The US evacuates more than 3,000 people from Afghanistan.
Photo: WAKIL KOHSAR / AFP / Getty Images
The United States has already evacuated 3,200 people from Afghanistan, a number that the government expects to increase in the coming days. a senior White House official told reporters on Tuesday.
The evacuations come after the US resumed military flights at the Kabul airport on Monday, after interrupting them due to the chaos unleashed in the previous hours by the irruption of hundreds of Afghans on the runways in an attempt to climb onto the flights intended to evacuate Americans and their allies.
According to the aforementioned official, Washington has evacuated 3,200 people from Afghanistan in recent days, including diplomatic personnel.
Only this tuesday 1,100 US citizens, permanent residents and their families were evacuated from Afghanistan aboard 13 military aircraft.
“Now that we have established that flow, we expect those numbers to increase,” the official said.
With military flights operating again, the Pentagon’s intention is for a US military plane to depart every hour from Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport.
The Pentagon estimates that it could remove between 5,000 and 9,000 evacuees a day, including Americans and its embassy staff, as well as its Afghan collaborators.
Up to now, some 2,000 Afghan collaborators have managed to be transferred to the US with a special visa known as SIV, created by the US Congress to give refuge to those foreign citizens who face threats for having worked for Washington.
Nowadays, in Afghanistan, there are about 11,000 people who identify as “US citizens”White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said at her daily press conference Tuesday.
The Taliban seized control of Kabul on Sunday after its fighters entered the capital without meeting resistance, with almost all the provinces under their control, and the flight of hitherto Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
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