The Taliban are letting 200 Americans leave Afghanistan on Thursday, the first airlift since the US troop withdrawal, report says


Afghan families walk by the aircrafts at the Kabul airport in Kabul on August 16, 2021. WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images

The Taliban are letting 200 American citizens and an unnamed number of other foreign nationals leave Afghanistan by plane on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The departure is the first of its kind since the US military pulled out all its remaining forces from Kabul on August 30, surrendering control of the airport to the Taliban and ending the evacuation of American citizens and eligible Afghans. Other western countries, including the UK, ended their evacuations before the US.

The 200 Americans and the other foreign nationals are to be flown out of Afghanistan on Thursday to Qatar, on a Qatar Airways Boeing 777 jet that landed in Kabul hours earlier, The Journal said.

A senior Qatari official told The Journal that all the passengers hold foreign passports, so Thursday's flight wasn't an evacuation flight.

Thousands Afghans trying to flee Taliban are still stranded in the country after the US and other countries ended their evacuations.

The Qatari official also said that daily air links from Afghanistan to foreign countries would be a regular feature from Thursday onward.

On Sunday, GOP Rep. Michael McCaul had claimed that the Taliban were refusing to let six planes carrying Americans leave from at Mazar-i-Sharif airport, in northern Afghanistan.

"The Taliban is holding them hostage for demands right now," McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Fox News' Chris Wallace.

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