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WASHINGTON (AP) — Active-service members and veterans provided firsthand testimony Wednesday about the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, describing in harrowing detail the carnage and death they witnessed on the ground while imploring Congress to help the allies left behind.Former Marine Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews testified to Congress about the stench of human flesh under a large plume of smoke as the screams of children, women and men filled the space around Kabul’s airport after two suicide bombers attacked crowds of Afghans.“I see the faces of all of those we could not save, those we left behind,” said Vargas-Andrews, who wore a prosthetic arm and scars of his own grave wounds from the bombing. “The withdrawal was a catastrophe in my opinion. And there was an inexcusable lack of accountability."The initial hearing of a long-promised investigation by House Republicans displayed the open wounds from the end of America’s longest war in August 2021, with witnesses recalling how they saw mothers carrying dead babies and the Taliban shooting and brutally beating people.It was the first of what is expected to be a series of Republican-led hearings examining the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal. Taliban forces seized the Afghan capital, Kabul, far more rapidly than U.S. intelligence had foreseen as American forces pulled out. Kabul’s fall turned the West’s withdrawal into a rout, with Kabul’s airport the center of a desperate air evacuation guarded by U.S. forces temporarily deployed for the task.The majority of witnesses argued to Congress that the fall of Kabul was an American failure with blame touching every presidential administration from George W. Bush to Joe Biden. Testimony focused not on the decision to withdraw, but on what witnesses depicted as a desperate attempt to rescue American citizens and Afghan allies with little U.S. planning and inadequate U.S. support.“America is building a nasty reputation for multi-generational systemic abandonment of our allies where we leave a smoldering human refuse from the Montagnards of Vietnam to the Kurds in Syria,” retired Lt. Col. Scott Mann testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.He added, “Our veterans know something else that this committee might do well to consider: We might be done with Afghanistan, but it’s not done with us.”Vargas-Andrews sobbed as he told lawmakers of being thwarted in an attempt to stop the single deadliest moment in the U.S. evacuation — a suicide bombing that killed 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. servicemen and women.Vargas-Andrews said Marines and others aiding in the evacuation operation were given descriptions of men believed to be plotting an attack before it occurred. He said he and others spotted two men matching the descriptions and behaving suspiciously, and eventually had them in their rifle scopes, but never received a response about whether to take action.“No one was held accountable,” Vargas-Andrews told Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, the chairman of the committee. “No one was, and no one is, to this day.”U.S. Central Command’s investigation concluded in October 2021 that given the worsening security situation at Abbey Gate as Afghans became increasingly desperate to flee, “the attack was not preventable at the tactical level without degrading the mission to maximize the number of evacuees.” However, that investigation did not look into whether the bomber could have been stopped or whether Marines on the ground had the appropriate authorities to engage.Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Rob Lodewick said Wednesday that the Pentagon's earlier review of the suicide attack had turned up neither any advance identification of a possible attacker nor any requests for “an escalation to existing rules of engagement” governing use of force by U.S. troops.McCaul has been deeply critical of the Biden administration's handling of the withdrawal. “What happened in Afghanistan was a systemic breakdown of the federal government at every level, and a stunning failure of leadership by the Biden administration,” he said.Last month, U.S. Inspector-General for Afghanistan John Sopko concluded again that actions taken by both the Trump and Biden administrations were key to the sudden collapse of the Afghan government and military, even before U.S. forces completed their withdrawal in August 2021.That includes President Donald Trump’s one-sided withdrawal deal with the Taliban, and the abruptness of Biden's withdrawal of both U.S. contractors and troops from Afghanistan, stranding an Afghan air force that previous administrations had failed to make self-supporting.The report blamed each U.S. administration since American forces invaded in 2001 for constantly changing, inconsistent policies that strived for quick fixes and withdrawal from Afghanistan rather than a steady effort to build a capable, sustainable Afghan military.The witnesses testifying Wednesday urged action to help the hundreds of thousands of Afghan allies who worked alongside U.S. soldiers and who are now in limbo in the U.S. and back in Afghanistan.“If I leave this committee with only one thought it’s this: It’s not too late,” said Peter Lucier, a Marine veteran who now works at Team America Relief, which has assisted thousands of Afghans in relocating. “We’re going to talk a lot today about all the mistakes that were made, leading up to that day, but urgent action right now will save so many lives.”One of those solutions discussed Wednesday would be creating a pathway to citizenship for the nearly 76,000 Afghans who worked with American soldiers since 2001 as translators, interpreters and partners. Those people arrived in the U.S. on military planes after the withdrawal and the government admitted the refugees on a temporary parole status as part of Operation Allies Welcome, the largest resettlement effort in the country in decades, with the promise of a path to a life in the U.S. for their service.Congress began a bipartisan effort to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would have prevented Afghans from becoming stranded without legal residency status when their two years of humanitarian parole expire in August. The proposal would have enabled qualified Afghans to apply for U.S. citizenship, as was done for refugees in the past, including those from Cuba, Vietnam and Iraq.But that effort stalled in the Senate late last year due to opposition from Republicans.“If we don’t set politics aside and pursue accountability and lessons learned to address this grievous moral injury on our military community and right the wrongs that have been inflicted on our most at-risk Afghan allies, this colossal foreign policy will follow us home and ultimately draw us right back into the graveyard of empires where it all started,” Mann, the retired green beret, said to lawmakers.___Associated Press reporter Tara Copp contributed to this report.

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Former Marine Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews, who was gravely injured, losing an arm and a leg in a suicide attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, becomes emotional as he recounts his story during a House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing on the United States evacuation from Afghanistan on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 8, 2023.

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“I see the faces of all of those we could not save, those we left behind”

Global War On Terror Veterans Testify To Congress On Catastrophic Withdraw From Afghanistan

MEXICO CITY (AP) — When four Americans were kidnapped in the border city of Matamoros, authorities rescued the survivors within days, but thousands of Mexicans remain missing in a state long associated with cartel violence — some in cases dating back more than a decade.Mexican authorities in Tamaulipas state quickly blamed the local Gulf cartel for shooting up the Americans’ minivan after they crossed the border for cosmetic surgery Friday. They found the Americans — two dead, one injured and one apparently unharmed — early Tuesday after a massive search involving squads of Mexican soldiers and National Guard troops.By contrast, more than 112,000 Mexicans remain missing nationwide — about a tenth of them in Tamaulipas — in many cases years or decades after they disappeared. Although a convoy of armored Mexican military trucks extracted the Americans, the only ones searching for most of the missing Mexicans are their desperate relatives.“If these people had been Mexicans, they might still be disappeared,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at George Mason University.The rescue of the Americans provoked a special kind of fury in Tamaulipas, a border state long dominated by the warring Gulf and Northeast cartels, where the Network of Disappeared activist group estimates that 12,537 people remain missing.Delia Quiroa, from the nearby city of Reynosa, has been looking for her brother Roberto for nine years, ever since he was kidnapped by gunmen — probably belonging to the Gulf cartel, the same group blamed for abducting the Americans — in March 2014.Despite carrying out their own searches and pressuring authorities to investigate, the family knows nothing about his whereabouts.Quiroa said that the families of the missing “celebrate and give thanks to God that they found these four U.S. citizens,” but said “we wish the government would search for our disappeared with the same zeal and diligence.”“We feel complete indignation, desperation, anguish, impotence and grief,” Quiroa said, because of “authorities' failure to act when Mexican families suffer the disappearance of a relative.”Volunteer search teams like Quiroa's often are forced to walk the deserts of northern Mexico with iron rods and shovels, looking for clandestine graves where the bodies of the relatives may have been dumped.Authorities lack both the manpower, equipment and training — and many say, the will — to investigate the abductions, much less arrest or punish those responsible. Things are so bad that authorities aren't even able to identify tens of thousands of bodies that have been found.Like everything else, the fact that Americans were involved in the most recent abduction may guarantee that Mexican authorities go after the killers. About two dozen suspects, most from the Juarez cartel, have been arrested in connection with the 2019 killings of nine U.S. citizens — women and children — in the western border state of Sonora.It is unclear exactly what faction of the Gulf cartel may have abducted the Americans in Matamoros last week. The gangs go by colorful nicknames like “The Scorpions,” “The Cyclones” and “The Troops of Hell.” In Matamoros, Correa-Cabrera said, they are essentially all offshoots of the Cardenas clan, whose head, Osiel Cardenas Guillen, was arrested in 2003.The gangs care little about innocent bystanders. In 2021, gunmen from factions of the Gulf cartel drove through the streets of Reynosa randomly killing 15 passersby just to intimidate their rivals.The Mexican government claims that its “hugs not bullets” strategy — anti-poverty programs intended to reduce the number of recruits for drug gangs — has been working. The number of officially recognized homicides fell from 719 in 2020, to 707 in 2021 and 492 in 2022.That, of course, doesn't count all of the disappeared people. But things are clearly not as bad as the dark days of 2010 and 2011 in Tamaulipas, when drug cartels massacred 72 migrants or dragged passengers off passing buses and killed hundreds who refused to fight each other to the death with sledge hammers.Correa-Cabrera said the decline in killings and crimes in Matamoros in recent years may have been because the Cardenas clan re-asserted control.“It was clear that the Cardenas family had control of the territory and there was a peace, a sort of mafia peace” in Matamoros, Correa-Cabrera said, until early this year when it appeared to break down.“At the start of this year, there began to be reports of a lot more extorsion by the same group that controls the city,” said the professor, who previously taught at the then University of Texas-Brownsville just across the Rio Grande from Matamoros.It is clear that the events have unnerved U.S. officials, who have to tread carefully given the nationalistic bent of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's administration.The United States depends on the Mexican government to help control the influx of migrants from South and Central America but also watches helplessly as Mexican-made fentanyl flows across the border, causing about 70,000 overdose deaths in the United States each year.In a rare criticism, U.S. Ambassador Ken Salazar wrote in his Twitter account Tuesday that “we are particularly worried about the control that the Gulf cartel exercises over an area known as the frontera chica,” which is near Matamoros.The Mexican government is likely to feel pressured to at least investigate those involved in the Americans' case."Cartel violence predated the (López Obrador) administration, of course, but the policy of ‘hugs not bullets’ is not yielding the promised results as evidenced by increasing violence,” said Andrew Rudman, director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute.

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Mexican army soldiers prepare a search mission for four U.S. citizens kidnapped by gunmen at Matamoros, Mexico

The rescue of American nationals has angered some of the local populace, as well over one hundred thousand Mexicans are still unaccounted for due to Cartel violence

Americans Kidnapped In Mexico Have Been Rescued

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Jaime Deigh poses with her student who dressed like her for "Superhero Day."

"You never know the influence you might have on a child regardless of the color of your skin, where you come from or who you are!"

Teacher Moved By Student Who Dresses Like Her On Superhero Day

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Since He did not spare even His own Son but gave Him up for us all, won’t He also give us everything else?

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The Carrie Murphy Show

A Comedy Special That Will Have You in Stitches!

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Since He did not spare even His own Son but gave Him up for us all, won’t He also give us everything else?

Romans 8:32 (NLT)

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