American Airlines on evacuation enlistment: ‘The images from Afghanistan are heartbreaking’

American Airlines says it is “proud to fulfill its duty” as one of six U.S. commercial airlines assisting the U.S. military in evacuating refugees fleeing Afghanistan.

Starting Monday, the Fort Worth-based carrier will deploy three widebody planes to military bases and other interim waystations on the Arabian Peninsula and in Europe to shuttle U.S. citizens and others. The airlines will not fly into Afghanistan.

The Pentagon on Sunday ordered the airlines to help move evacuees from temporary sites outside of Afghanistan. The activation involves three aircraft each from American, Atlas Air, Delta Air Lines and Omni Air; two from Hawaiian Airlines; and four from United Airlines.

“The images from Afghanistan are heartbreaking,” American Airlines said in a statement. “The airline is proud and grateful of our pilots and flight attendants, who will be operating these trips to be a part of this life-saving effort.”

American said it will work to minimize the impact of removing the planes from its existing flight schedule.

It’s the first time the civil airline reserve system has been activated since 2003, when it was used for the Iraq War. The commercial airliners will retain their civilian status but the flights will be controlled by the military’s Air Mobility Command.

Biden administration officials said the U.S. military is employing “creative ways” to get Americans and others into the Kabul airport for evacuation amid “acute” security threats.

At the one-week mark since the Taliban completed their takeover of country by sweeping into the capital, U.S. officials expressed growing concern about the threat to the evacuation from the Islamic State group. That worry comes in in addition to obstacles to that mission from the Taliban, as well as U.S. government bureaucratic problems.

“The threat is real, it is acute, it is persistent and something we’re focused with every tool in our arsenal,” said President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.

On CNN’s State of the Union, Sullivan said 3,900 people had been airlifted out of Kabul on U.S. military flights over the past 24 hours. A U.S. defense official said those people were flown on a total of 23 flights — 14 by C-17 transports and nine aboard C-130 cargo planes. That represents an increase from 1,600 flown out aboard U.S. military planes in the previous 24 hours.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told ABC’s This Week that as Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline for ending the evacuation operation approaches, he will recommend whether to give it more time. Tens of thousands of Americans and others have yet to flown out of the country.

The interview aired Sunday but was taped Saturday as other U.S. officials cited increased concerns about security threats at the Kabul airport from militants affiliated with the Islamic State. The U.S. Embassy issued a security warning Saturday telling citizens not to travel to the airport without individual instruction from a U.S. government representative. Officials declined to provide more specifics about the IS threat but described it as significant.

In a notice Sunday, the State Department urged people seeking to leave Afghanistan as part of an organized private evacuation effort not come to the Kabul airport “until you have received specific instructions” to do so from the U.S. Embassy’s flight organizer. The notice said that others, including American citizens, who have received specific instructions from the embassy to make their way to the airport should do so.

Austin said the airlift would continue for as long as possible.

“We’re gonna try our very best to get everybody, every American citizen who wants to get out, out,” Austin said in the interview. “And we’ve got — we continue to look at different ways to — in creative ways — to reach out and contact American citizens and help them get into the airfield.” He later said this included non-Americans who qualify for evacuation, including Afghans who have applied for Special Immigrant Visas.

Austin noted that the U.S. military on Thursday had used helicopters to move 169 Americans into the airport from the grounds of a nearby hotel in the capital. That is the only announced example of U.S. forces going beyond the airport to get evacuees, who often are blocked by chaos, violence and crowds at airfield gates.

A central problem in the evacuation operation is processing evacuees once they reach other countries in the region and in Europe. Those temporary waystations, including in Qatar, Bahrain and Germany, are sometimes reaching capacity.

Austin said he could not predict how long it will take the United States to complete the evacuation, which began on Aug. 14.

“In terms of what we’ll be able to accomplish going forward, you can’t — we can’t place a, you know, a specific figure on exactly what we’ll be able to do, but I’ll just tell you that we’re going to try to exceed expectations, and do as much as we can, and take care of as many people as we can, for as long as we can,” he said.