not opened an investigation.”
Ferrari replied: “If there are reports of underage girls being trafficked to London to have sex with the Duke of York, isn’t that something you’d want to take a look at?”
Dick explained she’d reviewed the evidence twice and concluded that “that there is no investigation to open.”
“What we will look at is, is there evidence of a crime? Is this the right jurisdiction for it to be dealt with? And is the person against whom the crime alleged still alive?” she responded. “Those are the three things that we do look at and have looked at in these cases. And we have concluded that there is no investigation to open, and we haven’t.
“I’m aware that there’s been a lot of commentary in the media and an apparent civil case going on in America and we will again, of course, review our position.”
When asked for further explanation as to what the commissioner meant by “review our position,” the Metropolitan Police said in a following statement to ABC News: “We do not comment on named individuals who are alive unless they have been charged with an offence.”
In her interview with LBC, Dick also refused to comment on whether she’s seen the testimony from Prince Andrew’s police protection officers.
Ferrari quizzed her, “Have you seen the testimony from the Duke of York’s royal protection team pertaining to the night of the allegations which he strenuously denies what took place in a London apartment?”
Dick replied: “I’m not going to comment any further. … It’s been reviewed twice before, we’ve worked closely with the CPS, we are of course open to working with authorities from overseas, we will give them every assistance if they ask us for anything — within the law, obviously — and as a result of what’s going on I’ve asked my team to have another look at the material.”
“No one is above the law,” she added.
The Met police do not comment on security but there has been much speculation that their records could help to establish Prince Andrew’s movements on the night that Virginia Giuffre alleges he sexually assaulted her.
Prince Andrew has consistently denied these allegations. In a 2019 interview with the BBC, he said, “I’ve said consistently and frequently said that we never had any sort of sexual contact whatever.”
He claimed to have no memory of ever meeting her and suggested that a widely circulated photograph of him with his arm around the waist of the then-17-year-old Giuffre, allegedly taken by Epstein in the London home of Ghislaine Maxwell in 2001, might have been doctored.
“I don’t believe that photograph was taken in the way that has been suggested,” he said. “I think it’s, from the investigations that we’ve done, you can’t prove whether or not that photograph is faked or not, because it is a photograph of a photograph of a photograph. So it’s very difficult to be able to prove it, but I don’t remember that photograph ever being taken.”
The prince also contended that he had an alibi for the date of the alleged encounter, claiming he was home with his daughter, Beatrice.
“I was at home,” the prince said. “I was with the children, and I’d taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking for a party at, I suppose, sort of 4 or 5 in the afternoon. And then, because the duchess was away, we have a simple rule in the family that when one is away the other one is there. I was on terminal leave at the time from the Royal Navy, so therefore I was at home.”
The prince’s interview was harshly criticized in the British press and, within days, he released a new statement conceding that his “former association” with Epstein had become a major distraction for the royal family, and he stepped back from official duties.
He vowed in that statement that he would be willing “to help any appropriate law enforcement agency with their investigations.”
But since then there have been complaints from the Southern District of New York that the prince has not cooperated with their requests to interview him as a witness for the federal investigation into sex trafficking by Jeffrey Epstein and his associates.
Prince Andrew’s lawyers, Blackfords LLP, however denied this, issuing a statement in June 2020 saying the prince had offered “his assistance as a witness to the DOJ” several times.
The beleaguered royal was last seen Tuesday arriving at his mother’s Scottish home, Balmoral Castle, accompanied by ex-wife Sarah Ferguson. Several UK newspapers are reporting that they are holding crisis talks, deliberating the best response to this lawsuit.
“Now that this lawsuit has been filed, unless it is stopped in its tracks, it doesn’t seem that any of the options for Prince Andrew and his legal team will be particularly palatable to him,” said ABC News Royal Contributor Victoria Murphy.
Legal opinions vary as to what the prince might do, but his options appear to be fourfold.
Firstly, he could ignore the entire thing, the case could go ahead without him and a possible default judgment and damages could be entered against him.
Secondly, he could instruct lawyers to argue that the case is spurious and lacking in evidence in the hopes it would be thrown out before trial.
Thirdly, he could agree to answer questions under oath, attend the trial and defend himself.
And lastly, he could agree to settle the claims out-of-court.
Each option has its own pitfall.
“No one could have predicted just how low Prince Andrew’s reputation could have plummeted in the last two to three years,” Murphy added. “The accusations that have been leveled against him, the fact they’ve been so widely reported and his attempts to draw a line under them spectacularly backfiring have all left his reputation in tatters — and has the potential to seriously impact people’s perception of the monarchy.”
No member of the royal family has made a public comment about the latest developments, and Buckingham Palace told ABC News that this was a legal matter and for Andrew’s lawyers to respond. A spokesman for Prince Andrew said there would be no comment on the new lawsuit.
The Times of London, however, quotes a source close to Prince Charles as saying, “This will be unwelcome reputational damage to the institution. [Prince Charles] has long ago concluded that it is probably an unsolvable problem. This will probably further strengthen in the prince’s mind that a way back for the duke is demonstrably not possible, because the spectre of this [accusation] raises its head with hideous regularity.”
The source also said, “The prince loves his brother and has the ability to have sympathy for the slings and arrows that his brother endures, whatever the reasons may be. His ability to support and feel for those having a tough time is well known.”
It is a difficult position for the family to be in, Murphy explains, as they may be tainted by association whatever they do.
“The monarchy has done everything they can to distance itself officially,” she said. “He has stepped down from official duties, Buckingham Palace no longer speaks for him and he’s not being represented by royal lawyers, but the fact is, he is still the queen’s son. He’s at Balmoral now. There’s no avoiding that this will continue to damage the image of the monarchy and could even affect the standing of other royals.”
(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.”
(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.
(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.”
(NEW YORK) — Eight months after Iran banned imports of any vaccines developed in the United States or the United Kingdom, the country is in the grips of its deadliest coronavirus surge yet, prompting criticism of the government for prioritizing politics over public health.
Over the past week, a daily average of 493 people died from COVID-19, according to official statistics, a deadlier toll than the country experienced even during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, during which the country was badly hit. To date, the country has recorded over 4.2 million cases of coronavirus, with 95,647 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
After a surge in April this year, the country experienced a sharp decline in cases, but since July the numbers have been headed in the wrong direction. According to Our World in Data, only 11.2% of Iranians have received at least one dose of COVID vaccine, and only 3.3% have been fully vaccinated, mostly with China’s Sinopharm and AstraZeneca, which have been sent as part of humanitarian aids from Japan and other countries, as well as the domestically developed COVIran Barekat, which has not been recognized by international health bodies.
In January, the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei banned the purchase of Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines made in the U.S. and U.K. Khamenei claimed that Americans wanted to “test the vaccines on other nations,” without providing any evidence or reasons to back up his claim.
However, in a televised speech on Wednesday, with the country now experiencing a fifth wave coronavirus infections, Khamenei indicated a potential change in heart with the onset of the more transmissible delta variant.
“Corona vaccines must be accessible for all people from any possible way, be it domestic production or through importing,” he said. “As the disease or the enemy takes on a new form, so should our defense.”
Disappointed by the response of their own officials, many Iranians have criticized the government on social media. Users have posted tweets, photos and videos to document the situation in hospitals across the country, using the hashtag #SOSIran. Users ask the international community to pay attention to the situation in Iran and address the Islamic Republic officials to stop the ban on importing vaccines.
“It was an ideological approach to a health issue from the beginning,” Sarvenaz, an Iranian psychiatrist whose full name cannot be published for security reasons, told ABC News. “It was a gesture to show that the Islamic Republic won’t import medical products from a country it has been calling the Great Satan and its biggest enemy. But it has cost thousands of lives.”
In the past, regime officials have attributed the shortage of medicines and supplies in the country to international sanctions, but now the ire of Iranians has turned to the government, with the ban on importing effective vaccines taking that excuse away.
With the delta variant of the coronavirus ravaging the country, graveyards, as well as hospitals, are struggling to deal with the surge.
In the holy city of Mashhad, the officials at city cemeteries have asked for taxi drivers to allow their cars to be used as hearses as the city has run out of enough hearses to carry dead bodies, the Islamic Republic’s News Agency reported on Wednesday.
On the ground, medical professionals have warned that hospitals are struggling to deal with the surge, even as vaccination rates remain low.
Dr. Morteza Gharibi, head of the emergency unit of Iran’s University of Medical Sciences in Markazi Province, told ABC News that that the hospital is running out of basic medication, and expects the death toll to climb even higher.
“Even if the vaccination gets accelerated — which I do not think [will] happen — it takes at least three weeks for the first shot to produce antibodies. It is already too late for that in this spike,” he explained.
“I foresee an estimation of around 1,200 daily COVID death cases in about three weeks in the country,” he added.
