Sen. Bill Cassidy will be honored this week with a Capitol Hill ‘Grammy’ for his work helping to evacuate a large group of women from Afghanistan during the United States’ messy 2021 withdrawal from the country.
The 272-strong Afghanistan Institute of Music had a double target on its back: it was teaching music — which the Taliban are known to hate — and its students were mostly girls.
‘Everybody knew what was going to happen to Afghan women when the Taliban took the place,’ Cassidy R-La., said in an interview with DailyMail.com.
‘It was very easy to imagine what would happen even more so to Afghan women who had taken upon themselves to learn Western style classical music.’
Cassidy said he took particular interest in helping the school, which he initially got in contact with through a former campaign staffer, because he knew that not only would they be in danger in Afghanistan, but their passion would be taken away from them.
The 272-strong Afghanistan Institute of Music had a double target on its back: it was teaching music — which the Taliban are known to hate — and its students were mostly girls
Music school members on their final flight to their new home: Lisbon, Portugal
‘Once that spark of creativity had ignited, and once these young women begin to understand the kind of fulfillment that could come from the arts, there was a double tragedy of “no now that you’ve tasted it, we’re going to snuff it out.”‘
The senator’s team worked long hours and had calls with administration officials worldwide that eventually resulted in securing the freedom of around 272 young Afghan musicians and staff.
Cassidy, alongside Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and musician Pharrell Williams – will be honored by the Recording Academy’s annual ‘Grammys on the Hill.’
The Louisiana senator is set to accept the award this week as Biden administration agencies reflect on what went wrong with the frenzied withdrawal and there are growing reports that ISIS is plotting terrorism from the nation.
Earlier this month the State and Defense Departments released their congressionally-mandated post-mortem assessing what went right and wrong during the now-infamous end to America’s longest war.
The report largely stood by the decision to leave, citing ‘unclear objectives’ and ‘America’s goal was never to nation-build.’
But reverberations from the pullout continues to haunt the U.S. to today – ISIS is now coordinating terrorist attacks from within the Taliban-run nation against Europe and Asia, and even conducting ‘aspirational plotting’ for incursions on the U.S., according to classified documents leaked on Discord and obtained by the Washington Post.
Republicans are united in opposition to the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal – but divided on if it needed to happen at all.
Democrats, including Biden in his recently released after-action reports, blame Trump, who long promised to bring home the last of the 2,300 troops stationed there and signed a peace agreement with the Taliban that promised to do so.
A young student hugs music school founder Dr. Ahmad Sarmas
‘Everybody knew what was going to happen to Afghan women when the Taliban took the place,’ Sen. Bill Cassidy R-La., said in an interview with DailyMail.com
Cassidy is of the mind that the U.S. should have kept its small presence of troops on the ground to keep the Taliban at bay and get on-the-ground intel on the region.
‘A minimal amount of troops – 3000 – and with an international coalition, we’re able to maintain the Taliban in the recesses of the country … for really a minimal amount of money invested. All that was sacrificed in a pell mell retreat.’
The Taliban had promised to be more moderate this time in power than they were in the late ’90s and early 2000s, but just last week the United Nations suspended operations there because the Taliban would not allow women to work at the agency.
‘I don’t think the women of Afghanistan particularly feel like Taliban are being very moderate,’ said Cassidy.
Founded in 2010 under the American-backed Kabul government by Dr. Ahmad Sarmast, the school was a sign of progress in the nation – bringing together girls and boys who were usually kept separate and bringing in orphans and children who work on the street to teach them a combination of Afghan and Western classical music.
From the start, that progress made them a threat to the Taliban and their Sharia law.
Once the school escaped, Sarmast, who was wounded by a Taliban suicide bomber in 2014 who broke into a school play, told the students once they’d escaped they could play a part in the Taliban resistance movement from the outside.
When Cassidy’s office came in contact with the music school in August they were trying to aid at least five other groups in escaping the country – but many could not escape due to insurance issues, Taliban raiding buses and planes that could not get the clearance to take off.
They had planes on the ground to get the girls out at multiple times but they could not get through the Taliban – some were accepting bribes, some weren’t and some were indiscriminately killing people.
Every morning Cassidy’s foreign policy aide would call the U.S. Central Command and they would tell him what gate was open that day for evacuations. The aide would urge Cent Com to get a message to the Marines on top of the wall to look out for a bus with lights on top of it containing the girls from the school.
At one point the students made it past the Taliban but were stopped by the U.S. government – they had shut down all entrances after receiving intelligence a bomb was going to go off.
At one point Cassidy was on the phone with a high-level White House official and his staff was on the phone with the chief of staff for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley- but no one would reopen the gates.
For over 12 hours, U.S. officials knew a bomb was going to explode but they didn’t know where and they didn’t know when.
And after the bomb went off – killing 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. Marines – extractions were nearly impossible.
The show goes on! Musicians of the Afghanistan National Institute of music (ANIM) days after fleeing Afghanistan and arriving in Qatar for processing
In this photo taken on February 19, 2019, Afghan conductor Negina Khpalwak, 22, the first female orchestra conductor in Afghanistan, plays piano at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul
US cellist Yo-Yo Ma (C) plays with fellow musicians the Allegro of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachmusik at ‘The importance of music for the Union of peoples’ event on March 29, 2022, in Lisbon, Portugal
Cassidy then called the Embassy of Qatar who got the Qatari royal family involved. Qatar put pressure on the Taliban to pass the group through to their country, but only 100 of the students had passports. Those girls were allowed to pass through, but for the other 150 it was all-hands-on-deck to get them to the top of the list to get papers from the last working passport machine in Afghanistan.
Cellist Yo Yo Ma was influential in the process, as was the Minister of Defense of Portugal and the Minister of Intelligence in Estonia. The intelligence minister had seen the students perform and talked the Portuguese into offering residency for the students.
From there, Qatar put a pressure campaign on the Taliban who finally agreed to move the 150 remaining students to the top of the list for passport documents. On November 17, five Qatari Airlines flights rescued the 150 remaining students, who were reunited with their classmates in Qatar.
On December 13, the school relocated to Lisbon, where they continue to study music, tour and perform today.
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Read more at DailyMail.co.uk