WASHINGTON (AP) — The Americans trying to evacuate hundreds of Afghans and American citizens — including one Afghan who worked as a U.S. military translator and says he is anticipating his beheading by the Taliban — pleaded for action from the Biden administration to get the would-be evacuees aboard charter flights that are standing by to fly them from Afghanistan.

“Unfortunately we are left behind now,” the former translator said quietly in the pre-dawn darkness Wednesday in Afghanistan. “No one heard our voice.”

The man, whose identity The Associated Press withheld for his security, said he was running out of money to keep his family housed in a hotel in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, after waiting a week for Taliban permission for the chartered evacuation flights to leave the airport there.

U.S. Army veterans working to help the man, an interpreter for U.S. forces for 15 years, called the effort more grinding than their months of deployment in Afghanistan. They tried and failed to get their old interpreter on the earlier airlifts that ended with the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan Aug. 30.

“I hope we can help them out, and get them out of this mess,” said a retired Army colonel, Thomas McGrath, one of the veterans trying to help his former interpreter.

Hundreds of vulnerable Afghans are waiting for permission from Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers to board prearranged charter flights standing by at the airport in Mazar-e-Sharif.

The group includes dozens of American citizens and green card holders and their families, the Afghans and their American advocates say.

“We think we are in some kind of jail,” said one Afghan woman among the would-be evacuees gathered at one large hotel in Mazar-e-Sharif.

She described the Americans and green-card holders in their group as elderly parents of Afghan-American citizens in the United States.

Taliban leaders, who named a new Cabinet Tuesday in the wake of their lightning takeover of most of the country last month, say they will allow people with proper documents to leave the country. Taliban officials insist they are currently going through the manifests, and passenger documents, for the charter flights at Mazar-e-Sharif.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday the U.S. was working with the Taliban to resolve the standoff over the charter flights.

He rejected an assertion from a Republican lawmaker, Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, over the weekend that the standoff at Mazar-e-Sharif was turning into a “hostage situation” for American citizens in the group.

“We’ve been assured all American citizens and Afghan citizens with valid travel documents will be allowed to leave,” Blinken said in Doha, Qatar, a major transit point for last month’s frantic U.S. military-led evacuations from Afghanistan.

Later Tuesday, 12 Democratic lawmakers added to the pressure for evacuees, in a letter urging the administration to disclose its plans for getting out all of the hundreds of at-risk people remaining in Afghanistan, and not just American citizens.

“Our staff have been working around the clock responding to urgent pleas from constituents whose families and colleagues are seeking to flee Afghanistan, and they urgently require timely, post-withdrawal guidance to best assist those in need,” Reps. Jerrold Nadler, Zoe Lofgren, Gerald Connolly and nine other lawmakers from President Joe Biden’s party wrote.

Blinken, in Doha, said the Taliban had told U.S. officials that the problem in Mazar-e-Sharif was that passengers with valid travel documents were mixed in with those without the right travel papers.

The Afghan woman contacted at the hotel — an employee of a U.S.-based nonprofit, Ascend, that works with Afghan women and girls — also spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity for her security. She said those in her group have proper passports and visas, but the Taliban are blocking them from entering the airport.

Like the interpreter, she said she has been waiting for eight days.

At one point last week, alarm spread through the women’s side of her hotel in the city when warnings came that the Taliban were searching the would-be evacuees on the men’s side, and had taken some away.

“I am scared if they split us and not let us leave,” she said. “If we can’t get out of here, something wrong will happen. And I am afraid of that.”

The former U.S. military interpreter, at the hotel with his family of eight children and wife, said he would expect beheading by the Taliban given his work with the U.S. military, and based on what rights groups say are past Taliban attacks on Afghan civilians who have worked with U.S. forces.

“They’ll probably kill him,” McGrath agreed, expressing fear for the man’s children as well.

The interpreter had always told his American comrades that he believed his work with them was in service of his own country, the retired colonel said. “He put a lot on the line by lining up with us,” McGrath said.

An array of Americans — many of them with some past experience in Afghanistan, or other ties — have been working for weeks to try to help evacuate at-risk Afghans. Much of that effort is focused now on the planes in Mazar-e-Sharif.

Some of those Americans pushing for U.S. action said Tuesday they fear the Biden administration will help out American citizens and leave behind green card holders, Afghans who used to work with Americans, and others whose work has left them vulnerable, including journalists, women’s advocates and rights workers.

“The game changed partway through,” said Marina LeGree, the American head of Ascend.

Private organizers of the flights complain the State Department and other U.S. agencies have been slow or outright unresponsive to pleas for help despite assurances that Washington would work with the Taliban and others to get people out.

On Monday, the State Department said it had helped a family of four U.S. citizens escape Afghanistan via a land route.

Alex Plitsas, a representative of a group called Digital Dunkirk, which is serving as an umbrella group for several organizations arranging the private evacuation efforts since the completion of the U.S. military withdrawal, welcomed Blinken’s words.

“Our men and women in uniform and diplomats on the ground in Kabul did a fantastic job” with the military-run evacuation last month, Plitsas said. “Now it’s time to bring the last remaining folks home.”

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Marine Lance Corporal Rylee McCollum was one of those who died. He was only 20 years old and his first child was due to be born in three weeks. It would have been tragic enough had he died in a battle that had meaning. The horror of what happened to him and, by extension to his family and unborn child, was that his death was utterly pointless.

McCollum died because Biden completely botched the pullout from Afghanistan. Even a child would figure out that you never give up your security until the last person, civilian or military, is gone. But while a child could have figured that one out, Biden and his team were unable to do so.

Although McCollum’s family was at Dover to see his body arrive, only his wife, Jiennah went to meet with Biden. The rest of the family didn’t even want to speak with him because they believe he is responsible for what happened.

The Washington Post described what happened at that meeting:

“Only Jiennah, who is expecting the couple’s child next month, stayed. But she left disappointed, Roice [McCollum’s sister] said. The president brought up his son, Beau, according to her account, describing his son’s military service and subsequent death from cancer. It struck the family as scripted and shallow, a conversation that lasted only a couple of minutes in ‘total disregard to the loss of our Marine,’ Roice said.

“‘You can’t f— up as bad as he did and say you’re sorry,’ Roice said of the president. ‘This did not need to happen, and every life is on his hands.’

“The White House declined to comment on the private conversations Biden had with families.” I’m very sure that the White House declined to comment. Once again, the only rhetorical vehicle Biden had when dealing with someone’s loss was to express his own sorrow over Beau’s death. I’ll say again what I said before: It’s a genuinely sad thing that Beau died of a brain tumor at a relatively young age. I’m sure Biden felt that loss deeply. However, Biden doesn’t let sentiment get in the way of business.

Biden has grossly abused Hunter over the years. Hunter is obviously a deeply damaged man, with his drug addictions, sex fetishes, and self-confessed problems with parading naked around children. A child like that should be protected and helped. Instead, Biden dragged this miserable man around the world, using him as a bagman to collect massive amounts of foreign bribes, ostensibly for business deals but, again per Hunter’s own statements, to enrich Joe himself.

While Beau seemed to have been his own man during his life, he’s become a rhetorical trope for Biden since his death. Biden drags him out at every opportunity to wave before the world the fact that he’s suffered, so nobody had better try to out-suffer him. Poor Beau is the ultimate conversational tool for a malignant narcissist, which is my armchair diagnosis for Biden. Beau is so useful that it’s tempting (although cruel) to say that, if Beau hadn’t died, Joe would’ve had to kill him simply for his value as a symbol Joe can use when needed.

UPDATE: The Daily Mail has a report that shows Biden again making it all about himself when speaking with the parents the murdered American troops:

Mark Schmitz – the father of Lance Corporal Jared Schmitz – and Darin Hoover – the father of Staff Sgt Darin Taylor Hoover Jr. – spoke to Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday night. Both claimed the commander in chief did not just check his watch once, but after every casket was removed from the plane.

Hoover also told how he refused to meet with the president at the event.

Schmitz said his own meeting ‘didn’t go well’, and Biden spent more time talking about his own son Beau than Jared Schmitz. Schmitz said Biden spoke of losing his son Beau Biden, an Iraq veteran, to cancer six years ago. But Schmitz said that he wanted to talk about Jared instead and that he and his wife took out a photo of their son to show the president.

“I said: ‘Don’t you ever forget that name. Don’t you ever forget that face. Don’t you ever forget the names of the other 12,’” Schmitz told The Post. “‘And take some time to learn their stories.’” But according to Schmitz, the president didn’t like that and bristled, replying: ‘I do know their stories.’

Andrea Widburg | Columnist

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that as many as 1,500 Americans may be awaiting evacuation from Afghanistan, a figure that suggests this part of the U.S.-led airlift could be completed before President Joe Biden’s Tuesday deadline. Untold thousands of at-risk Afghans, however, are struggling to get into the Kabul airport.

Blinken said the State Department estimates there were about 6,000 Americans who wanted to leave Afghanistan when the airlift began Aug. 14, and that about 4,500 of them have been evacuated so far. The 6,000 figure is the first public estimate by the State Department of how many Americans were seeking to get out when the Taliban completed its takeover of Afghanistan.

“Some are understandably very scared,” Blinken told a State Department news conference.

About 500 Americans have been contacted with instructions on when and how to get to the chaotic Kabul airport to catch evacuation flights.

In addition, 1,000 or perhaps fewer are being contacted to determine whether they still want to leave. Blinken said some of these may already have left the country, some may want to remain and some may not actually be American citizens.

Of the 1,000, the number who are “actively seeking assistance” to leave Afghanistan “is lower — likely significantly lower,” Blinken said.

The Biden administration has stressed that American evacuees are its first priority, even as it attempts also to airlift Afghans who worked for the U.S. government or military or to build Afghan civil society during the 20-year war as well as what it calls “vulnerable Afghans” — those who believe they face retribution from the Taliban for their role in opposing the insurgency.

The Tuesday deadline aside, Blinken said, “There is no deadline on our work to help any remaining American citizens who decide they want to leave to do so, along with the many Afghans who have stood by us over these many years, and want to leave, and have been unable to do so. That effort will continue, every day, past August 31.”

Biden said Tuesday he has asked his national security team for contingency plans in case he decides to extend the deadline.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul has been evacuated; staff are operating from the Kabul airport and are to leave by Aug. 31.

However, refugee groups are describing a different picture when it comes to many Afghans: a disorganized, barely-there U.S. evacuation effort for Afghan allies that leaves the most desperate to risk beatings and death at Taliban checkpoints

Some Afghans are reported being turned away from the Kabul airport by American forces controlling the gates, despite having approval for flights.

“It’s 100% up to the Afghans to take these risks and try to fight their way out,” said Sunil Varghese, policy director with the International Refugee Assistance Project. “Those with young children and pregnant are willing to take those beatings to get out.”

His group is one of several working with the U.S. government, and communicating with clients and colleagues on the ground, to get out those Afghans most in danger from the Taliban. Those include Afghans who formerly worked with Americans, as well as journalists, women’s rights advocates and others.

Just days are left before the U.S. military is to start shutting down its anchoring role in a massive operation that the White House says has evacuated 82,300 Afghans, Americans and other foreigners on a mix of U.S., international and private flights. The withdrawal comes under a 2020 deal negotiated by President Donald Trump with the Taliban.

Taliban leaders who took control of Afghanistan this month say they will not tolerate any extensions to the Tuesday deadline. But Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen tweeted that “people with legal documents” will still be able to fly out via commercial flights after Tuesday.

U.S.-based organizations, speaking on background to discuss sensitive matters, cite accounts from witnesses on the ground as saying some American citizens, and family members of Afghans with green cards, still are having trouble pushing and talking their way into the Kabul airport for flights.

Kirby said the U.S. military will preserve as much airlift capacity at the airport as possible in the coming days, ahead of Tuesday’s deadline. The military will “continue to evacuate needed populations all the way to the end,” he said. He added that in the final days and hours there will have to be a balance in getting out evacuees as well as U.S. troops and their equipment.

Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor, the deputy director of regional operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. forces had conducted another helicopter mission beyond the perimeter of the airport to pick up people seeking to evacuate.

He said the operation happened in Kabul during the night and that the people were now safely at the airport awaiting an evacuation flight.

Taylor provided no other details, but Germany’s top military commander, Gen. Eberhard Zorn, said separately that 21 German citizens had been extracted by the U.S. helicopter. He said the helicopter crew was American and that German troops picked up the evacuees.

In White House news conferences and remarks during the airlift, Biden has offered varying degrees of commitment to getting former Afghan translators and others most at risk from the Taliban included in the airlift.

U.S. military and diplomatic officials appear to still be compiling a list of eligible Afghans but have yet to disclose how — and how many — they may be getting out, private Americans and American organizations said.

“We still have 1,200 Afghans with visas that are outside the airport and haven’t got in,” said James Miervaldis with No One Left Behind, one of dozens of veterans groups working to get out Afghans who worked with the U.S. military during America’s nearly 20 years of combat there. “We’re waiting to hear from the US. government and haven’t heard yet.”

Marina LeGree of Ascend, a U.S.-based nonprofit that worked to develop fitness and leadership in Afghan girls and young women, described getting calls from U.S. officials telling the group’s interns and staffers to go to the airport for evacuation flights, only to be turned away by American forces keeping gates closed against the throngs outside.

One Afghan intern who went to the airport with her family saw a person killed in front of them, and a female colleague was burned by a caustic agent fired at the crowd, LeGree said.

“It’s heartbreaking to see my government fail so badly,” said LeGree, the group’s American director, who is in Italy but in close contact with those in Kabul.

The number of U.S. troops at the airport has dropped by about 400, to 5,400, but the final withdrawal has not begun, Kirby said Wednesday.

He said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will consult directly with Gen. Frank McKenzie, the head of Central Command and overseer of the evacuation operation, before McKenzie moves ahead with the final withdrawal.

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U.S. President Joe Biden declared Tuesday he is sticking to his Aug. 31 deadline for completing a risky airlift of Americans, endangered Afghans and others seeking to escape Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The decision defies allied leaders who want to give the evacuation more time and opens Biden to criticism that he caved to Taliban deadline demands.

“Every day we’re on the ground is another day that we know ISIS-K is seeking to target the airport and attack both us and allied forces and innocent civilians,” Biden said at the White House, referring to the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate, which is known for staging suicide attacks on civilians.

He said the Taliban are cooperating and security is holding despite a number of violent incidents. “But it’s a tenuous situation,” he said, adding, “We run a serious risk of it breaking down as time goes on.”

The United States in recent days has ramped up its airlift amid new reports of rights abuses that fuel concern about the fate of thousands of people who fear retribution from the Taliban and are trying to flee the country. The Pentagon said 21,600 people had been evacuated in the 24 hours that ended Tuesday morning, and Biden said an additional 12,000 had been flown out in the 12 hours that followed. Those include flights operated by the U.S. military as well as other charter flights.

Biden said he had asked the Pentagon and State Department for evacuation contingency plans that would adjust the timeline for full withdrawal should that become necessary.

Pentagon officials expressed confidence the airlift, which started on Aug. 14, can get all Americans out by next Tuesday, the deadline Biden had set long before the Taliban completed their takeover. But unknown thousands of other foreign nationals remain in Afghanistan and are struggling to get out.

The Taliban, who have wrested control of the country back nearly 20 years after being ousted in a U.S.-led invasion after the 9/11 attacks, insist the airlift must end on Aug. 31. Any decision by Biden to stay longer could reignite a war between the militants and the approximately 5,800 American troops who are executing the airlift at Kabul airport.

In Kabul, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told a news conference the U.S. must stick to its self-imposed deadline, saying “after that we won’t let Afghans be taken out” on evacuation flights. He also said the Taliban would bar Afghans from accessing roads to the airport, while allowing foreigners to pass in order to prevent large crowds from massing.

At the Pentagon, spokesman John Kirby said Aug. 31 leaves enough time to get all Americans out, but he was less specific about completing the evacuation of all at-risk Afghans. He said about 4,000 American passport holders and their family members had been evacuated from Kabul as of Tuesday.

“We expect that number to grow in coming days,” Kirby said.

With the full U.S. withdrawal looming, the Pentagon said several hundred U.S. troops have been withdrawn because they are no longer needed to complete the evacuation mission. Kirby said these are headquarters staff, maintenance personnel and others. “It will have no impact on the mission at hand,” he said.

It’s unclear how many Americans who want to leave are still in the country, but their status is a hot political topic for Biden. Some Republicans bristled Tuesday at the U.S. seeming to comply with a Taliban edict. “We need to have the top priority to tell the Taliban that we’re going to get all of our people out, regardless of what timeline was initially set,” said Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

And Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters Monday that “it was hard for me to imagine” wrapping up the airlifts by the end of the month.

One of the main refugee groups resettling Afghan evacuees in the United States said many people, including some American citizens, still were finding it impossible to get past Taliban checkpoints and crushing throngs outside the airport.

“The United States cannot pat itself on the back for a job half-done,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

Biden decided in April that he was ending the U.S. war, which began in October 2001. Former President Donald Trump had earlier agreed in negotiations with the Taliban to end the war in May.

However, Biden waited until the Taliban had swept to power this month, following the collapse of the U.S.-backed government and its army, to begin executing an airlift.

Tragic scenes at the airport have transfixed the world. Afghans poured onto the tarmac last week and some clung to a U.S. military transport plane as it took off, later plunging to their deaths. At least seven people died that day, and another seven died Sunday in a panicked stampede. An Afghan solider was killed Monday in a gunfight.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the Group of Seven nations will not recognize a Taliban government unless it guarantees people can leave the country if they wish, both before and after the August deadline. A day earlier, the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns, met with a top Taliban leader in Kabul. The extraordinary meeting reflected the gravity of the crisis and America’s need to coordinate with a Taliban group it has accused of gross human rights abuses.

For now, the U.S. military coordinates all air traffic in and out of the Kabul airport, but the Taliban will take over there after the U.S. pullout.

Meanwhile, a U.S. official said Burns, the CIA director, met with Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar — an extraordinary moment for the U.S. spy agency, which for two decades targeted the Taliban in paramilitary operations. It was not clear what exactly they discussed.

The CIA partnered with Pakistani forces to arrest Baradar in 2010, and he spent eight years in a Pakistani prison before the Trump administration persuaded Pakistan to release him in 2018 ahead of U.S. peace talks with the Taliban.

Mujahid, meanwhile, pushed back on the idea that Afghans need to flee, arguing that the Taliban have brought peace and security to the country. He said the main problem was the chaos at the airport, and he accused the U.S. of luring away engineers, doctors and other professionals on which the country relies.

Earlier, U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said she had credible reports of “summary executions” of civilians and former security forces who were no longer fighting, the recruitment of child soldiers and restrictions on the rights of women to move around freely and of girls to go to school.

She did not specify the timing or source of her reports.

It has been difficult to determine how widespread abuses might be and whether they contradict the Taliban’s public statements or reflect disunity in its ranks.

From 1996 until the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, the Taliban largely confined women to their homes, banned television and music, chopped off the hands of suspected thieves and held public executions.

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KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A firefight outside Kabul’s international airport killed an Afghan soldier early Monday, highlighting the perils of evacuation efforts as the Taliban warned that any attempt by U.S. troops to delay their withdrawal to give people more time to flee would “provoke a reaction.”

The shooting came as the Taliban moved to shore up their position and eliminate pockets of armed resistance to their lightning takeover earlier this month. The Taliban said they retook three districts north of the capital seized by opponents the day before and had surrounded Panjshir, the last province that remains out of their control.

Afghanistan’s security forces collapsed in the face of the Taliban advance, despite 20 years of Western training and assistance. Since then, tens of thousands of Afghans have sought to flee the country, fearing a return to the brutal rule the Taliban imposed the last time they ran Afghanistan. That has led to chaos at the airport in Kabul, the main route out of the country.

U.S. President Joe Biden has not ruled out extending the evacuation beyond Aug. 31, the date he set for completing the pullout of U.S. forces. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to press Biden for an extension.

But Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen, in an interview with Sky News, said Aug. 31 is a “red line” and that extending the American presence would “provoke a reaction.”

Gunfire broke out early Monday near an entrance to the airport, where at least seven Afghans died a day earlier in a panicked stampede of thousands of people.

Navy Capt. William Urban, a U.S. military spokesman, said an unknown assailant shot at Afghan security forces at the airport’s northern gate, leading Afghan, U.S. and allied troops to open fire in response. He said an Afghan soldier was killed and several Afghans were wounded.

An Italian humanitarian organization that operates hospitals in Afghanistan said it treated six patients with bullet wounds from the airport.

There was no comment from the Taliban, who in recent days have fired warning shots and lashed out with batons to try to control crowds swelling into the thousands outside the airport.

The tragic scenes around the airport have transfixed the world. Afghans poured onto the tarmac last week and some clung to a U.S. military transport plane as it took off, later plunging to their deaths. At least seven people died that day, in addition to the seven killed Sunday.

The Taliban blame the chaotic evacuation on the U.S. military and say there’s no need for any Afghans to flee. They have pledged to bring peace and security after decades of war and say they won’t seek revenge on those who worked with the U.S., NATO and the toppled Afghan government.

Addressing a conference of Muslim clerics, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid urged them to push back against Western “propaganda” about the Taliban and said the U.S. was undermining their rule by sending planes and offering Afghans asylum.

But Mohammad Khalid, another Taliban official addressing the same gathering, struck a more ominous tone, saying “history and Afghans will not forgive those who were trained in the U.S. and Europe and returned to kill their own people.”

He said foreign countries should not interfere in education, asking the clerics if they would “tolerate a young girl sitting next to a boy at school.” He also praised the role of suicide bombers in forcing the U.S. to withdraw.

The divergent messages raised doubts as to whether the Taliban are fully united behind the more moderate image their leadership is projecting. There have also been reports in recent days of the Taliban hunting down their former enemies.

German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer told the Bild newspaper that the main obstacle to getting people out was the crowds outside the airport.

Asked about Taliban assurances of safe passage to the airport, she said: “So far, I can say that what we need is being granted; the danger comes more from these uncontrollable crowds of people.”

As the airlift continues, the U.S. government asked for 18 aircraft from American commercial carriers to assist in transporting Afghan refugees to their final destinations after their initial evacuation.

Since Aug. 14, the U.S. has evacuated or facilitated the evacuation of some 37,000 people on military and coalition flights. Those efforts are accelerating: In the 24 hours that ended early Monday, U.S. military flights ferried about 10,400 people to safety, an official said.

Tens of thousands of people — Americans, other foreigners and Afghans who assisted in the war effort — are still waiting to join the airlift, which has been slowed by security issues and U.S. bureaucracy hurdles.

U.S. special operations forces retrieved 16 more American citizens from outside the airport early Monday, according to senior military officials in Afghanistan.

Rescue missions that go beyond the airport walls require the approval of a four-star officer and are handled on a case-by-case basis, said the American officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss ongoing military operations publicly.

Meanwhile, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin ordered five men who were evacuated from Afghanistan placed under surveillance in France for possible links to the Taliban.

“France is human but it is also vigilant,” the minister tweeted Monday, along with a story by a French news agency quoting him about the suspicions.

Amid the evacuations, there are also concerns that a local affiliate of the Islamic State group might target the crowds outside the airport with suicide bombers or fire missiles at U.S. aircraft. Military planes have been executing corkscrew landings, and other aircraft have fired flares upon takeoff — both measures used to avoid missile attacks.

The Taliban and IS have different ideologies and have fought in recent years, but one concern about the Taliban’s takeover is that they could again shelter extremist groups. The Taliban harbored al-Qaida while it orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, leading to the U.S. invasion in 2001. The Taliban now say they will not allow Afghanistan to be a base for attacks on other countries.

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, the Taliban have faced limited armed resistance from fighters in Baghlan province, some 120 kilometers (75 miles) north of Kabul. The anti-Taliban fighters claimed to have seized three districts in the Andarab Valley on Sunday, but the Taliban said Monday that they had cleared them out overnight.

Khair Mohammad Khairkhwa and Abdul Ghani Mahmood, commanders of the anti-Taliban forces, said the recent fighting had caused casualties on both sides and displaced civilians.

Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, said the group’s forces have also surrounded nearby Panjshir, the only one of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces yet to fall to the Taliban. Several Taliban opponents have gathered there, pledging to resist any attempt to take the province by force.

Mujahid said there had been no fighting in Panjshir yet and that the Taliban are seeking a “peaceful solution.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. military reported its biggest day of evacuation flights out of Afghanistan by far on Monday, but deadly violence that has blocked many desperate evacuees from entering Kabul’s airport persisted, and the Taliban signaled they might soon seek to shut down the evacuation.

Twenty-eight U.S. military flights ferried about 10,400 people to safety out of Taliban-held Afghanistan over the 24 hours that ended early Monday morning, a White House official said. The chief Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, said the faster pace of evacuation was due in part to coordination with Taliban commanders on getting evacuees into the airport.

“Thus far, and going forward, it does require constant coordination and deconfliction with the Taliban,” Kirby said. “What we’ve seen is, this deconfliction has worked well in terms of allowing access and flow as well as reducing the overall size of the crowds just outside the airport.”

With access still difficult, the U.S. military went beyond the airport to carry out another helicopter retrieval of Americans. U.S. officials said a military helicopter picked up 16 American citizens Monday and brought them onto the airfield for evacuation. This was at least the second such rescue mission beyond the airport; Kirby said that last Thursday, three Army helicopters picked up 169 Americans near a hotel just beyond the airport gate and flew them onto the airfield.

President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said at the White House that talks with the Taliban are continuing as the administration looks for additional ways to safely move more Americans and others into the Kabul airport.

“We are in talks with the Taliban on a daily basis through both political and security channels,” he said, adding that ultimately it will be Biden’s decision alone whether to continue military-led evacuation operations beyond Aug. 31.

In a reminder of the urgency felt amid a dizzying array of security threats to the evacuation effort, the Pentagon posted a video of a laser near the airport targeting a U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft and apparently attempting to disrupt the pilot during landing.

After more than a week of evacuations plagued by major obstacles, including Taliban forces and crushing crowds that are making approaching the airport difficult and dangerous, the number of people flown out met — and exceeded — U.S. projections for the first time. The count was more than twice the 3,900 flown out in the previous 24 hours on U.S. military planes.

Army Gen. Stephen Lyons, head of U.S. Transportation Command, which manages the military aircraft that are executing the Kabul airlift, told a Pentagon news conference that more than 200 planes are involved, including aerial refueling planes, and that arriving planes are spending less than an hour on the tarmac at Kabul before loading and taking off. He said the nonstop mission is taking a toll on aircrews.

“They’re tired,” Lyons said of the crews. “They’re probably exhausted in some cases.”

On a more positive note, Lyons said that in addition to the widely reported case of an Afghan woman giving birth aboard a U.S. evacuation aircraft, two other babies have been born in similar circumstances. He did not provide details.

The Pentagon said it has added a fourth U.S. military base, in New Jersey, to three others — in Virginia, Texas and Wisconsin — that are prepared to temporarily house arriving Afghans. Maj. Gen. Hank Williams, the Joint Staff deputy director for regional operations, told reporters there are now about 1,200 Afghans at those military bases. The four bases combined are capable of housing up to 25,000 evacuees, Kirby said.

Afghan evacuees continued to arrive at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington. A bus carried some of the latest arrivals from Dulles airport to another site for what would be one of many processing stops before they reach new homes in the United States.

Exhaustion clouded the faces of many of the adults. How does it feel to be here, a journalist asked one man. “We are safe,” he answered.

An older woman sank with relief into an offered wheelchair, and a little girl carried by an older boy shaded her eyes to look curiously around. It was an interim stop for what had been a grueling struggle over days for many to get flights out of what is now Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The scramble to evacuate left most arrivals carrying only a bookbag or purse, or a plastic shopping bag of belongings. Some arrived for their new lives entirely empty-handed.

Biden said Sunday he would not rule out extending the evacuation beyond Aug. 31, the date he had set for completing the withdrawal of troops. And British Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to press Biden for an extension to get out the maximum number of foreigners and Afghan allies possible. Biden is to face the U.S.’s G-7 allies in a virtual summit on Afghanistan Tuesday.

Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen, in an interview with Sky News, said that Aug. 31 is a “red line” the U.S. must not cross and that extending the American presence would “provoke a reaction.”

Since the Taliban seized the capital Aug. 15, completing a stunning rout of the U.S.-backed Afghan government and military, the U.S. has been carrying out the evacuation in coordination with the Taliban, who have held off on attacking under a 2020 withdrawal deal with the Trump administration.

Monday’s warning signaled the Taliban could insist on shutting down the airlifts out of the Kabul airport in just over a week. Lawmakers, refugee groups, veterans’ organizations and U.S. allies have said ending the evacuation then could strand countless Afghans and foreigners still hoping for flights out.

Since Aug. 14, the U.S. has evacuated and facilitated the evacuation of about 37,000 people.

A firefight just outside the airport killed at least one Afghan soldier early Monday, German officials said. It was the latest in days of often-lethal turmoil outside the airport. People coming in hopes of escaping Taliban rule face sporadic gunfire, beatings by the Taliban, and crowds that have trampled many.

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