Pentagon announces three more military bases to house Afghans in US

The Pentagon has added three more U.S. military bases to the list of installations that will help temporarily house Afghan evacuees who make it stateside, press secretary John Kirby confirmed Friday.

“Today the Department of Defense can announce that it has authorized Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va.; Fort Pickett, Va.; and Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., to provide additional support to the U.S. mission to evacuate Afghan special immigrant visa applicants, their families, and other at-risk individuals,” Kirby told reporters at the Pentagon.

Kirby said the three new bases join Fort Lee, Va.; Fort McCoy, Wis.; Fort Bliss, Texas, and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J., in providing support. Combined, the seven installations have the capacity for up to 50,000 Afghans and their families.

U.S. Northern Command will coordinate the accommodation details with the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services, Kirby added.

As of Friday, “just under 7,000” Afghan evacuees are in the United States and are being processed.

The United States has used a combination of U.S. military, coalition and commercial flights to remove vulnerable Afghans from the Kabul airport to overseas military bases. The far-flung installations are being used as staging areas to process the evacuees before moving them to the United States for safe haven.

But the use of commercial flights is creating a bottleneck at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., where numerous evacuation flights have flown in in the past week carrying thousands of people.

Afghan refugees have reportedly had to wait hours on the tarmac as officials process the passengers.

Kirby on Friday acknowledged the reports and said “they have proven accurate in the last couple of days.”

He said the holdup is “really more an issue for Customs and Border Patrol and the process,” but as of Friday morning, “they have worked through the difficulties and we believe that wait time now upon landing is going to get much, much shorter.”

As of early Friday morning, the U.S. military had evacuated 111,000 people from Afghanistan since the end of July, including 12,500 in the last 24 hours.