Rockets fired at Kabul airport after US drone strikes, as time winds down to withdraw

Maj. Gen. William “Hank” Taylor, Deputy Director of the Joint Staff for Regional Operations: “Over the weekend and into today, evacuation operations continued yesterday, twenty six U.S. military aircraft all see Seventeen’s departed with approximately 1200 evacuees in total. There were 28 flights out of Kabul airport in the last 24 hours, which included the remaining coalition departures.”

“122,000 were evacuated, approximately 5,400 Americans. We continue to have the capability to evacuate and fly out those until the very end. But as you talk about active peace, we’re continuing to work with Department of State on that and continue evacuation and military operations.”

John Kirby, Pentagon Press Secretary: “Right now as we get into the the this has always been a dangerous operation, but we’re in a particularly dangerous time right now, Idris, I think you can understand that we’re not going to be detailing the status of any particular gate right now. As the general said, we still have the ability and the capability to conduct evacuation operations even while we are completing and working to complete retrograde of U.S. forces.”

“We certainly assess, as the general said, that there is a there’s still an active threat in various ways that we have to be prepared for. And what I will tell you, without getting into specific systems and in their availability, which I think you can understand why we wouldn’t, we continue to have and will maintain the capability to protect ourselves and defend ourselves as we continue to complete the retrograde.”

“We are not in a position to dispute it right now. And as the general said, we’re assessing and we’re investigating. Look, make no mistake, no military on the face of the earth works harder to avoid civilian casualties than the United States military, and nobody wants to see innocent life taken. We take it very, very seriously.”

“When we know that we have caused innocent life to be lost in the conduct of our operations. We’re transparent about it. We’re investigating this. I’m not going to get ahead of it. But if we have, you know, verifiable information that we did, in fact, take innocent life here, then then we will we’ll be transparent about that, too. Nobody wants to see that happen. But you know what else we didn’t want to see happen. We didn’t want to see happen what we believe to be a very real, a very specific and a very imminent threat to the Hamid Karzai International Airport and to our troops operating at that airport, as well as civilians around it and in it.”