Over the course of the next six months, Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Nashville will help resettle 150 Afghans into local communities as part of the effort to help them escape Taliban rule under the U.S. State Department’s Afghan Placement Assistance Program.
Pashtana Zalmai Khan Durrani had a choice to make: work to educate women inside Afghanistan despite the potential danger of doing so, or leave for a safer location. She chose to be courageous and not take the easy way out.
With the Taliban now in full control of Afghanistan, females in that country could face discrimination and hardships not seen in two decades, experts and women’s rights advocates said.
There was only one place Army veteran Dominick Liello wanted to be on the night of Sept. 2 — at a candlelight prayer service at St. Helen’s Church to honor the 13 U.S. military service members killed a week earlier in a suicide bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan.
President Joe Biden said the decision to end 20 years of U.S. military presence in Afghanistan on Aug. 31 came down to limiting further loss of American lives in a place where the country no longer had vital interests.
As the bloody, contentious U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan approached its Aug. 31 deadline, fears rose about the ultimate fate of Catholics and Christians under Taliban rule if they are unable, or unwilling, to flee.
As Aug. 30 ended in the U.S. and a new day began in a different time zone in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 31, 2021, the U.S. Central Command released a green-tinted photo of a soldier about to get on a cargo plane, a photographic coda to seal the historic moment that put an end to nearly two decades of U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.
In a new interview, Pope Francis appears to criticize the handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan by the United States that triggered scenes of chaos and violence at the Kabul airport, saying that while “I don’t want to judge” nevertheless “they didn’t take into account all the eventualities.”
With increased violence unfolding in Afghanistan, Pope Francis appealed to all Christians to fast and intensify their prayers.
Roots of Peace founder Heidi Kuhn is on a deadline-driven, life-or-death mission to get her nearly 400 employees out of Afghanistan by Aug. 31. The Taliban took over the organization’s compound in Kabul Aug. 15.
