Afghan evacuees line up before boarding the Italian military aircraft C130J during the evacuation at Kabul airport, Afghanistan, on August 22, 2021.
Italian Ministry of Defense via Reuters
A shootout broke out on Monday morning in the chaos of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport as foreign forces continued to aid in the evacuations and thousands of Afghans tried to escape the country taken by the Taliban a week ago.
An Afghan security guard was killed and three others were injured when gunfire erupted between Afghan security forces and unknown attackers, the official account of the German Joint Forces Operations Command said on Monday.
The German army also said that American and German forces participated in the progression of the fighting, but that all German forces on the ground were unharmed.
Last week, at Kabul airport, images of despair were seen as mothers handed over their babies to foreign soldiers over the wire walls and Afghan civilians clung to planes as they took off in desperate attempts. to flee his country.
The violence comes as the Joe Biden administration faces a torrent of criticism over the aftermath of his withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Biden said Sunday that the U.S. military has evacuated 28,000 people from Afghanistan since Aug. 14, but many thousands of Americans are still there. The Pentagon said last week that the U.S. military could not guarantee the safe passage of Americans to Kabul airport, even though there are now several thousand forces on the ground.
The administration is considering extending the deadline for the full withdrawal of troops beyond the original August 31 date, Biden added.
“Our hope is that we will not have to expand, but I suspect there will be debates about how far we are in the process,” he said.
The Taliban, with whom the United States had negotiated a ceasefire agreement, made a series of impressive gains across the country and finally seized the center of power in Kabul on August 15, taking the essential control of the country in about ten days. As a result, Islamic extremist militants now have access to billions of dollars worth of American weapons surrendered by the Afghan army, which the U.S. trained and equipped for two decades.
And tens of thousands of Afghans have made desperate attempts to escape, particularly those who worked with U.S. personnel and fear the death of retaliation by the Taliban. Although Biden has said these Afghans will be supported, defense groups say as many as 20,000 remain in the country, unable to embark on an evacuation flight due to bureaucratic barriers or lack of safe passage at Kabul airport. .