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The last commander of the Afghan Army's plot to defeat the Taliban... and his warning to the U.S. after troops withdrew and left a breeding ground for terrorism
As Lieutenant General Sami Sadat stepped onto a C-17 military plane at Kabul International Airport on August 19, 2021, bloodshed engulfed the country he loved and had spent his life fighting for.
Desperate Afghans surrounded the runway, trying to escape the Taliban and the inhumanity that would soon take over as Western forces left.
The three-star general in the Afghanistan Army was exhausted, humiliated, quietly nursing a shrapnel wound to his neck and about to make the hardest decision of his life: To leave his homeland behind. Staying would have likely meant death for him and his troops.
He had been fighting day and night for three and a half months to slow the Taliban’s rapid offensive towards the capital as allied forces withdrew.
Over two weeks in August, the airport was under siege from terrorists and thousands poured onto aircrafts to evacuate as the U.S. pulled their remaining troops and staff out.
At the beginning of the month, President Ashraf Ghani had named Sadat the commander of Afghanistan’s special forces, the country’s most elite fighters.
But by the time he had arrived in Kabul the situation was already dire. He was tasked with ensuring the security of the capital, but it was too late and Ghani had fled.
Lieutenant General Sami Sadat (second from left) was the last commander of Afghanistan's special forces. His new book details how is country was abandoned as Kabul fell to the Taliban
He lifted off over mountains his father traversed to defeat the Taliban after 9/11, and reflected on military career that saw him rise to become one of the country’s youngest generals.
As he flew above the carnage in the windowless plane, he was furious at the actions of President Joe Biden and the U.S. administrations before him.
His country had been betrayed. Afghans who fought alongside Western troops were forced into hiding and left to fend for themselves with targets on their backs.
Rights women had enjoyed for 20 years would vanish and children would be stopped going to school.
They are faced with barbarism and beatings if they show their face in public.
The military he’d led so valiantly were losing a battle almost impossible to win without support.
The Afghan Army - who lost 66,000 men over 20 years - no longer had the will to fight because they had been abandoned.
Three years after the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, the extremists have sent the war-torn nation back 20 years with their oppressive and corrupt policies.
Sadat is watching his nation deteriorate from the United Kingdom, where he is living with his wife and two children.
He wonders when he will be able to return so he can finally defeat the Taliban, and he is ready.
He still has hope that Afghanistan has a future free of the Taliban that he helped force into the mountains during the allied forces’ two-decade stay.
Sadat lays out his vision for his beloved country and gives a damning assessment of who is to blame for his its collapse in his book The Last Commander.
His story is the inside account of how Afghanistan was cast aside, and the pivotal role the U.S. and the West played in its abandonment.
Sadat rose rapidly through the Afghan military. He worked in intelligence and served in many senior roles that included the deputy commander of the Afghan ground forces and later the deputy chief of the Afghan National Army.
He received training at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst - Britain’s officer training college - and in the U.S. and Germany.
Sadat rose rapidly through the Afghan military. He worked in intelligence and served in many senior roles that included the deputy commander of the Afghan ground forces and later the deputy chief of the Afghan National Army
His early work involved close cooperation with the C.I.A and U.S. forces, tracking down Al-Qaeda in the mountains of the Hindu Kush.
It was in conventional combat, leading from the front, where he became a legend in the ranks of the Afghan military.
Sadat lays out his vision for Afghanistan and gives a damning assessment of who is to blame for his country’s collapse in his book The Last Commander
Now, from afar, he leads the Afghan United Front after reluctantly fleeing the country he served with dedication.
He was on the frontlines of the battle with the Taliban for decades, and has since seen them take the upper hand while Afghanistan has turned into an even more dangerous breeding ground for terrorism.
The resistance in Afghanistan has made inroads against the Taliban in recent months and has even had successful operations near Kabul.
But Sadat says they need support to take back the country, and it needs to come from the nations that turned their back.
‘Direct responsibility lies with the U.S. and specifically with former President Barack Obama and his Democratic successor Joe Biden’, he writes.
He blames Obama for being ‘clearly intent’ on withdrawing from Afghanistan and ‘emboldening’ the Taliban by setting a timetable for getting American troops out.
Obama gradually drew down the presence of U.S. forces during his administration, leaving enough to provide support for the Afghan military after stopping combat operations in 2014.
Sadat says The Doha Agreement, the 2020 peace deal between the Taliban and Donald Trump’s administration, led to the U.S. virtually cutting off communications with the Afghan government.
‘Direct responsibility lies with the U.S. and specifically with former President Barack Obama and his Democratic successor Joe Biden’, Sadat (left) writes
It caused situations, he says, where the U.S. military weren’t authorized to conduct strikes in support of Afghan security forces.
The Taliban started to sense that they only had to wait for Americans to leave to achieve victory.
Before the 2020 deal was signed, they had not made any significant progress on the battlefield.
The deal was one of the key turning points where the situation for the Afghan army started to go downhill.
Sadat says Biden showed ‘withering contempt’ for Afghanistan and didn’t listen to generals who warned him that keeping a military presence on the ground would stop Al-Qaeda and ISIS being able to ‘rebuild’.
In 2021, Biden set out a timetable for the last U.S. forces to leave, but he was urged by Gen. Kenneth ‘Frank’ McKenzie - the commander of U.S. Central Command - to keep at least 2,500 troops on the ground to prevent the inevitable collapse of the Afghan military and government.
Now the terrorist groups the U.S. wanted to push to the brink of eradication are starting to thrive again, and Sadat believes the risk of attack is increasing by the day.
From when Biden was vice president under Obama, he was the most consistent critic of prolonged American involvement in Afghanistan, Sadat says,
Sadat is pictured fourth from right in the back row. It was in conventional combat, leading from the front, where he became a legend in the ranks of the Afghan military
Biden, Sadat says, also gave the Taliban a propaganda victory by choosing September 11, 2021, as the date the last soldier had to leave
Sadat said his troops 'fought, bravely, until the end. They lost 66,000 troops over 20 years
He would have cut the number of U.S. troops to just one thousand and limited operations to just special forces raids.
Biden, Sadat says, also gave the Taliban a propaganda victory by choosing September 11, 2021, as the date the last soldier had to leave.
‘It was as if Osama Bin Laden had come back to life to ask for this date, so they could celebrate another victory against America’, he told DailyMail.com.
The withdrawal was brought forward a month to August because the Taliban was rapidly overrunning the country and making their way towards Kabul faster than the U.S. had anticipated.
Sadat says he met with the U.S. officials to try and tell them they needed to hold the capital city, but the Americans said their orders were to head for the airport.
Over two weeks during the evacuation, hundreds of civilians died. People fell to their deaths from the planes they were clinging onto in a bid to escape.
On August 26, 2021, an ISIS-K operative detonated a suicide bomb at the airport and killed 182 people - 170 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. service members.
Sadat (second from left) was on the frontlines of the battle with the Taliban for decades, and has now seen them take the upper hand while the nation he fought for has turned into an even more dangerous breeding ground for terrorism
‘Biden was the a**hole who turned his back and left things in chaos’, Sadat told DailyMail.com.
When Biden announced the withdrawal, he stated that the Afghan military was not able to fight for themselves.
From 2014 on, NATO and U.S. forces had essentially stopped fighting and left the Afghan forces to hold the ground.
Sadat says Biden is wrong. The local troops were winning and increasingly capable, but their ability to fight was taken away.
He admits there were a lot of problems in the Afghan military, including the police and the corruption of the Ghani government that impacted military leadership.
But the supply of ammunition was gradually taken away and political pressure on the Afghan government was pushing them to the point of disintegration.
They were crippled.
‘For us Afghans, it's very difficult to counter a narrative that is set up by somebody like President Biden, because every single newspaper and TV channel picks that up and they don’t listen to the Afghans’.
Sadat's forces were also trained to use U.S. military equipment. Their hardware was based on highly technical special reconnaissance units, helicopters and airstrikes.
They needed oversight, sophisticated maintenance and software. When the U.S. presence shrank, that all went away and the Black Hawk helicopters and C-130 transport planes were left idle.
‘We were already under immense pressure on the battlefield, the lack of ammunition, the lack of support, and then all of a sudden this political pressure caused us to fail,’ he says.
Afghan people climb atop a plane as they wait at the Kabul airport in Kabul on August 16, 2021, after a stunningly swift end to Afghanistan's 20-year war
Sadat says that failure combined with the withdrawal has created a vacuum that has allowed terrorist groups including Al Qaeda to grow.
He said the American deal with the Taliban in 2020 ‘normalized’ terrorism and opened the door for neighboring nations in the region such as Iran to take advantage.
‘Taliban units were coming into Afghanistan in their thousands kitted with tactical gear and trained with new weapons. They had nice uniforms, good money and good shoes.
‘It was very clear that they’re getting paid a lot of money.’
For Sadat, the escalation in terrorism has created a three-pronged threat for the West that if not dealt with could have devastating consequences.
The first is the threat to large oil companies and shipping lanes in the Middle East.
American commercial vessels have already been targeted in the Red Sea by Houthi rebels in Yemen.
As Sadat stepped onto a C-17 military plane at Kabul International Airport on August 19, 2021, bloodshed engulfed the country he loved and had spent his life fighting for. Afghans are seen on a transport plane during the evacuation
The second is Al Qaeda expanding into new terrain. Sadat says this has already happened in African nations like Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.
‘Tribal factions in Africa are united and control more territory than the size of the United Kingdom,’ he says.
‘They are now a formidable conventional strategic threat in the Sahel area (a region that extends from Senegal eastward to Sudan), and they will expand because African countries will fall apart and ultimately fall into the hands of Al Qaeda.
The third is the threat of attacks in the West.
Sadat believes that Al Qaeda will use Islamophobia in Europe to invoke small-scale attacks and the direct risk to the U.S. is at one of its highest points since 9/11.
With the U.S. election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on the horizon, Sadat’s message to whoever ends up in the White House is clear.
‘Help the Afghan resistance. We don’t need soldiers, we don’t need boots on the ground, we just need political support and to be recognized as a freedom fighting group.
‘We need to buy equipment and technical and financial help so we can topple the Taliban regime and create a system.
‘We definitely don’t want to be the host for Al Qaeda and other terrible groups who go around and butcher people.
‘This is not who we are and we refuse to accept this. We are ready to sacrifice whatever it takes and we are more than capable of toppling the Taliban regime.
He says the dynamics have changed drastically in the region and China, Russia and Iran could use the Taliban as if it’s their friend against the U.S.
Russia and neighboring Pakistan have yet to give the Taliban military or financial support, but the time he says for the West to act is now.
‘I think we have a great opportunity to get rid of the Taliban now.
‘Later its regime will create so many problems in Africa, Middle East and Europe, that it will be near impossible to go back in and topple them
‘The more we wait, the more they will spread their practices around the world, and there will be more chaos.’
The Taliban has also declared war on women’s rights since they took back power by moving towards adherence of strict Sharia Law.
They have barred women from most areas of public life and have stopped girls going to school beyond the sixth grade.
Afghans struggle to reach the foreign forces to show their credentials to flee the country outside the Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 26, 2021
There are restrictions on females visiting parks, gyms or holding certain jobs.
Morality police squads have scolded, arrested and punished citizens involved in activities they consider ‘un-Islamic’, such as wearing ‘Western’ hairstyles or listening banned music.
There has also been a crackdown on the free press - including the recent seizure of two TV networks - and civil society.
Sadat is urging Americans to address the widespread rights violations the United Nations has referred to as a ‘gender apartheid’.
‘The United States has been lecturing the rest of the world that we would like to share freedom, and democracy and freedom for all eyes.
‘I think it’s hypocritical not to support the desire for freedom for Afghans.
‘I think the Americans owe us this much, because we've been partners for so long, and we went beyond our scope, and we fought every enemy of the United States.
‘And ultimately, when the time came, they just pulled out and left us alone.’
If Kamala Harris does become president, Sadat wants her to publicly condemn the widespread abuse of women’s rights.
So far, he says, she hasn’t done anywhere near enough.
Sadat may be more than 3,500 miles away from Helmand Province, but he is still working towards a better future for Afghanistan and the people forced to live under the Taliban.
The Taliban is summarily arresting people every day. Some are even Sadat’s colleagues.
He has helped establish a team of Afghan patriots young, general officers, diplomats, governors to lead the resistance.
‘We know they love Afghanistan, we know they're ready to sacrifice. So we established a good leadership team that could lead not only the war, but actually the future of the Afghan administration.
‘We also established an organization called the Afghanistan United Front to have a platform for the rest of the Afghans to come together and become a force.
Sadat has also been traveling the United States and Europe, lobbying for support.
‘We are at the stage right now that we need to mobilize a force to go in and start fighting, but mobilizing the force depends on the resources.
‘Right now we're working to get some resources. We already have the soldiers.
‘We have a little bit of political recognition globally, and we definitely have that entire Afghanistan, we have the support of the tribes and support of the young generation of the Afghan people.
‘People are absolutely fed up with the Taliban. And once we mobilize our resources, then we will start going inside our country to face the Taliban in the battlefield and take our country back.’