Scenes of chaos broke out again over the weekend at the besieged Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, with a mass stampede claiming seven lives, including one child, Breitbart reports.
On Saturday, a flood of Afghan civilians stormed the airport in a desperate attempt to flee the country. According to the British Ministry of Defence, multiple people were crushed against concrete barriers outside the airport as the crowd attempted to board several evacuation planes that were taking off. The panic was dramatically increased when several Taliban fighters fired warning shots into the air in an attempt to ward the crowd away, which only caused many of them to stampede even faster.
“Conditions on the ground remain extremely challenging, but we are doing everything we can to manage the situation as safely and securely as possible,” said a statement released by the Defence Ministry on Sunday. “Our sincere thoughts are with the families of the seven Afghan civilians who have sadly died in crowds in Kabul.”
One Afghan woman came forward to tell the media that her two-year-old daughter was among those who died. She said that she had been trying to get her entire extended family of nine out of the country when she briefly lost her daughter in the chaos. She eventually found her daughter dead on the ground after having been trampled to death.
“I felt pure terror. I couldn’t save her,” the mother said in an interview with the New York Times. She described the experience as “like drowning and trying to hold your baby above the water.”
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has said that at least 20 people have died in the last week in and nearby the airport, with some being shot and killed by armed guards and others being trampled. On the first day after Kabul fell to the Taliban, five people died at the airport as American aircraft were taking off; stunning video footage shows at least Afghan men falling to their deaths after clinging desperately to an Air Force aircraft even after it had taken off.
This, along with other scenes of panic in Kabul, has become symbolic of the botched American withdrawal from Afghanistan under Joe Biden. The speed with which the Taliban seized control, and Biden’s unpreparedness for the situation, has led to widespread criticism from across the political spectrum and around the world. Thousands of American citizens remain trapped in the country, unable to flee through the airport, effectively trapped behind enemy lines.
Scenes of chaos broke out again over the weekend at the besieged Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, with a mass stampede claiming seven lives, including one child, Breitbart reports.
On Saturday, a flood of Afghan civilians stormed the airport in a desperate attempt to flee the country. According to the British Ministry of Defence, multiple people were crushed against concrete barriers outside the airport as the crowd attempted to board several evacuation planes that were taking off. The panic was dramatically increased when several Taliban fighters fired warning shots into the air in an attempt to ward the crowd away, which only caused many of them to stampede even faster.
“Conditions on the ground remain extremely challenging, but we are doing everything we can to manage the situation as safely and securely as possible,” said a statement released by the Defence Ministry on Sunday. “Our sincere thoughts are with the families of the seven Afghan civilians who have sadly died in crowds in Kabul.”
One Afghan woman came forward to tell the media that her two-year-old daughter was among those who died. She said that she had been trying to get her entire extended family of nine out of the country when she briefly lost her daughter in the chaos. She eventually found her daughter dead on the ground after having been trampled to death.
“I felt pure terror. I couldn’t save her,” the mother said in an interview with the New York Times. She described the experience as “like drowning and trying to hold your baby above the water.”
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has said that at least 20 people have died in the last week in and nearby the airport, with some being shot and killed by armed guards and others being trampled. On the first day after Kabul fell to the Taliban, five people died at the airport as American aircraft were taking off; stunning video footage shows at least Afghan men falling to their deaths after clinging desperately to an Air Force aircraft even after it had taken off.
This, along with other scenes of panic in Kabul, has become symbolic of the botched American withdrawal from Afghanistan under Joe Biden. The speed with which the Taliban seized control, and Biden’s unpreparedness for the situation, has led to widespread criticism from across the political spectrum and around the world. Thousands of American citizens remain trapped in the country, unable to flee through the airport, effectively trapped behind enemy lines.