WASHINGTON, The Pentagon said Friday that about 6,000 passengers, “including a couple hundred American citizens” have departed Kabul, Afghanistan in the last 24 hours on 17 flights.
“Our mission to defend Kabul Airport and evacuate people from Afghanistan as quickly and safely as possible continues,” said Joint Staff Regional Operations Deputy Director Hank Taylor during a Pentagon briefing.
He affirmed “the airport remains secure, evacuation flights are steadily increasing, and we are doing everything we can to maximize safe evacuations.” He reiterated that flights were paused earlier today leaving Kabul “while we adjusted resources and personnel to ensure a temporary capacity issue at one of our stopover locations, although flight operations have resumed.” He added “we’re looking at additional locations for these initial flights too land. We’re grateful for our allies, including Germany, where flights will land today who are cooperating with us in this global effort.” He stressed “aircraft availability is not an issue. We intend to maximize each plane’s capacity. We’re prioritizing the evacuation of people above all else, and we’re focused on doing this as safely as possible with a great sense of urgency.” “We have not experienced any hostile acts since my last update. The troops on the ground are steadfast in an extremely dynamic environment,” he remarked.
Taylor continued “we continue to assess the operating environment and will aggressively addressed any threat to the mission, the safety and security of American citizens and service members, our partners who remain in Kabul alongside us, and the Afghan people is absolutely our top priority.” For his part, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby told reporters “we know that al-Qaeda is a presence, as well as (IS) in Afghanistan and we’ve talked about that for quite some time.” “We do not believe it is exorbitantly high,” he added. “What we believe is that there isn’t a presence that is significant enough to merit a threat to our homeland, as there was back on 9/11, 20 years ago.” He stressed “obviously, we’re still going to maintain and overwatch vigilance with respect to the counterterrorism threat emanating out of Afghanistan and if we need to, we will take action to eliminate and defeat that threat.”
Source: Kuwait News Agency