During Wednesday’s press conference, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki tried to convey the idea that the evacuation of Americans from Afghanistan has gone well, bragging about the number of total evacuations from a country of 39 million people.
“A total of approximately 19,000 people were evacuated from Kabul over a period of 24 hours that, of course, ended early this morning,” Psaki said. “This is the result of 42 U.S. military flights which carried approximately 11,200 evacuees, and 48 coalition flights which carried 7,800 people, for a total of 90 flights out of Kabul — which, if I get my math right, that’s approximately a flight every 39 minutes. I believe the Department of Defense gave that statistic.”
“And just to reiterate: Since August 14th, we’ve evacuated — the United States has evacuated and facilitated the evacuation of approximately 82,300 people on U.S. military and coalition flights as part of one of the largest airlifts in world history,” she continued. “Since the end of July, we have relocated approximately 88,000 people on U.S. military and coalition flights.”
The Biden administration has so far evacuated around 4,500 Americans of the approximately 15,000 left stranded in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over.
The Biden administration has also been one of the obstacles preventing the evacuation of those able to reach the Kabul airport in Afghanistan through private organizations attempting to makeup for Biden’s failures.
“Chartered planes are flying out of Kabul with hundreds of empty seats… The biggest challenge the groups faced was getting people with seats on the charter planes through the gauntlet of Taliban checkpoints, crushing crowds at the airport entrances, and U.S. forces who refuse to let manifested passengers in,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
“Last week, Sayara International, a Washington-based development firm that has long worked in Afghanistan, lined up plans to take 1,000 Afghan refugees to Uganda, whose government has offered sanctuary. Sayara chartered three planes for the operation, said George Abi-Habib, one of the company’s co-founders. Then it into a series of obstacles,” the Wall Street Journal continued. “Marines at the airport gates refused to allow Afghans with seats on the plane to get inside. At one point, Sayara started charging some passengers for seats to fill a cash shortfall it needed to plug before they could fly out of the country, Mr. Abi-Habib said. One Ugandan woman had to crawl through a sewage pipe to get into the airport, he added.”
