The Defense Department may change its policies to hold leaders accountable when military strikes go awry and innocent civilians are killed, said Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III on Nov. 17. During a rare press briefing by Austin at the Pentagon, he also questioned Putin’s ...
Hamid Karzai International Airport
The Story of the Afghanistan Airlift. Rescuing Afghans who had helped the U.S. cause over the past two decades was moving.
Three days after 13 Americans were killed at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, a U.S. Central Command strike cell in Qatar made a series of assumptions over the course of eight hours based on the intelligence available at the time, leading to the death ...
Afghans fleeing the Taliban in August concealed medical conditions ranging from battlefield wounds to high-risk pregnancies out of fear that doing so might cause U.S. military members to bar them from escaping Kabul. In response, Air Mobility Command provided medics and nurses, turning transports into ...
U.S. Transportation Command is already conducting an after-action report of the Noncombatant Evacuation Operation that flew more than 124,000 Afghan refugees, third-country nationals, and Americans from Kabul to safety in August to identify lessons learned, said the command's director of operations, Maj. Gen. Corey J. ...
Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall has ordered an investigation into the facts and circumstances related to the erroneous Kabul drone strike Aug. 29 that killed 10 civilians. The effort will be led by Air Force Inspector General Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said, who ...
In the wake of the massive Afghanistan airlift operation, Air Mobility Command is surging its use of C-5s in order to give its C-17 aircraft and crews a break, officials said Sept. 20 at AFA's Air, Space & Cyber Conference.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Sept. 13 and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Sept. 14, testifying for nearly a combined nine hours about the U.S.’s withdrawal from Afghanistan that ended with scenes of chaos in ...
Capping his Gulf state tour in Kuwait, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III visited Marines present during the Aug. 26 Kabul airport attack and warned that Al-Qaida may emerge in the chaos now enveloping Afghanistan. “The whole community is kind of watching to see what ...
President Joe Biden spoke to the American people Aug. 31, one day after the final military flight left Kabul, to say that some 200 Americans remained in Afghanistan but that the military mission had ended and “over-the-horizon” capabilities will now fight terrorism in the country. ...
The final U.S. Air Force C-17 has cleared Afghanistan airspace, completing the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan and marking the end of nearly 20 years of war, U.S. Central Command boss Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. announced Aug. 30.
The threat of another Islamic State-Khorasan attack on the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul and on U.S. troops based there remains high, but Pentagon leaders say there is “still time” to evacuate remaining Americans before a self-imposed Aug. 31 deadline. The U.S. struck an ...
