On the eve of the planned departure of the US military in Afghanistan, rockets were fired at Kabul airport, but evacuations are continuing “without interruption,” said White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, this Monday.
“The President (Joe Biden) has been informed that operations are continuing without interruption” and “he reconfirmed the commanders to redouble their efforts in order to do as a priority whatever is necessary to protect our forces on the ground” , she added.
Nearly 115,000 people evacuated
An incident that comes as the United States carries out its last evacuations in an extremely tense climate. The location where these rockets landed is not identified, nor the targets they were aimed at. No more than 300 Americans remain to be evacuated from the country, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Sunday. “We are working tirelessly these hours and days to get them out of there,” he said on ABC, 48 hours before the US withdrawal deadline.
About 114,400 people including nearly 5,500 American citizens have been evacuated from Afghanistan by a gigantic airlift since August 14, on the eve of the capture of Kabul by the Taliban. The last phase of the evacuation operations was weighed down by the attack on Thursday near the airport of the Afghan capital, claimed by the Islamic State in Khorasan (EI-K), which killed around 100 people, including 13 American soldiers and two British. Joe Biden welcomed the remains of the 13 deceased on Sunday on the tarmac at the military base in Dover, Delaware. The US president is under fire for his handling of the Afghan crisis.
American strikes
In retaliation for Thursday’s attack, the United States carried out a drone strike in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing two “high-level” members of the Afghan branch of ISIS and injuring a third. , and claimed that it would not be “the last”. On Sunday, they destroyed a vehicle loaded with explosives, in order to “suppress an imminent threat” from IS-K to the airport. A Taliban spokesperson confirmed that a car bomb was destroyed on the way to the airport, and added that a likely second strike hit a house nearby.
Were there any civilian casualties? “We know that there were large and powerful explosions as a result of the destruction of the vehicle, indicating the presence of a large amount of explosive material inside, which may have caused additional casualties,” he said. said US Army Central Command (Centcom) Sunday night. “It is not clear what happened and we are continuing to investigate.” Before the release of this statement, the American channel CNN had said that nine members of a family, including six children, were killed in Sunday’s strike in the overcrowded capital, where thousands of Afghans are still trying to flee the Taliban. .