Michael McCaul, the Lead Republican on the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, has revealed that there are several American citizens and their Afghan allies who are stuck at the Mazar-i-Sharif airport in Afghanistan as the Taliban is not allowing their plane to depart.
McCaul, who joined Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday "to discuss President Biden's catastrophic failure of leadership in Afghanistan", said that he has got information "in the classified space" that hundreds of Americans have been left behind in Afghanistan.
"We have six airplanes with American citizens on them as I speak, also with these interpreters and the Taliban is holding them hostage for demands right now. State has cleared these flights. And the Taliban will not let them leave the airport," McCaul told the channel.
McCaul also claimed that not a single American has left Afghanistan after the withdrawal of American forces. He said that "this over the horizon capability is greatly exaggerated" [by the Biden Administration] and Afghanistan, where America has no eyes and ears now, has become a major national security threat.
"I've said all along this president has blood on his hands. And this week, this last week, we had 13 servicemen and women come home in flag-draped coffins at Dover Airbase. This problem is going to get worse, not better," said McCaul.
News agency AP also confirmed that there are several hundred people seeking to escape the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan with "at least four planes" chartered for the job unable to leave the country for days.
"An Afghan official at the airport in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif said that the would-be passengers were Afghans, many of whom did not have passports or visas, and thus were unable to leave the country. He said they had left the airport while the situation was sorted out," said the AP report.
It also quoted a US State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as saying that the US has no reliable way to confirm information about such charter flights, including how many American citizens might be on them, since it no longer has people on the ground.
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