(Washington) The United States again urged Americans on Monday to leave warring Ethiopia “immediately” on their own, adding the warning: there will be no military evacuation as it was. the case for Afghanistan.
The American embassy has been urging its fellow citizens for several days to take commercial flights to leave the country, where rebel groups no longer rule out marching on Addis Ababa, the capital. It offers loans to those who are unable to purchase a ticket immediately.
“We are doing this not out of pessimism about the prospects for peace, but out of practicality,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters on Monday, issuing a new appeal.
He said he feared a “misunderstanding” on the part of the public which could “think that what took place in Afghanistan can be reproduced by the American government everywhere else in the world”.
In mid-August, when the Taliban captured Kabul even before the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan was completed, the United States sent thousands of military personnel back to the airport in the Afghan capital to improvise an evacuation operation. unprecedented.
In just over two weeks, with the help of its allies, the US military established an airlift and evacuated more than 123,000 people – Americans, foreigners, but also and especially Afghans fearing reprisals from the country’s new Islamist masters, especially for having worked with Westerners in the past.
However, the government of US President Joe Biden has been criticized for failing to evacuate these people further upstream, rather than in general bailout, and for leaving Americans behind after the withdrawal of foreign forces. The State Department announced an internal investigation to determine how it could have better anticipated and organized these evacuations.
Obviously anxious to take the lead, Ned Price insisted Monday, about Ethiopia: “What we did in Afghanistan was unique”, “a military airlift of nearly 125,000 people”, “it is not something the US government can replicate elsewhere ”.
“There is no reason for Americans to wait until the last minute” to leave the Horn of Africa country on commercial flights, he insisted.