The U.S. has only five more days to evacuate American citizens and its allies out of Afghanistan, which was taken over by the Taliban militant group earlier this month.
This week, President Joe Biden said that the U.S. is "on track" to complete its evacuation by the agreed upon August 31 deadline. In fact, the Biden administration's Secretary Of State Antony Blinken recently gave an update on how many more Americans remain in Afghanistan after the government ramped up its evacuation operations.
"Our first priority is the evacuation of American citizens. Since Aug. 14, we have evacuated at least 4,500 U.S. citizens and likely more," Sec. Blinken said during a press conference on Wednesday, as reported by the Christian Post. "More than 500 of those Americans were evacuated in just the last day alone."
Biden's Secretary of State also reported that since the beginning of evacuation operations in Afghanistan on August 14, there were about 6,000 American citizens in the country who expressed their desire to leave. He added that in the last 10 days, about 4,500 of them had already been safely evacuated.
In addition, the U.S. state department had been in direct contact with about 500 more Americans, whom they provided with specific instructions on how to safely make their way to the airport in Kabul. Sec. Blinken said that they are "aggressively reaching out" to the rest of the Americans who remain stranded by reaching out "multiple times a day, through multiple channels of communication."
Republican Rep. Michael McCaul from Texas gave an update on the steps of the U.S. Capitol today, describing conditions at the airport as "severe" because both the Taliban and the ISIS-K, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant - Khorasan Province, which are a self-proclaimed branch of ISIS, are all there, posing as a "major terror threat."
McCaul also took the opportunity to blast the Biden administration for following an "arbitrary deadline" set by the Taliban, questioning why a superpower like the U.S. should let the Taliban "dictate" when and how it would exit Afghanistan.
He argued, "That has weakened us, our standing in the world, when we are bowing down to the Taliban and letting them dictate the terms of our surrender."
In a visit to CNN's "Situation Room," Rep. McCaul said there are a lot more Americans and allies than what the White House is leading the public to believe, Breitbart reported. The Republican leader said that the number is definitely higher than the figures presented by the State Department and that he does not see how the U.S. can get them all out by August 31.
On Wednesday and Thursday, the British and Australian governments issued a warning to those trying to gain access to the Kabul airport, citing a "high threat" of a "terrorist" attack, Al Jazeera reported.
Those who were at the Abbey Gate, East Gate, or North Gate were instructed to "leave immediately" due to an "ongoing and very high threat of terrorist attack." Those who sought to flee the country were advised to go "safely by other means" if they could.
