Evacuation flights resume at Kabul airport as Biden defends US withdrawal
Military flights evacuating diplomats and civilians from Afghanistan resumed early on Tuesday after the runway at Kabul airport was cleared of thousands of people desperate to flee after the Taliban seized the capital. The number of civilians at the airport had thinned out, a Western security official at the facility told Reuters, a day after chaotic scenes in which US troops fired to disperse crowds and people clung to a US military transport plane as it taxied for take-off. "
Many people who were here yesterday have gone home," the official said. Reuters witnesses, however, could still hear occasional shots coming from the direction of the airport, while streets elsewhere in the city appeared calm.
US forces took charge of the airport, their only way to fly out of the country, on Sunday, as the militants were winding up a dramatic week of advances across the country with their takeover of the capital without a fight. Meanwhile a German military plane was waiting Tuesday for the US to grant it permission to fly to Afghanistan to help with the evacuation of foreign nationals and local Afghan staff, the defense minister said on Tuesday.
Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer told Germany's ARD television that she hoped that an air bridge could be organized, but added that the situation at Kabul airport was currently very confusing. The German military uses Tashkent as a hub for its air bridge to Kabul. On Monday, a German military aircraft had to divert to Tashkent because desperate people trying to flee Afghanistan were blocking the runway in Kabul.
Germany said on Monday it would airlift thousands of German-Afghan dual nationals as well as human rights activists, lawyers and other people who worked with NATO forces in the country. Flights were suspended for much of Monday, when at least five people were killed, witnesses said, although it was unclear whether they had been shot or crushed in a stampede.
