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With the Taliban taking over the country after 20 years and President Ashraf Ghani fleeing, the world is watching Afghanistan which is now staring at a humanitarian crisis.
In a matter of weeks since US troops began to withdraw, the Taliban swept all major cities in Afghanistan and entered Kabul on Sunday, 15 August.
The withdrawal of forces by the US in Afghanistan is now being compared to the fall of Saigon and has rekindled memories of the Vitenam war for many.
The Vietnam War, the world's first televised war, was a conflict that killed 58,000 Americans and 2,50,000 Vietnamese and ended with the United States' expulsion from this Southeast Asian country.
It began at Dien Bien Phu when the North Vietnamese general Wu Yuanjia defeated the French colonial army. 21 years later, that same military leader defeated the Americans from South Vietnam in Saigon.
The US under the leadership of President Lyndon Johnson entered the war in 1965. This was after he passed a memorandum from the National Security Agency in November 1963 that allowed the United States to "help the people and government of South Vietnam win their victory".
After succeeding Johnson in 1969, President Richard Nixon assumed the responsibility of the war.
In January 1973, the United States and North Vietnam signed an agreement, called the 'Paris Peace Agreement', and the United States began to withdraw its troops.
However, in 1974, North Vietnam violated the agreement and resumed its attack on the South.
Between March and April 1975, the North Vietnamese army occupied more and more southern cities, causing the South Vietnamese to flee collectively.
When Saigon fell to the hands of the communists, visuals and images on TV and in newspapers showed that there were large groups of Americans, soldiers and civilians on the roof of the US Embassy waiting to be rescued.
The US evacuated more than 7,000 people in less than 24 hours, including 5,500 Vietnamese.
A lot of people took to Twitter to draw parallels between what happened in Saigon in 1975 as helicopters rescued Americans and Vietnamese as thousands of desperate people scaled the embassy’s walls.
However, US Secretary of State Anthony Brinken insisted that the Afghan mission to be 'successful' and refused to compare Kabul to Saigon.
(With Inputs from The Indian Express and The Print)
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