Pentagon says Afghan evacuations will continue through August 31
Washington DC: The Pentagon rejected reports on Thursday that they are preparing to end evacuations from Afghanistan before this weekend, saying the operations from Kabul airport will continue until August 31.
"Evacuation operations in Kabul will not be wrapping up in 36 hours. We will continue to evacuate as many people as we can until the end of the mission," Defence Department Spokesman John Kirby said.
Key U.S. allies France, Canada, Hungary, the Netherlands and others already announced they had or would soon halt their evacuation flights, and Germany was also expected to carry out its last flights by Friday, amid intelligence that suicide bombers were threatening the Kabul airport.
The total number of people who have been taken out of the U.S.-controlled Kabul airport since the international airlift began on August 14 hit 95,700 Thursday, including both Afghans and foreign nationals.
President Joe Biden said on Tuesday that the United States would stick to its deadline of withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan by August 31, to end the two-decade US-led war there. A spokesman for the Taliban, which seized Kabul on August 15 to cap a lightning campaign against government forces, said Tuesday that the evacuation operation had to end on August 31.
The US has so far evacuated over 82,000 people from Kabul, with about 19,000 in the last 24 hours alone, in "one of the largest" airlifts in the world history, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said.
Starting on August 14, the day when the Taliban toppled the US-backed Afghanistan government, there were 6,000 American citizens in the war-torn country who wanted to leave. Over the last 10 days, roughly 4,500 of these Americans have been safely evacuated along with their immediate family members, Blinken told reporters here on Wednesday.
Since August 14th, more than 82,300 people have been safely flown out of Kabul. In the 24-hour period from Tuesday to Wednesday, approximately 19,000 people were evacuated on 90 US military and
coalition flights.
