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US forces begin vacating Karachi airport

Sixty members of the International Security Assistance Force, which used the Karachi airport as a base for conducting military operations in Afghanistan, have left Pakistan.

The decision came after the pro-Taliban parties that won the recent polls stepped up their demand that the US leave the airbases.

The officials left Pakistan aboard a special flight on Sunday from Karachi, sources in the Civil Aviation Authority said.

The remaining ISAF officials, numbering over 100, will leave on November 11, reports said.

"They (the ISAF) have just intimated to us that they have completed their work in Pakistan and now they are winding up the operation," The News daily quoted an aviation official as saying.

"Our contract with the ISAF will expire on November 11," it quoted a Pakistan International Airlines source as saying.

"There is no information about the shifting of the ISAF operation to any other nearby country," the CAA official said.

The IASF was using the Karachi airport, along with several other across the country, as a forward mounting base since the middle of January to transport troops and arms and ammunition to fight Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

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