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111 Afghan school girls escape Kabul safely

▶ Watch Video: Biden administration scrambles to contain Afghanistan crisis

A group of 111 Afghan school girls in Kabul were able to fly out on a C-17 Saturday night in an attempt to flee the Taliban, sources in Doha, Qatar, confirmed to CBS News.

The girls attended a special leadership school in Kabul sponsored by the government of Qatar.

Sources tell CBS News that the students have successfully arrived at the Al Udeid Air Base in Doha, Qatar and have been processed.

The State Department says they cannot comment on specific groups of evacuees but say, “we are working around the clock to maximize evacuations.”

President Biden said Sunday that there were 11,000 people evacuated from Kabul this weekend. Mr. Biden said said the evacuation would be “hard and painful” no matter what and mentioned “pain, loss and heartbreaking images.”

Thousands of Americans and Afghans are still being evacuated in Kabul as the Taliban has seized control of the country. The U.S. has maintained control of the airport in Kabul, where harrowing scenes showed a crush of people desperate to gain access to military aircraft leaving the country, while the U.S. embassy in the capital city warned Americans on Saturday not to travel to the airport and avoid airport gates due to ongoing security threats.

Analysis: The world Washington built is fraying. What comes next?

The United States is confronting a global security environment that increasingly resembles the outcome its Cold War adversaries once hoped to produce: a divided West, weakened alliances, economic exhaustion, multiple simultaneous wars and declining confidence in American leadership. That does not mean today’s crises were orchestrated according to some surviving Soviet master plan. The Soviet Union is gone, and the threats facing Washington now come from several different states with different interests. But the strategic effect is strikingly familiar. Early NATO assessments of Soviet intentions warned that Moscow sought to weaken the democratic powers, deny the West a secure European base and ultimately exhaust North America economically. Now, NATO says Russia is again trying to reconfigure the Euro-Atlantic security order through military force, sabotage, cyberattacks, coercion and disinformation. The difference is that much of the pressure now confronting the West is occurring simultaneously — and some of the damage to alliance cohesion is self-inflicted.
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