Approximately 1,500 Americans remain in Afghanistan after some 4,500 have been evacuated, a top U.S. official said Wednesday. Evacuation efforts launched on Aug. 14, after the Taliban terrorist group took over the country. On that date, there were as many as 6,000 Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave the country, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters in Washington. Since then, roughly 4,500 U.S. passport holders have been evacuated, along with immediate family members. Over the past 24 hours, U.S. officials have been in direct contact with approximately 500 other Americans and provided specific instructions on how to get to the U.S.-held airport in Kabul safely. For the remaining 1,000 or so Americans, officials are “aggressively reaching out to them multiple times a day through multiple channels of communication—phone, email, text message—to determine if they still want to leave and to get the most up to date information and …