Pentagon spokesman John Kirby on Tuesday said Taliban aggression will be met with force at the Kabul airport as American military personnel are in the process of evacuating Afghans.
Kirby indicated that troops would take action if militants disrupted “people or operations at the airport.” The United States has since resumed its rescue efforts after a brief hiatus on Monday due to overcrowding as hundreds attempted to climb aboard transport aircraft and blocked runways following the Taliban‘s takeover of Afghanistan’s capital city.
“Any attack on our people or on our operations at the airport will be met with a swift and forceful, unambiguous response,” Kirby said on a segment of CNN’s New Day.
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An additional 1,000 troops have since arrived at the airport, bringing the total footprint to approximately 3,500 personnel, a number that represents half of the 7,000 total U.S. forces in the embattled nation. Kirby indicated that “security is much better” in the area, though he estimated between 5,000 and 10,000 U.S. residents still need to be extracted.
The new capabilities afford the U.S. the opportunity to remove between 5,000 to 9,000 people per day, but U.S. citizens are not the sole focus of the operation, Kirby said. On Monday, the Department of Defense revealed that it planned to house up to 30,000 Afghan refugees on military bases, including Fort Bliss in Texas and Fort McCoy in Wisconsin.
The people will be recipients of the SIV program, short for Special Immigrant Visas for Afghans, which grants asylum to residents of the country who worked for the U.S. government in some capacity. Getting people to Kabul is one of the remaining issues, Kirby said.
“Right now, though, I don’t want to set the expectation that we are equipped and able to go out into the countryside and physically move people into Kabul,” Kirby said.
Shail Shaheen, an English-speaking Taliban spokesman, vowed on Monday not to attack U.S. personnel and promised to let Afghans leave the country at will.
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“We have commitment that there will be no attack on the Americans,” he said on a segment of MSNBC.
“Anyone who wants to go to the West and to other European countries, they are welcome,” he added.
