Afghan war vet Prince Harry says fellow veterans should ‘reach out to each other and offer support’

212

View
comments

Prince Harry said he and other Afghanistan War veterans are ‘bound by a shared experience’ and that the horrifying scenes from Kabul ‘resonate’ across them as he urges former soldiers to ‘offer support for one another’ – but said nothing about Joe Biden’s handling of the crisis.

The Duke of Sussex, who spent 10 years in the British Army and performed two frontline tours of Afghanistan during the two-decade Western intervention, was speaking in his capacity as founder of the Invictus Games Foundation for wounded warriors.

Amid scenes of frightened Afghans trying to flee a return to brutal Islamist theocracy after the Taliban captured the capital city Kabul, Harry and senior figures from the Games said: ‘What’s happening in Afghanistan resonates across the international Invictus community. 

‘Many of the participating nations and competitors in the Invictus Games family are bound by a shared experience of serving in Afghanistan over the past two decades, and for several years, we have competed alongside Invictus Games Team Afghanistan. 

‘We encourage everybody across the Invictus network – and the wider military community – to reach out to each other and offer support for one another.’

Harry has known President Biden and his wife, First Lady Jill Biden, for several years, and both have been publicly supportive of the duke’s Invictus Games. Harry and Meghan were praised by White House press secretary Jen Psaki after their ‘courageous’ bombshell Oprah interview. 

When asked if the US President had any reaction to the chat, Ms Psaki said: ‘For anyone to come forward and speak about their own struggles with mental health and tell their own personal story, that takes courage and that’s certainly something the president believes.’

Just weeks before last year’s Presidential Election, Harry urged US voters to ‘reject hate speech’ and Meghan called the ballot ‘the most important of our lifetime’ in remarks which made waves on both sides of the Atlantic – and suggested they were supporting Mr Biden. 

Kabul airport has reopened with evacuation flights to continue after at least eight people were killed on Monday, including two shot dead by US troops, three run over by taxiing jets and three stowaways who plummeted from the engines of an airborne plane amid chaotic scenes in Afghanistan. 

Three stowaways fell hundreds of feet to their deaths after climbing onto the fuselage of a departing US Air Force C-17 plane as it took off from at Hamid Karzai International Airport, while hundreds of other desperate people tried to cling onto planes as they taxied down the runway. 

Senior US military officials said troops shot and killed two armed Afghans among those trying to get onto the jet while US citizens were evacuated in two separate incidents. A further three people were caught under plane wheels amid scenes of anarchy as the country slips into Taliban control. 

A Pentagon official said that US troops had come under fire at the airfield and grounded all flights while soldiers cleared the airfield with Apache helicopters and fired ‘warning shots’ to disperse the crowds. Flights resumed after 90 minutes but were suspended again after a security breach on the civilian side of the airport, a Pentagon spokesperson said.

Thousands of terrified people descended on Hamid Karzai International Airport as the US, Britain and other Western countries evacuate their citizens and diplomats on military aircraft following the Taliban’s seizure of the capital city Kabul and much of Afghanistan this week. 

Video posted on Twitter shows hundreds of people running alongside a C-17 crammed with 800 people – eight times its usual capacity – with many clambering on to the front and rear wheels, while others climbed airbridges hoping to force their way on to planes waiting at the departure gates. 

The clip then shows three people falling to their deaths from hundreds of feet in the air, with images posted online later appearing to show residents collecting bodies from a rooftop in Kabul.  

The C-17 can carry 171,000 pounds of cargo but its interior is designed to carry fewer than 150 soldiers. It is unclear who exactly was on board and how many Americans remain on the ground. However, a flight-tracker showed the jet was flown to the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

The first of three German evacuation planes en route to Afghanistan diverted to the Uzbek capital Tashkent after it could not land at Kabul airport, a German general said on Monday.

The A400M transport plane circled for more than an hour over Kabul before changing its destination, Lieutenant General Markus Laubenthal told public broadcaster ZDF. A foreign ministry spokesperson said earlier in Berlin that no evacuation flights were leaving Kabul because people were blocking the runway.

A Pentagon spokesperson said 3,000 soldiers would be on the ground at the airport by Tuesday to help with the evacuation efforts, with a further 3,000 troops arriving later this week. However, the shambolic scenes further humiliated the US and its NATO powers, with much of the Anglo-US media and political class branding the withdrawal the ‘biggest foreign policy disaster’ since Suez. 

In an extraordinary address to the American nation on Monday, Joe Biden defended the US withdrawal and blamed Donald Trump’s agreement with the Taliban, Afghanistan’s political leaders for refusing to negotiate and Afghan military forces for refusing to fight.  

Announcing an end to the War in Afghanistan, the US President – who had returned to the White House from a ‘vacation’ in Camp David – said: ‘I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years I’ve learned the hard way. That there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.’   

In a statement on Saturday, he blamed his predecessor Trump for creating the conditions of the Taliban takeover. However, President Biden has faced intense domestic and global criticism of his handling of the Afghanistan crisis from both the Left and Right of politics across the West. 

US media said the ‘debacle of the US defeat and chaotic retreat in Afghanistan’ was a ‘political disaster’ and slammed the President’s ‘failure to orchestrate an urgent and orderly exit’. 

A New York Post editorial even said his claims that he ‘inherited’ Trump’s withdrawal plans were a ‘lie’ and branded the crisis situation ‘as humiliating an end as the rooftop scramble in Saigon in 1975’.  

The head of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party, Armin Laschet, called it the ‘biggest NATO debacle’ since the founding of the alliance, while MPs accused Prime Minister Boris Johnson of a ‘shameful’ silence and questioned if he did enough to discourage President Biden from withdrawing US troops. 

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was ‘concerned’ by accounts of human rights violations against the women and girls of Afghanistan who fear a return to the darkest days’ of the 1990s when the Taliban came to power after the Civil War and imposed a brutal theocracy. 

Afghanistan’s representative to the UN Security Ghulam Isaczai told a meeting of the five powers – the US, Britain, China, Russia and France – on Monday that ‘there are already reports of target killings and looting in the city’. 

‘Kabul residents are reported that the Taliban have already started house-to-house searches in some neighbourhoods, registering names and looking for people in their target list,’ he added.   

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has also come under fire from critics and political rivals for hightailing out of the country as the Taliban stormed the Presidential Palace last night. 

The Russian Embassy claimed that he had fled in a helicopter full of cash. His whereabouts remain unknown.