happened. so what that means is that even with a suicide attack like this is suspected to be, you could have a large number of casualties. now we don t know how many afghans have died in this explosion yet. that is something that we re still trying to learn and i think it is fair to say that all of the government officials here at the state department, at the pentagon, at the white house are all trying to gather that information because this is such a fast-moving case scenario. this happens just recently. but the bottom line also is what does this do for the evacuation efforts for the biden administration? we have heard the president say he wanted to speed up the evacuation efforts by august 31st to get out because of the isis-k threat streams that they were picking up on the ground, jim. kylie atwood at the state department. as kylie was speaking there, and again this is a live picture of the flight line at kabul airport, you could see a flight
they reported to us from the secretary that there were 1500 americans still to depart, 500 have been contacted and 1,000 they were trying to contact to get those remaining 1,000 out for the deadline which is august 31st and before that by several days because they have to begin scaling back. what would this interruption mean? an interruption in flights taking off, people being able to get to the airport, certainly? so, yes. more of an interruption of people to get to the airport. the airfield is massive. the airfield this blast, because of the number of barriers in place would not have impacted the airfield, would not have impacted the flight line, would not have impacted aircraft in that area, but it would certainly impact access to that gate and there are only so many functional gates on to the air base. the u.s. is trying to get as
issue this deadline, send in more troops and that was even after afghanistan fell faster than expected to the taliban. that was even as the evacuation flights had to be halted because the flight line was flooded with people that wanted to get out and planes could not take off or land. this is the most devastating event of the withdrawal. so if now we wait to see if it s something that changes his opinion. he is a long-time proponent of getting out of afghanistan. there s no question that he s going to continue the withdrawal. it s an issue really of how he s going to continue it and whether or not he s going to give it a little bit more time to guarantee the safety of these people that he said are going to get out. american citizens and then afghans with the proper qualifications after helping americans after 20 years of war are eligible for visas to come
last time i was on here i got backed onto the corner on the stuff. i m not a cultural reporter here, okay? i m beyond upset. i feel betrayed. you know, i tweeted the taliban broke my body but the united states government broke my heart on this, right? week sacrificed a lot, and that s okay. my sacrifice was justified that it happened because other people came home that day and lived, but we ve got men and women serving right now and i couldn t imagine being there either on that flight line in kabul were sitting on a base somewhere here knowing you could be called up next, knowing that this is was going to have your back, but more importantly who isn t. and look, on the excuses part, this is the only president really that did not inherit this war. because even when george w. bush, you could say it s incompetence of the clinton, they could have squashed this thing to begin with and pretended to try. but joe biden was vice president. he helped preside over the
speaking. so this is going to be an incredibly quick evolving situation. we re looking to learn more. were there any casualties, was anyone hurt on the u.s. side as of now, there are no u.s. casualties that we are told. but we ll also watch to see how this impacts the evacuation effort. the united states is still flying americans out of the country. they warned those americans to stay away from these gates, just yesterday because of the threat stream that they were seeing. but right now what we re learning is that this was at one of those entry gates into the airport and it is suspected to be a suicide attack. kylie atwood at the state department. and if you could put the map up on the screen. this is a live picture at the airport looking toward the flight line, the runway there. the main entrances to the airport for civilians are on the south side. the civilian side for entry to