Lt. Gen. Sami Sadat, one of Afghanistan’s top special forces commanders, was in the midst of an offensive against the Taliban when he learned that President Joe Biden had ordered U.S. troops to leave the country.
Last year, in an interview with congressional investigators probing the disastrous withdrawal, he expressed disbelief.
“It felt like a stab in the heart. That day he looked like a tyrant, sounded like a tyrant, and acted like a tyrant,” he said in shocking testimony released for the first time in the Republican-led report on the Afghan withdrawal.
The long-awaited report from the House Republican Party, released Sunday, revealed a series of missteps that led to Biden’s decision, followed by complacency and mismanagement as US troops and diplomats left amid chaotic scenes.
Sadat, 39, was commander of the Afghan National Special Operations Corps and deputy chief of staff of the Afghan National Army at the time of the Taliban takeover.
Taliban security personnel take part in a military parade to mark the third anniversary of the Taliban government’s takeover, in Bagram, Afghanistan, August 14, 2024
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His story describes how Afghan soldiers felt abandoned after twenty years of fighting the US.
Biden’s order paralyzed Sadat and his forces, he told Congress, before the US government eventually surrendered the Bagram air base and issued a panicked non-combatant evacuation (NEO) order to evacuate thousands of people.
The scene was reminiscent of the fall of Saigon half a century earlier, when American forces and diplomatic personnel were surprised and forced to escape the American embassy in panic via an airlift.
Videos from Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) – the main evacuation point during the withdrawal – show similarly desperate images of Afghans running alongside US military planes, hoping they can one day join them.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee, the body behind the investigation, has held numerous hearings into the operation that left American citizens and allies in a Taliban-controlled country.
“When President Biden announced he was going to reduce US troops, I was in southwest Afghanistan leading an operation. I followed it with interest,” Sadat told investigators of the president’s order that led to the withdrawal.
“The bad moment was when the announcement came in,” he continued.
He describes not only how he was completely overwhelmed by the order, but also how its execution brought the Afghan and American forces into conflict with each other.
“The truth is that after President Biden announced the withdrawal, the US and Afghan forces were in complete disarray.”
Afghan General Sami Sadat (left) greets U.S. General Scott Miller, the head of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, in southern Helmand province in April 2021. “Over the past year, Afghan forces have held their ground quite well,” Sadat said. U.S. and Afghan forces were taken over by the Taliban just months after this photo
Sadat with coalition forces. He trained in the UK when he reached the Afghan military ranks
President Joe Biden speaks on ending the war in Afghanistan on August 31, 2021
U.S. President Joe Biden (center) meets with the National Security Council on the crisis between Ukraine and Russia, in the situation room of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 24, 2022
“It was terrible to separate two war brothers… two soldiers who had worked together for twenty years.”
US forces were already present in Afghanistan shortly after the World Trade Center towers collapsed.
The US and Afghan forces have built close cooperation over the past decades.
“President Biden has betrayed not only the US-Afghanistan strategic agreement, but also the wishes of his own troops. This has caused a strategic defeat for Afghans and Americans from the White House, which has supreme authority over the US military,” Sadat told HFAC investigators.
But he didn’t just blame Biden.
“What followed was a rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country, while the Taliban quickly turned on Afghan forces. Politically, there was tremendous pressure from Secretary Blinken and his envoy on our president to resign.”
The country’s President Ashraf Ghani fled the country on August 15, 2021.
It was the same day that the Taliban invaded the capital Kabul and took over.
Sadat’s testimony accompanies a new report by the commission highlighting the scale of the Biden-Harris administration’s failures in Afghanistan.
Some of the report’s key new discoveries show that former US ambassador to Afghanistan Ross Wilson was on vacation just weeks before the military withdrawal, as the Taliban rampantly seized cities across the country.
The evacuation of civilians was not officially ordered until August 16, a day after the Taliban invaded Kabul. American civilians, diplomatic personnel and military personnel were stationed near HKIA.
In the rush to leave the country, Taliban forces seized classified documents and items, including those left behind at the US embassy.
Some embassy staff attempted to ignite sensitive materials by burning them in the microwave.
The Fall of Kabul in 2021 was the capture of the Afghan capital Kabul by the Taliban on August 15, 2021. The U.S. Air Force Boeing C-17 Globemaster III safely transported approximately 640 Afghan civilians from Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 15, 2021.
Sadat (left) described the withdrawal as damaging to the US-Afghan coalition
Additionally, there were reports that Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wanted Ghani to step down as the Taliban spread across major cities and provinces.
“Personally, I lost my American friends and our advantage on the battlefield when the US withdrew its air force and the contractors who supported our air and ground forces,” Sadat testified.
When Biden took office in January 2021, he had 2,500 troops in the country, after former President Donald Trump began reducing the U.S. military presence there.
However, there were thousands of military contractors in the country, reports show, with some estimating they far outnumbered U.S. troops in Afghanistan at the time.
“The Taliban would never have been able to defeat the Afghan forces if President Biden had not made such a rash and callous decision, ordering an immediate, unconditional and uncoordinated withdrawal,” the general said.
And on August 26, 2021, disaster struck.
An Islamic State suicide bomber has attacked a group of Afghans trying to enter HKIA to evacuate the now Taliban-controlled country.
More than 170 Afghans and 13 American soldiers were killed in the attack.
The last American troops left the country a few days later, on August 30, ending a 20-year American presence.
After the last troops left the country, more than 300 American citizens had to be rescued because they had been left behind, the commission’s report found.
Sadat reiterated to the committee that Biden’s “action has made the world less safe, less harmonious and more fragile in every way.”