About 13,400 people were evacuated out of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Wednesday, according to the White House, down from the 19,000 people shuttled out of the country the day before.
The U.S. military ushered 5,100 people out on 17 flights while coalition allies used 74 flights to ferry 8,300 people out of the country.
The total number of evacuated people from Afghanistan since Afghanistan’s capitol city fell to the Taliban is now 95,700. The largest airlift in history was during the fall of Saigon, when 131,000 people were evacuated.
Neither the White House nor the Pentagon are currently breaking down the number of Americans, third party nationals or Afghans within the number of evacuated people.
The dip in the day-over-day number of people evacuated comes as the U.S. faces a looming deadline to fully withdraw U.S. troops from the country by Aug. 31. President Joe Biden determined that U.S. troops would withdraw from the country by that date in the spring, a commitment that the Taliban has now set as a red line.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said there were still approximately 1,500 possible American citizens in Afghanistan. The State Department is in contact with 500 of those Americans and is “aggressively” attempting to reach the others, Blinken added.
While both Biden and Blinken have said the U.S. is “on track to complete our mission” in Afghanistan by the Aug. 31 pullout deadline, Blinken stressed Tuesday that there was “no deadline” for getting Americans out of the country.
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