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Pentagon names last US soldier to leave Afghanistan

This handout picture provided by the US Central Command shows US Army Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, XVIII Airborne Corps, boarding a C-17 cargo plane at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul the night before August 31, 2021, US withdrawal deadline from Afghanistan.

The Pentagon has identified the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan after its 20-year occupation of the country as a parachutist.

Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue from the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division, who had been deployed to Afghanistan earlier this month to help in the evacuation operation, departed on a cargo plane from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Monday night ahead of Tuesday's withdrawal deadline.

The Pentagon posted a photo recognizing Donahue as the final soldier in America's longest war, which saw more than 775,000 American troops serve over two decades.

"This was an incredibly tough, pressurized mission filled with multiple complexities, with active threats the entire time," the XVIII Airborne Corps tweeted alongside the photo of Donahue taken through a night-vision lens.

The US and its NATO allies launched a joint military operation to speedily evacuate foreign citizens and Afghan allies after the Taliban toppled the Kabul government.

However, a top US military commander revealed that they had failed to evacuate all foreign citizens, as well as the Afghan allies.

General Kenneth McKenzie, commander of US Central Command, revealed that a number of foreigners and Afghans approved to leave over the fear of retribution had been left behind.

McKenzie said on Monday that some 123,000 people had been evacuated over the last weeks, but noted that the joint operation had failed in pulling out a few hundred foreign citizens and an unknown number of the local Afghan allies.


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