Thousands of Americans have flown from Afghanistan on charter flights with the U.S. military since the Taliban hijacked the country in mid-August, the U.S. military said Monday.
“We believe we have been able to evacuate thousands of Americans since the 14th,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters in Washington on August 14th. rice field.
The US military has evacuated a total of about 37,000 people since that day via its own flights or charter planes.
This means that up to 10.8 percent of those displaced by the military were Americans.
Asked for more specific numbers, Kirby described himself as “hesitating to be too specific.”
Therefore, the reporter asked if it was “intentionally ambiguous.”
“I think the numbers are very fluid and I think they change literally almost every hour, so I think I’ll leave them in the thousands for now,” he said.
Most of the people evacuated on U.S. flights are Afghan citizens, special immigrants because they can be persecuted to assist the U.S. military during decades of war in their home countries or to stay in the Taliban. Receive a visa or P-2 visa.
After leveling off for several days, the pace of evacuation has skyrocketed in the last 24 hours, with 25 US military flights departing with 61 charter commercials and other military flights.
About 16,000 passengers were able to leave Afghanistan.
The number of Americans on those flights was not given.
It is not yet clear how many Americans remain in the Taliban-owned countries that the United States plans to leave by August 31st.
The Department of State and the Pentagon usually estimate it to be between 5,000 and 10,000, but President Joe Biden nailed as many as 15,000 last week.
The Pentagon first identified how many Americans flew from Kabul on August 17, reaching 165 in the last 24 hours. The White House that night said 1,100 people had been evacuated.
Kirby said on August 19 that nearly 300 more people had been evacuated on the planes left in the last 24 hours. The next day, he later said that hundreds more were evacuated.
Major Hank Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters on Saturday that about 2,500 Americans had been evacuated.
Biden has vowed to station US troops in Afghanistan until all Americans who want to leave Afghanistan have been evacuated.
Zachary Stieber covers US news, including politics and proceedings. He started in The Epoch Times as a metro reporter for New York City.