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https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/pineapple-express-rescue-afghan-special-forces/2021/08/28/id/1034133/

A volunteer group of American military veterans have been helping hundreds of at-risk Afghan elite forces and their families to safety in a night-time operation called “Pineapple Express,” a daring and heroic private mission detailed by embedded ABC News reporters witnessing the heart-pounding operations.

“Dozens of high-risk individuals, families with small children, orphans, and pregnant women, were secretly moved through the streets of Kabul throughout the night and up to just seconds before ISIS detonated a bomb into the huddled mass of Afghans seeking safety and freedom,” a leader of the private rescue effort, Army Lt. Col. Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret commander, told ABC News, which had journalists embedded with the groups.

The group is working with the U.S. military and U.S. embassy to move people in small groups, if not one at a time, into the secured areas of the U.S.-controlled Hamid Karzai International Airport, according to the report.

The dangers of the operation were increased by the pair of suicide bombings that killed at least 13 U.S. service members and wounded 15 more.

Pineapple Express, an offshoot of “Task Force Pineapple,” has rescued 500 Afghan special operators, assets and enablers, and their families overnight to date, ABC News reported.

The operation was named after refugees who would hold up their smartphones showing a graphic of yellow pineapples on a pink field to identify themselves, according to the report. The password has since changed.

“This Herculean effort couldn’t have been done without the unofficial heroes inside the airfield who defied their orders to not help beyond the airport perimeter, by wading into sewage canals and pulling in these targeted people who were flashing pineapples on their phones,” Mann told ABC News.

The operation began Aug. 15 when the group helped rescue an Afghan commando who was being hunted by the Taliban and had received death threats by text because they knew he was a high-value target having worked with Navy SEAL Team Six for a dozen years.

The operation was made more difficult by the ISIS-K threat warning that came before the suicide bombings.

“We have lost comms with several of our teams,” Jason Redman, a wounded former Navy SEAL, texted in an encrypted chat viewed by ABC News.

It was initially believed the blackout might have been because of the Taliban taking down cell towers, but another Task Force Pineapple member, a Green Beret, learned the U.S. military was jamming cell phones to counter terror threats outside the Kabul airport gates.

“The whole night was a roller-coaster ride,” Redman told ABC News. “People were so terrified in that chaotic environment. These people were so exhausted, I kept trying to put myself in their shoes.”

http://Biden’s mad-lib bungle He’s sticking to the mission, even as he throws out his back on every banana peel from here to Jalalabad

The terrorist attack at Kabul airport on Thursday was so horrific as to summon the word ‘unprecedented’. But it was nothing of the sort. In fact, it was hard not to be struck by a numbing sense of déjà vu.

There was the nature of the attack: a suicide bombing, pioneered as a terrorist technique by the Tamil Tiger rebels in Sri Lanka but introduced to Americans by our Islamist foes. I remember reading for the first time about a suicide bomb back in 2001 and trying to comprehend the sheer fanaticism that could lead anyone to push that button. Fast-forward 20 years to the supposedly more enlightened Afghanistan we created, and that same evil is still ripping apart the innocent.

There was the ghoulish disregard for human life, a trademark of Islamic extremists. The killed were not just combat forces but evacuees, men and women trying to get out of Afghanistan. The initial bombing was, according to one account, followed by a shooting, as a gunman sprayed fire into the desperate crowd. The attack killed more Americans than any incident in Afghanistan since 2011.

There was the fatigues-clad military man, General McKenzie from CENTCOM, discussing death in the calm tones of a specialist and vowing to press on with the mission.

There was the media, throwing it to their correspondents in Doha or Amman — not Kabul, to be sure, but still run by Muslims, so close enough.

There were the credentialed foreign policy gurus wearily returning to the cameras to reopen their vast stocks of Delphic wisdom for public consumption. Some of these graybeards were on-air in 2001 too. Being wrong about everything has in no way set back their careers.

And there was the hastily cobbled together presidential address. Joe Biden’s royal bungling of the Afghanistan withdrawal has drawn comparisons to Saigon under Gerald Ford, but it’s actually par for the course in the War on Terror.