US troops left their key Afghanistan base at 3 a.m. without telling their allies, leaving 5,000 Taliban prisoners in their cells, reports say
- US troops left Bagram Airfield, their main base in Afghanistan, last week.
- They left at 3 a.m. with no warning, the base's new commander told the BBC.
- The troops reportedly shut off the power at the base and left thousands of Taliban prisoners.
US troops left their key base in Afghanistan in the dead of night last week without telling their Afghan allies, the base's new commander has said.
Gen. Asadullah Kohistani of the Afghan National Security and Defense Forces told the BBC that US forces left Bagram Airfield at 3 a.m. local time last Friday.
They also shut off the electricity when they left, the Associated Press reported.
"We [heard] some rumor that the Americans had left Bagram … and finally by 7 in the morning, we understood that it was confirmed that they had already left Bagram," General Kohistani told the AP.
The BBC said that as many as 5,000 Taliban prisoners remained interned at Bagram's prison. The Department of Defense did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
Bagram was captured during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and had been continuously occupied by US forces since then.
President Joe Biden announced plans in April to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks.
However, the Pentagon said it expects that US troops will be out of the country by the end of August, well ahead of Biden's deadline, the AP reported last week.
Around 1,000 troops are to remain to guard the US Embassy in Kabul, CNN reported.
As the US departs Afghanistan for good, the Taliban are said to be gaining new ground in the country.
Deborah Lyons, the UN envoy for Afghanistan, said on June 22 that the Taliban had taken control of 50 of the country's 370 districts since May, Reuters reported.
Kohistani, the Afghan general, told the BBC that he expected the Taliban to waste no time in attacking Bagram, as they are making "movements in rural areas" nearby.
After the US departed Bagram and before the Afghan National Security and Defense Forces moved in, a group of looters entered the base to collect anything of worth that American troops had left behind.