President Biden is scheduled to return home to Delaware on Saturday as thousands of Americans and Afghan allies are trapped in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over last weekend.
The White House announced that Biden would leave for Wilmington around noon after a meeting with his national security team to keep up to date on the situation. Vice President Kamala Harris, who was traveling in Southeast Asia, is expected to attend virtually.
Lately On Friday evening, Biden had no public event scheduled for Saturday or Sunday.
The president had initially planned a long weekend with a White House outing on Friday afternoon. But the White House said it changed its mind.
On Friday afternoon, he delivered a speech on the state of the chaotic evacuations of Hamid Karzai International Airport in front of Kabul.
Biden later spoke by telephone on Friday evening with Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi and the Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, of the executive mansion.
Biden’s trip on Saturday would be the 19th to his home state since he took office on January 20th.
The president faced an intense reaction for being at Camp David in Maryland last weekend as the Taliban quickly swept Afghanistan and took the capital Kabul on Sunday.
He eventually restricted his trip and returned to the White House to address the nation on Monday, admitting that “this developed faster than we had anticipated.”
He then returned to Camp David, before turning around and returning to the White House on Tuesday night.
Biden’s weekend plans had been the subject of confusion since the Federal Aviation Administration issued an airspace restriction for Wilmington from Thursday night. The White House released an initial program for Friday that included leaving Washington in the early afternoon.
Then, just before noon on Friday, the White House confirmed that Biden would remain in the country’s capital that night after his speech, but left it open if he would head to Delaware later in the weekend.
In his statements from the East Room of the White House, Biden insisted that Taliban fighters let Americans pass through checkpoints on their way to the airport, a statement that was later contradicted by journalists on the ground in Kabul, as well as by Secretary of Defense Lloyd. Austin, who admitted in a call with lawmakers that Islamic fundamentalists were hitting American citizens trying to get through checkpoints.
The president also claimed that Al Qaeda had “disappeared” from Afghanistan, thus fulfilling the mission of the US-led NATO force that invaded the country in the fall of 2001. However, a day earlier, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby admitted that “we know that Al Qaeda is a presence, in addition to ISIS, in Afghanistan and we’ve been talking about it for quite some time.”
Biden added on Friday that 13,000 people had left Afghanistan by U.S. military aircraft since Saturday and that thousands more had been evacuated on private charter flights.
However, although the president estimated earlier this week that up to 15,000 Americans remain in Afghanistan, along with up to 65,000 Afghans and Afghan families who worked with U.S. forces during the war, administration officials have acknowledged that they do not have an exact count of how many are left to leave.