Afghans and Westerners stranded in Kabul after Sunday’s Taliban takeover started trickling into the city’s U.S.-controlled airport for evacuation flights, but entry remained extremely difficult, with Taliban checkpoints on most access roads and no clear system to bring people in.
In the eastern city of Jalalabad, meanwhile, the first challenge emerged to Taliban rule, with hundreds of locals walking through the city’s central square and waving the black-red-and-green flags of the fallen Afghan republic to chants of “Allahu akbar." Video footage showed gunfire as the demonstrators dispersed.
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There was no immediate information on casualties, and it wasn’t clear whether this was a harbinger of a more brutal attitude by the country’s new rulers, who have attempted to project an image of benevolent tolerance since seizing the capital on Sunday. On Wednesday, Anas Haqqani, a senior member of the Taliban, came to Kabul for a meeting with former President Hamid Karzai, who ruled until 2014, and with the fallen republic’s chief peace negotiator, Abdullah Abdullah.
At Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, crowds of Afghans continued to gather along the perimeter, trying to flee the country. U.S. Marines focused mostly on keeping people from coming close. As a result, many of the evacuation flights continued leaving with empty seats even as tens of thousands of Afghans who worked with Western governments clamored for a way out before the Taliban track them down.
“The situation is very bad at the gate," said Lida Ahmadi, who applied for a special immigrant visa for Afghans who had helped the U.S. effort in Afghanistan. “I slept on the road last night. Now, after two nights and two days at the gate, we’ve finally got the chance to come in. I am so happy now."
Many others haven’t made it, so far. An Australian C-130, which can carry more than 120 passengers, flew out only 26 people Wednesday morning, the Australian government said.
An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 U.S. citizens remain in Afghanistan, senior Biden administration officials told Senate staff during a private briefing on Tuesday, a Senate aide said. The U.S. military evacuated 1,100 U.S. citizens, U.S. permanent residents and their families on Tuesday, according to a White House official. In total, the U.S. has evacuated 3,200 people so far and relocated to the U.S. 2,000 Afghans who were approved for special immigrant visas, the official said.
In the heart of Kabul, only one Western embassy—that of France—remained after all other Western missions shut down or moved to the airport on Sunday. In the past three days, it became a magnet for hundreds of Afghans and foreigners trying to get out, with several hundred others camping around the compound in hopes of being allowed entry.
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On Tuesday night, a convoy of some 10 buses traveled from the French Embassy to the Kabul airport, stopping at Taliban checkpoints, with passengers—most of them Afghans—later boarding a French A400 military plane to Abu Dhabi. By then, the crowded diplomatic compound had already run out of water and food rations.
“The embassy had turned into an internally displaced persons camp," said Stéphane Nicolas, head of operations for consulting firm ATR, who sheltered in the embassy until Tuesday night. “Behavior changes in this kind of place. Everyone is under shock, they know that they have lost everything, and that if they venture out they may die."
Outside the passenger terminal of the military side of the airport Wednesday morning, U.S. Marines handed out field rations to Afghan civilians, many of them women and children. A secondhand bus, bearing the markings of a tourism agency in Germany’s Thuringia region, dropped off the latest load of refugees. A small boy pulled his father’s kameez as a Marine directed the new arrivals.
Esrar Ahmad, a former interpreter for U.S. troops who also managed to enter the airport on Wednesday, said that his son and wife were injured in a stampede at the gates. “The crowd pushed us from the back and she fell down," he said. “Her knee was badly hurt by a rock, and she can’t really walk now."
“The problem is that people believed in rumors of being able to go abroad without any documents or coordination," added Hayatullah, a 47-year-old Afghan-American who also spent the night outside the airport gate before being allowed inside Wednesday morning. “These people created a huge chaos."
In the U.K., Home Secretary Priti Patel told the BBC that officials are working “around the clock" to evacuate British and eligible Afghan nationals out of the country, and now are flying out roughly 1,000 a day.
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