[The Last Refuge] According to the data provided by the U.S. State Department in the last few days, the total number of people evacuated from the Kabul airport was 122,000. Of those, 6,000 were American citizens (AmCits), and 116,000 were Afghan refugees.
Today the State Department admits the "majority" of the qualified Afghan people who assisted the U.S. during operations in Afghanistan, Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants, did not get evacuated. That admission begs the question: then who the heck are those 116,000 refugees?
[...] The U.S. still doesn’t have reliable data on who was evacuated, nor for what type of visas they may qualify, the official said, but initial assessments suggested most visa applicants didn’t make it through the crush at the airport. "I would say it’s the majority of them," the official said. "Just based on anecdotal information about the populations we were able to support."
[...] The Biden administration has said that from the end of July, the U.S. and allied nations evacuated more than 122,000 thousand people from the country, most of whom were Afghans.
The State Department estimates that fewer than 200 Americans that wanted to leave Afghanistan have been left behind. Pentagon Press secretary John Kirby said on Friday, near the end of the evacuation effort, that the U.S. had been able to evacuate about 7,000 Special Immigrant Visa applicants by that point. |