◆ U.S. troops leaving as Kabul evacuation winds down.
The sweeping international effort to evacuate thousands of vulnerable Afghans and foreign nationals from Kabul’s airport neared completion Saturday as the United States continued to withdraw its remaining troops from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan after carrying out a retaliatory airstrike in response to a devastating terrorist attack.
Britain was concluding the evacuation of its citizens Saturday and starting to bring its remaining troops home, Gen. Nick Carter, chief of the defense staff, told the BBC’s Radio 4. More U.S. troops have also begun getting on planes and leaving. A military official said Saturday there were around 4,000 U.S. troops in Kabul, down from 5,800 a few days ago. The official’s comment came just as President Joe Biden was warning that “an attack is highly likely in the next 24 to 36 hours.”
The troop departures signaled a tumultuous end to a 20-year war that has left the country awash in grief and desperation, with many Afghans fearing for their lives under Taliban rule and struggling with cash shortages and rising food prices.
France, too, has ended its evacuations, French officials said Friday.
Three days remain before Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan. As the date nears, the evacuation mission has been shifting its focus, from vetting and airlifting Afghan civilians to bringing home U.S. troops and military personnel.
About 6,800 people were evacuated from the airport Friday, down significantly from early Thursday, when White House officials said 13,400 people had been evacuated from the Kabul airport in the previous 24 hours.
About 117,000 people, most of them Afghans, have been evacuated since the Taliban seized Kabul on Aug. 15, Pentagon officials said. On Saturday, about 1,400 people were still at the airport, and had been screened and booked for flights, Pentagon officials said.
About 350 Americans have told the State Department that they were still seeking to leave the country, the department said Saturday, adding that it believes some may have already left Afghanistan.
Hundreds of thousands of Afghans are still thought to be trying to flee the country, yet Biden and other global leaders have acknowledged that many will not get out before the deadline.
Outside Kabul’s airport Saturday, roads remained closed and the large crowds that had strained to push inside had largely dissipated in the aftermath of Thursday’s suicide bombing, which killed 13 American service members and as many as 170 civilians.
At the Abbey Gate, near where the bombing occurred, only two families and two young men still waited.
The airport’s South Gate remained open, and there was a growing backlog of buses carrying some 500 to 1,000 people, as U.S. military personnel screened for suicide vests and other explosives.
The Taliban, which was manning checkpoints around the airport, also turned away dozens of buses. Few people, if any, were getting through the airport gates.
Among those still hoping to leave were two brothers who said they had traveled 26 hours from Herat, a city in western Afghanistan, and had managed to sneak past guards outside the airport’s perimeter to reach the Abbey Gate. One of them said he had been selected by a U.S. visa lottery.
The brothers knew of the deadly explosion at the gate two nights ago, “but what can we do?” one of them said Saturday. “This is our only way out.”