Americans were being evacuated yesterday from a major Iraqi air base as Al Qaeda-aligned militants toppled cities in the country’s north and threatened to advance toward Baghdad.
A senior U.S. official confirmed to Fox News that Americans were being evacuated from a base in Balad, which had been one of the largest training missions in Iraq.
The three planeloads of Americans are mostly contractors and civilians. The State Department said yesterday that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is operating as usual.
But the evacuation means that the vital training mission at Balad, about an hour northwest of Baghdad, has been suspended indefinitely — despite repeated administration statements that it would continue to support Iraq’s military.
Regarding those assurances, one U.S. official clarified to Fox News: “At the same time, we are not going to do anything stupid.”
The development signals the worsening security environment in the northern part of the country. One senior official told Fox News that the focus for evacuation at this point is on people outside of Baghdad.
Two senior intelligence sources, though, told Fox News there is serious concern about how to evacuate other Americans out of Iraq if the situation further deteriorates.
“We need places to land, we need safe and secure airfields,” one source said, noting that the militants are “seizing airfields and they have surface-to-air missiles, which very clearly threatens our pilots and planes if we do go into evacuation mode.”
