At least five people were killed in Kabul airport as hundreds of people tried to forcibly enter planes leaving Afghanistan’s capital, witnesses told Reuters. One witness said he had seen the bodies of five people being taken to a vehicle. Another witness said it was not clear whether the victims were killed by gunshots or in a stampede.
Moreover, three persons allegedly held on to a wheel of a US plane flying out of Kabul and were seen falling to their death in one of the multiple videos showing insane attempts by Afghans to escape Taliban rule.
American troops, who are in charge of the airport, earlier fired in the air to scatter the crowd. A US official said troops had fired in the air to deter people trying to force their way onto a military flight that was set to take diplomats and embassy staff out of the fallen city.
As the authorities declared Afghanistan airspace “uncontrolled” and closed the Kabul Airport, Air India on Monday cancelled its Delhi-Kabul-Delhi flight that was scheduled to operate and diverted its two aircrafts coming to Delhi from the US toward Sharjah in the UAE for the same reason.
Airlines officials said it was the only commercial flight scheduled to operate between India and Afghanistan on Monday, and Air India is the only carrier that has been operating flights between the two countries.
The officials said no flights can operate from Kabul airport now as the airspace has been closed and this means no aircraft can also land there. An Air India aircraft tasked to fly to Afghanistan to bring out people will no longer be able to go there too, they added.
Increasingly distressing videos showed the mayhem in Afghanistan after the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban on the weekend. In more videos, a crowd swarms the airport runway, chasing a US Air Force plane, and a group is seen huddled on a wing of a plane before take-off.
The Taliban has returned to power in Kabul after a military advance across Afghanistan. President Ashraf Ghani fled the country on August 15 as the Islamist militants entered the city, bringing the Islamist militants close to taking over the country two decades after they were overthrown by a US-led invasion. Russia’s embassy in Kabul said on Monday that the Afghan President had fled the country with four cars and a helicopter full of cash and had to leave some money behind as it would not all fit in, the RIA news agency reported. Ghani’s current whereabouts are unknown.
According to the Associated Press, there were scattered reports of looting and armed men knocking on doors and gates, and there was less traffic than usual on eerily quiet streets of Kabul. Fighters were seen searching vehicles at one of the city’s main squares.
Many fear chaos, after the Taliban freed thousands of prisoners and the police simply melted away, or a return to the kind of brutal rule the Taliban imposed when it was last in power.
