The United States has resumed flights from Afghanistan after one pause for hoursPentagon officials said Friday afternoon. The temporary suspension came after a facility in Doha, Qatar, reached capacity, leaving officials struggling to find more places to help with the evacuation of desperate evacuees.
“Flight operations have resumed and US military flights to Qatar and elsewhere are leaving Kabul as we speak right now,” Army Divisional General William Taylor, deputy director, told a news conference of the Joint Staff for regional operations. “We are looking for additional locations for these first ground flights.”
Taylor stressed that aircraft availability is not an issue and said the United States aims to “maximize the capacity of each aircraft.”
State Department spokesman Ned Price listed countries that would help the U.S. in the evacuation effort. Bahrain, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Qatar, Tajikistan, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and Uzbekistan have allowed or will soon allow transit of evacuees to their countries, Price said.
He said Albania, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Kosovo, Northern Macedonia, Mexico, Poland, Qatar, Rwanda, Ukraine and Uganda “have also made generous offers on the efforts to relocate Afghans at risk.”
“We are deeply grateful for the support they have offered and we are proud to work with them in our shared support to the Afghan people,” Price said of the countries that had offered support.
Sergeant Isaiah Campbell / US Marine Corps via AP
Maintenance facilities for the hanger at al-Udeid air base in Doha, where evacuees are being held until they can be processed and inspected, had reached their capacity by Friday morning.
“Qatar’s sites were just around the corner,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said at the briefing on Friday afternoon. “There just wasn’t room to flow in more people.”
CBS News has confirmed that approximately 5,000 to 6,000 Afghans and U.S. citizens are crammed into the air base. One woman told CBS News that many had spent hours without food.
But even though conditions were uncomfortable in Doha, chaos still reigned in Afghanistan, with tens of thousands of people desperate to get out. Many gathered at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport in hopes of boarding a flight, but some, even those at the invitation of the state department, have struggled to get through the door.
A woman, a permanent legal resident of the United States, told CBS News that the Taliban tried to prevent her from entering the airport. She says they beat her nephew, escorted her, and lost her in the crowd. Now, she said, she has been trapped in Doha, unable to leave the base to take a flight home, and worries that the Taliban will punish her nephew for taking her out.
Taylor said approximately 13,000 people have been evacuated from the airport since Saturday. President Biden has estimated that between 50,000 and 65,000 people, including Americans, their families and vulnerable Afghans, are seeking to leave the country.
Biden has said that although he intends to end the mission in Afghanistan on August 31, troops will remain in the country for as long as it takes to get the Americans out. He has not made the same promise to the Afghans.
Christina Ruffini and Roxana Saberi contributed to the communication.