Taliban Spokesman Says Afghans Will No Longer be Allowed to Leave Their Country

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said Tuesday his group would no longer permit Afghan nationals to leave their country.

“Change your policy and please don’t encourage our friends to leave,” Mujahid said at a press conference in Kabul. “Don’t encourage our engineers, our doctors, our military. We need them. … We are not in favor of allowing Afghans to leave.”

Mujahid said Americans “have the opportunity” and “all the resources” to “take all the people that belong to them, but we are not going to allow Afghans to leave and we will not extend the deadline.”

He was referring to the United States’ self-imposed deadline of August 31, when it had intended to finish departing from the country. Thousands of Americans and Afghan nationals have been prevented from reaching the international airport in Kabul since the city fell to the Taliban last weekend.

President Joe Biden committed last week to retrieving every American and Afghan ally to the United States still trapped in the country. As of Monday, however, it was not clear whether the White House believed any Americans were still trapped, with White House press secretary Jen Psaki saying it was “irresponsible to say Americans are stranded.”

Biden is expected to say as early as Tuesday whether he’ll seek to extend America’s military presence in the country.

“The way to the airport has been closed now,” Mujahid added. “Afghans are not allowed to go there now, foreigners are allowed to go but we have stopped Afghan nationals to go because the crowd is more, there is danger that people will lose their lives, their might be a stampede.”

He added that his group was “asking women to stay home at the moment” because Taliban fighters had not yet been trained on “how to deal with women.”