kabul for various staging bases. 66 flights left out of kabul yesterday in the 24-hour period with 6,800 evacuees. today, i can report an updated total evacuation that is more than 117,000. the vast majority of which are afghans. of this total number, approximately 5,400 are american citizens. this is an incredible number of people who are now safer thanks to the heroism of the young men and women who are putting their lives on the line each day to evacuate american and vulnerable afghans out of kabul. threats to our forces and to this operation remain real and significant. i m sure you can appreciate that. now, with the military mission beginning to end in kabul, thousands of service members are working across the globe and within the united states to complete this incredibly
withdrawal, it is only a couple of days away, it will be a difficult decision, if they want to plan for something while there are u.s. troops there. they are in 5400 u.s. at the airport, surrounded by taliban. potentially dangerous elements in kabul. it is a dangerous neighborhood. they have to ask themselves, do they want to do anything while there are troops there. what message do they hope to send with the strike? do they believe it will serve as retribution but a warning to someone planning something similar?
of the country, another in the east, both of them working as journalists, both fearing the taliban, both of them having received threats to the taliban, and neither of them able to travel to kabul, much less get on an evacuation flight. there have been promises from the united states and other coalition partners that in the future when the airport or borders are open properly, they ll hold the taliban to their promises to allow people to trafl freely. that s a promise the taliban just reiterated. they re hoping with help of the turks, they asked the turks to keep the airport open, turkish president said yesterday he was considering that, wolf. don t forget, since august 14th, pentagon announced 117,000 people have been evacuated from afghanistan, mostly afghans, of that 117,000, 5,400 americans flown out. there are hundreds more still there in afghanistan. sam kylie, barbara starr, thanks
happened yesterday gets us in the clear. not a minute. reporter: the u.s. didn t alert any other country to the strike beforehand. including the taliban. the taliban condemning the u.s. attack, calling it a direct violation of the sovereignty of our country. meanwhile, u.s. forces hustling to evacuate personnel with the august 31st deadline less than 60 hours away. so far more than 100,000 people have been evacuated. among them, 5,400 american citizens. the evacuation evolving to include u.s. troops and equipment. there is equipment leaving on those flights originally planned. reporter: a sign the mission is nearing its close. joining us from the white house, ali, the pentagon confirming the identities of the american soldiers killed in that horrible bombing on thursday. reporter: that s right, jose. the pentagon officially released the names of all 13 u.s. service members who lost their lives in kabul thursday. we also learned today that their remains are on the way back to
they ve done what s necessary for security in the force and getty evacuees out. the flow has diminished. we can expect it to continue to diminish the next two days as we are retro grading. eventually you reach a point you don t have security on the ground as barbara said, this may be for the last flight. before that, security is diminished. we have a real challenge to do everything we can to get americans out first. we are not hearing about that. didn t hear about it from the pentagon obviously, and we would like more information from state on how we re doing on this. this is the vital component, what the president pledged, so we have to get our americans that want out out. originally they said 6,000 u.s. citizens want out, and we were told 5400 were flown out. that would suggest maybe another 600 or so.