American soldiers have begun arriving in Kabul to help evacuate embassy personnel and other civilians, according to an anonymous US official who told Reuters their embassy is instructing staff to burn all sensitive materials in an incinerator.
It comes one day after the Taliban seized the country’s second- and third-biggest cities, with insurgents continuing to make gains at a pace faster than any Western nation predicted.
The regime now controls about a third of Afghanistan’s provincial capitals and, according to the latest US intelligence, it will likely take Kabul, the Afghan capital, in the next 30 days.
Some 3,000 US troops, including two battalions of Marines and one infantry battalion, will arrive in the south Asian country by Sunday. They will join the 600 UK troops who flew to Afghanistan on Friday in a bid to oversee the safe departure of British nationals still there.
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