“Several hundred” Americans remain in Afghanistan following the complete US troop withdrawal, the Pentagon spokesman announced Tuesday, as military leadership failed in its stated mission to remove all Americans from the Taliban-controlled nation by the end of August.
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told MSNBC’s Willie Geist that he doesn’t think there is an “exact figure,” for the number of Americans left in Afghanistan, sticking to vague language.
“We believe we got the vast, vast majority of American citizens out, something to the tune of 6,000 of them,” he said. “And we think it’s probably in the low hundreds that are still there. And there were also several hundred others that didn’t want to leave.”
On Tuesday, the last C-17 plane had left Kabul’s airport at 11:59 p.m. local time, just ahead of the Aug. 31 deadline to withdraw troops from the country.
US troops helped evacuate more than 79,000 civilians from the airport since Aug. 14 — including 6,000 Americans and 73,500 Afghans and third-country citizens, per US officials. Every single US service member is now out of the country.