Lt. General Sami Sadat, one of Afghanistan’s most senior special forces commanders, was in the middle of an offensive against the Taliban when he heard that President Joe Biden had ordered American troops to leave the country.
He described his disbelief to congressional investigators reviewing the disastrous withdrawal in an interview last year.
‘It felt like a dagger into my heart, that day he looked like a tyrant, he sounded like a tyrant and he acted as a tyrant,’ he said in bombshell testimony released for the first time in the Republican-led Afghanistan withdrawal report.
The House GOP’s long-awaited report, published Sunday, revealed a catalogue of missteps leading up to Biden’s decision, followed by complacency and mismanagement as American forces and diplomats left amid chaotic scenes.
Sadat, 39, was a commander of the Afghan National Special Operation Corps and Deputy Chief of General Staff of the Afghan National Army, at the time of Taliban takeover.
Taliban security personnel take part in a military parade to celebrate the third anniversary of the Taliban government takeover, in Bagram, Afghanistan, 14 August 2024
His account captures how Afghan soldiers felt they had been abandoned after fighting with the U.S. for two decades.
The order from Biden crippled Sadat and his forces, he told Congress, all before the U.S. government eventually surrendered Bagram Air Base and enforced a frantic Noncombatant Evacuation Order (NEO) to get thousands out.
The scene was reminiscent of the fall of Saigon half a century earlier when U.S. military forces and diplomatic personnel were caught flat footed and had to escape from the U.S. embassy in a panic-stricken airlift.
The videos from Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) – the main evacuation point during the withdrawal – show similarly desperate images of Afghans running alongside U.S. military aircraft with shattered hopes of getting a ride.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee, the body behind the probe, has held countless hearings on the operation that left U.S. citizens and close allies behind in a Taliban-controlled country.
‘When President Biden was making the announcement to go to zero for U.S. troops, I was in southwestern Afghan leading an operation, I watched it with interest,’ Sadat told investigators of the president’s order prompting the drawdown.
‘The bad moment was when the announcement came in,’ he continued.
He describes not only being totally taken aback by the order, but how it’s implementation put typically allied Afghan and U.S. forces at odds.
‘The truth of the matter is that after President Biden announced the withdrawal, the U.S. forces and Afghan forces were in complete disarray with each other.’
Afghan Gen. Sami Sadat (left) greets U.S. Gen. Scott Miller, the head of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, in the southern province of Helmand in April 2021. ‘For the past one year the Afghan forces have held their ground pretty well,’ Sadat said. U.S. and Afghan forces were taken over by the Taliban just months after this photo
Sadat along with coalition forces. He trained in the U.K. as he rose the Afghan military ranks
President Joe Biden speaks about the end of the war in Afghanistan on Aug. 31, 2021
U.S. President Joe Biden (C) meets with the National Security Council on the Ukraine-Russia crisis, in the situation Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 24, 2022
‘It was excruciating to separate two war brothers … two militaries that worked for twenty years.’
U.S. military forces held a presence in Afghanistan since shortly after the World Trade Center towers fell.
American and Afghanistan military forces have forged a close operating relationship over the decades since.
‘President Biden not only betrayed the U.S.-Afghan Strategic agreement but also betrayed the wishes to his own troops, causing a strategic defeat to Afghans and Americans from the very White House that held the highest realm of the U.S. military,’ Sadat told HFAC investigators.
But it was not just Biden who he cast blame on.
‘What followed next was a rapid withdrawal of the U.S. forces from the country while the Taliban rapidly deployed against the Afghan troops, politically there was immense pressure by Secretary Blinken and his envoy on our President to resign office.’
The country’s president, Ashraf Ghani, fled the country on August 15, 2021.
It was the same day Taliban forces marched into the capital Kabul and took power.
Sadat’s testimony accompanies a fresh report from the committee highlighting the extent of the Biden-Harris administration’s Afghanistan failures.
Some of the top new discoveries in the report show that the former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ross Wilson was on vacation just weeks before the military withdrawal and while the Taliban was running rampant taking over cities across the country.
The civilian evacuation was not formally ordered until August 16, a day after the Taliban had swept into Kabul, where U.S. citizens, diplomatic personnel and military were positioned close to HKIA.
In the mad dash to leave the country, classified documents and items were recovered by Taliban forces, including those left behind at the U.S. embassy.
Some embassy staffers sought to light sensitive materials alight burning them in microwaves.
The 2021 fall of Kabul was the capture of Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul by the Taliban on 15 August 2021. U.S. Air Force Boeing C-17 Globemaster III safely transported approximately 640 Afghan citizens from Hamid Karzai International Airport Aug. 15, 2021
Sadat (L) described the withdrawal as damaging to the U.S. and Afghan forces coalition
Additionally, there were reports that Blinken and Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin had wanted Ghani to resign as the Taliban spread throughout major cities and provinces.
‘Personally I lost my U.S. friends and our edge on the battlefield as the U.S. removed its air force and the contractors supporting our air and ground forces,’ Sadat testified.
When Biden entered office in January 2021 he had 2,500 troops in the country after former President Donald Trump began unwinding the American military footprint there.
However, there were thousands of military contractors in the country, reports indicate, some estimating that they far outnumbered U.S. troops in Afghanistan at the time.
‘Taliban would have never been able to defeat the Afghan troops if it was not for a careless and heartless decision of President Biden ordering immediate, unconditional and un-coordinated withdrawal,’ the general said.
And on August 26, 2021, disaster struck.
An Islamic State suicide bomber attacked a crowd of Afghans seeking to enter HKIA to evacuate the now Taliban-controlled country.
More than 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops died in the attack.
The last U.S. forces departed the country days later on August 30 – ending a 20-year American presence.
After the final troops left the country, more than 300 American citizens had to be rescued after the fact, as they were left behind, according to the committee’s report.
Again Sadat stressed to the committee: Biden’s ‘act made the world less secure, less harmonized and more vulnerable by every measure.’
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