escape in the hold of a cargo plane

The plane has facilities to carry 150 seated passengers, but the gravity of the situation in the Asian country has forced such a decision to be taken to save as many people as possible. Beyond extreme measure, the flight was not a record for this type of aircraft, since in 2013 another C-17 carried 670 people fleeing a typhoon in the Philippines.

On Sunday afternoon, a video circulated on social media in which we saw how hundreds of Afghans they sneaked into the plane by the semi-open ramp. The number of passengers was confirmed to Defense One by a representative of the US Air Force, after the plane landed. at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar.

UK welcomes Afghan refugees

The British government will announce in the coming days a plan of “tailor-made resettlement” for the most vulnerable Afghan population after the dramatic takeover of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, by the Taliban.

According to a spokesperson for 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the British government, the refugee program’s policy should focus primarily on helping women and girls.

In this sense, Foreign Minister Dominic Raab, who had to cancel his vacation yesterday and return to London due to the crisis in Afghanistan, told the BBC that the UK was considering a “tailor-made deal” for Afghan refugees and that the details to be established will be reported in due course.

Raab told the BBC Breakfast program that the UK “has always been a country which has always provided refuge for those fleeing persecution”, but stressed that the most important thing is to try to ensure stability so that this large number is not reached. migration. “So I think that should be the number one priority, but nevertheless, asylum is really important,” he said.

Facebook banned posts with Taliban content

Facebook has banned from its platforms all content in support of the Taliban militia – which since yesterday fully controls Afghanistan – which it considers a “terrorist organization”, and announced that a group of experts is already active for them. monitor and eliminate them.

“The Taliban are sanctioned as a terrorist organization under US law and we have banned them from our service under our dangerous organization policies. This means that we remove accounts managed by or on behalf of the Taliban and prohibit praise, support and representation of them. “, a spokesperson for Facebook told the British public information service BBC.

For years, Islamist militias have used social media to spread their messages, so their rapid takeover of Afghanistan poses new challenges for tech companies on how to deal with content related to this group and to d other radical groups.

>> Read more: Horror in Afghanistan: they try to flee clinging to a plane and fall from the air

Facebook has called the Taliban a dangerous organization for many years. The tech giant’s spokesperson added that “a dedicated team of experts in Afghanistan, who are native speakers of Dari and Pashto and know the local context, are helping us identify and alert us to emerging issues. on the platform “.