NPR recently sat down with Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob Mujahid, a Taliban leader and Afghanistan’s interim defense minister, as the one year anniversary of the collapse of the Afghanistan government.
In the year since the US abandoned its 20-year war in Afghanistan, about 700 people, many of them children and youth, have resettled in Pittsburgh seeking refuge from their home country.
The restrictions on women’s movement and dress are the harshest that the Taliban have announced since they came to power in August
Since last July, 40,000 Afghans have applied for humanitarian parole. Slow processing times and a high bar to qualify mean some in Philadelphia have been waiting for months with no word about their friends and family members’ chance to get to safety.
The local Afghan community, centered in Northeast Philadelphia, has nearly doubled with the influx of evacuees, adding 650 new people. Resettlement agencies predict around 200 newly arrived Afghan students will be enrolled in local schools once all the families are processed.
Church World Service, a refugee resettlement agency in Lancaster County, is working with 30 people who were temporarily housed at military bases around the country.
Philadelphia International Airport is now the only entry point in the United States accepting Afghan evacuees.
More Americans exit Afghanistan
The U.S. marks the milestone anniversary Saturday under the pall of a pandemic and in the shadow of a frantic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which fell to the same militant rulers who gave safe haven to the plotters of the 2001 attacks.
A new NPR/Ipsos poll shows unusually wide support for resettling Afghans allies. Even many Republicans who favor tighter controls on immigration say the U.S. should help those who fled the Taliban.
By NPR 