The U.S. evacuation in Afghanistan that ended Monday got some help over the past few weeks from an Alaska National Guard unit based at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson.
An Alaska Air National Guard spokesperson says the Guard’s 176th Wing provided two big C-17 cargo planes and four aircrews to help U.S. forces evacuate Americans and others from Afghanistan.
The spokesperson says an additional aircrew left J-BER over the weekend.
An Air National Guard news release said the two C-17s are assigned to the Alaska Air National Guard’s 144th Airlift Squadron that’s also based at JBER. The crews include both Guard members and active-duty military personnel from another JBER based unit, the 517th Airlift Squadron.
The news release said Alaska-based crews had helped evacuate about 1,700 people from Afghanistan as of Friday morning. And it says a total of about 111,000 have been transported from the region since U.S. and coalition forces began the evacuation.
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Tim Ellis is a reporter at KUAC in Fairbanks.
