MOSCOW, March 7 (RIA Novosti) – All military flights previously transiting through a US air facility in Kyrgyzstan have been transferred to a new base in Romania, a representative of the Manas Transit Center in the Central Asian country told RIA Novosti on Friday.
The commander of the facility, US Colonel John Millard, said Thursday that the final mission from Manas had been completed ahead of a July 11 deadline to vacate all US personnel from the center.
The Manas center, located on the territory of the Kyrgyz capital’s civilian airport, opened three months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to support US-led coalition forces in the invasion of Afghanistan.
Since then, more than 5 million soldiers have transited through the center, which also hosts US tanker aircraft that have flown over 33,000 missions in support of combat operations in Afghanistan.
In 2011, Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev announced that his country would not renew an agreement to extend the lease of the facility, in a move widely interpreted as bowing to Russian pressure to suspend US military activities in the former Soviet country.
The new US facility, at the Mihail Kogalniceanu airbase on Romania’s Black Sea coast, is less than 250 miles (400 kilometers) from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters at Sevastopol in Crimea.
The US Department of Defense Newspaper “Stars & Stripes” reported last week that over 6,000 American troops have passed through the Romania base since it saw its first transit flight last month.
