Sen. Cassidy recounts harrowing escape of over 250 Afghan young female musicians from Taliban hands

Senator Bill Cassidy is being honored this week with a Capitol Hill ‘Grammy’ for his work in evacuating a large group of women from Afghanistan during the United States’ messy withdrawal from the country in 2021.

The 272-strong Afghanistan Institute of Music had a dual purpose on its back: It taught music — which the Taliban are known to dislike — and the students were mostly girls.

“Everyone knew what would happen to Afghan women when the Taliban took over,” said Cassidy R-La., in an interview with DailyMail.com.

“It was very easy to imagine what else would happen to Afghan women who took it upon themselves to learn Western-style classical music.”

Cassidy said he was particularly interested in helping the school, which he initially connected with through a former campaign aide, because he knew not only would they be in danger in Afghanistan, but their passion would be taken from them.

Music school members on their last flight to their new home: Lisbon, Portugal

“Once that spark of creativity was ignited, and once these young women began 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 sniff it out. “‘

The senator’s team worked long hours calling government officials around the world, ultimately securing the freedom of approximately 272 young Afghan musicians and collaborators.

Cassidy believes the U.S. should have kept its small troop presence on the ground to keep the Taliban at bay and get intelligence about the region on the ground.

“A minimum amount of troops – 3,000 – and with an international coalition we are able to keep the Taliban in the corners of the country … for a really minimal investment. All that was sacrificed in an irresistible retreat.’

The Taliban had promised to be more moderate this time in power than it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but last week the United Nations suspended operations there because the Taliban would not allow women to work at the agency.

“I don’t think women in Afghanistan in particular feel that the Taliban are very moderate,” Cassidy said.

A young student hugs the founder of the music school, Dr. Ahmad Sarmas

“Everyone knew what would happen to Afghan women when the Taliban took the place,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy R-La., in an interview with DailyMail.com

Founded in 2010 under the US-backed government of Kabul by Dr. Ahmad Sarmast, the school was a sign of progress in the country – bringing together girls and boys who were usually kept separate and bringing in orphans and children who work on the streets to teach them a combination of Afghan and Western classical music.

These advances made them a threat to the Taliban and their sharia right from the start.

Once the school escaped, Sarmast, who was wounded in 2014 by a Taliban suicide bomber who broke into a school play, told the students that once they escaped, they could play an outside role in the Taliban resistance movement .

When Cassidy’s office came into contact with the music school in August, they attempted to help at least five other groups flee the country — but many were unable to escape due to insurance issues, Taliban looted buses and planes denied permission to leave.

They had planes on the ground several times to get the girls out, but they couldn’t get past the Taliban – some took bribes, some didn’t, and some killed people indiscriminately.

Every morning, Cassidy’s foreign policy assistant called US Central Command and they told him which gate was open for evacuations that day. The aide would urge Cent Com to send a message to the Marines on top of the wall to look for a bus with lights on it containing the girls from the school.

At one point, the students got past the Taliban, but were stopped by the US government – they had closed all entrances after receiving information that a bomb was about to go off.

At one point, Cassidy was on the phone with a senior White House official and his staff was on the phone with Chief of Staff Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, but no one wanted to open the gates again.

For more than 12 hours, US 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 — extraction was nearly impossible.

The show goes on! Musicians from the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) days after fleeing Afghanistan and arriving in Qatar for processing

In this photo taken on Feb. 19, 2019, Afghan conductor Negina Khpalwak, 22, the first female orchestra conductor in Afghanistan, plays the piano at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul

American cellist Yo-Yo Ma (center) performs the Allegro of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachmusik with fellow musicians during the event ‘The important of music for the Union of peoples’ on March 29, 2022 in Lisbon, Portugal

Cassidy then called the Embassy of Qatar, which involved the Qatari royal family. Qatar pressured the Taliban to release the group to their country, but only 100 of the students had passports. Those girls were allowed 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 Portugal’s defense minister and Estonia’s intelligence minister. The minister of intelligence had seen the students perform and persuaded the Portuguese to offer the students a residence.

From there, Qatar mounted a pressure campaign on the Taliban, who eventually agreed to put the 150 remaining students at 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 moved to Lisbon, where they are still studying music, touring and performing.

Cassidy will be honored along with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and musician Pharrell Williams at the Recording Academy’s annual “Grammys on the Hill.”

The Louisiana senator will receive the award this week as Biden’s government offices ponder what went wrong with the frenzied withdrawal and reports mount that ISIS is plotting terrorism from within the nation.

Earlier this month, the State and Defense Departments released their congressional-mandated post-mortem assessment of what went right and wrong during the now-infamous end of America’s longest war.

The report largely backed the decision to leave, citing “unclear objectives” and “America’s goal was never to build nations.”

But the reverberations of the withdrawal continue to haunt the US to this day – ISIS is now coordinating terrorist attacks from the Taliban-led country against Europe and Asia, even waging “ambitious conspiracy” for raids on the US, according to classified documents which were 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 over whether it should 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 deal with the Taliban promising to do so.