Spain's Armed Forces to withdraw from Afghanistan
Tuesday, August 25, 2015 @ 6:09 PM
SPANISH troops will pull out of Afghanistan at the end of October after a constant 13-year presence in the conflict-ridden Asian country.
The 464 soldiers currently based at Herat, in the west of Afghanistan, will come home in two months' time, with only around 20 officials at the NATO base in Kabul remaining for the foreseeable future.
Spain is involved in the 'resolute support' mission in Afghanistan, aimed at strengthening the process of stabilising the country's political climate and providing back-up for Afghan security forces and emergency services.
Until the beginning of this year, Spanish soldiers were participating in the so-called International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission, but their role has mainly been that of re-establishing proper law and order and civil protection rather than front-line combat fighting in the last few years.
A day after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC, the Atlantic Committee of NATO applied Article 5 of the Treaty of Washington for the first time in history: here, all signatory countries are required to respond where one of them has suffered an armed offensive.
At the same time, the United Nations called for the international community to provide urgent assistance to the Afghan population who were living under Taliban rule – an extremist régime in which women were not allowed to work or even show their faces at the window of their homes, and could be shot or stoned to death for showing an inch of flesh in public even by accident, or for going outside without being accompanied by a male relative.
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