About 200 Westerners, including Americans, fly out of Kabul

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — An estimated 200 foreigners, including Americans, left Afghanistan on a commercial flight out of Kabul on Thursday with the cooperation of the Taliban — the first such large-scale departure since U.S. forces completed their frantic withdrawal over a week ago.

The Qatar Airways flight to Doha marked a breakthrough in the bumpy coordination between the U.S. and Afghanistan’s new rulers. A dayslong standoff over charter planes at another airport has left hundreds of mostly Afghan people stranded, waiting for Taliban permission to leave.

A senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the media, said the Taliban's foreign minister and deputy prime minister helped facilitate the flight. Americans, U.S. green card holders and other nationalities, including Germans, Hungarians and Canadians, were aboard, the official said.

Qatari envoy Mutlaq bin Majed al-Qahtani said another 200 passengers will leave Afghanistan on Friday.

It was not immediately clear how many Americans were on board Thursday and how many were still in Afghanistan.

The White House said before the flight that there were roughly 100 U.S. citizens left in Afghanistan. But several veterans groups have said that that number is too low because many citizens never bothered to tell U.S. officials they were in the country. And they said the figure overlooks green-card-carrying permanent U.S. residents living in Afghanistan who want to leave.

Many thousands of Afghans remain desperate to get out, too, afraid of what Taliban rule might hold. The Taliban have repeatedly said foreigners and Afghans with proper travel documents could leave. But their assurances have been met with skepticism, and many Afghans have been unable to obtain certain...