One Afghan guard was killed and three others were injured in the battle, which also involved U.S. and German forces, the German military said on Twitter, without specifying whether the dead Afghan was one of the Taliban fighters deployed to guard the airport.

The airport has been a scene of chaos since the Taliban seized the Afghan capital on Aug. 15 as U.S. and international forces try to evacuate citizens and vulnerable Afghans.

On Sunday, Taliban fighters beat back crowds at the airport a day after seven Afghans were killed in a crush at the gates as the deadline for the withdrawal of foreign troops approaches.

Foreign forces in Afghanistan have not sought to extend the Aug. 31 deadline to leave the country, a Taliban official said on Monday, after President Joe Biden said U.S. troops might stay longer to oversee a “hard and painful” evacuation.

The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan just over a week ago as the United States and its allies withdrew troops after a 20-year war aimed at overthrowing the Taliban and hunting down al Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks.

Foreign forces were working towards the end-August deadline agreed with the Taliban to leave the country and had not sought to extend it yet, a senior legal adviser to the Taliban leadership told Reuters on Monday.

Biden, who last week flagged the possibility of troops remaining longer, said on Sunday the security situation in Afghanistan was changing rapidly and remained dangerous.

“Let me be clear, the evacuation of thousands from Kabul is going to be hard and painful” and would have been “no matter when it began”, Biden said in a briefing at the White House.

“We have a long way to go and a lot could still go wrong.”

Asked by a reporter whether the United States would extend an Aug. 31 deadline for evacuations, Biden replied: “Our hope is we will not have to extend but there are going to be discussions I suspect on how far along we are in the process.”

Biden said he had directed the State Department to contact Americans stranded in the country, where Taliban checkpoints are in place.

“We’re executing a plan to move groups of these Americans to safety and to safely and effectively move them to the airport compound. For security reasons, I’m not going to go into detail … but I will say again today what I’ve said before: Any American who wants to get home will get home.”

Afghan allies of the West and vulnerable Afghans such as women activists and journalists would be helped too, he said.

CIVILIAN AIRCRAFT

Panicked Afghans have clamoured to board flights out of Kabul, fearing reprisals and a return to a harsh version of Islamic law that the Sunni Muslim group implemented when it was last in power, two decades ago.

The United States on Sunday sought the help of six commercial airlines to transport people after their evacuation from Afghanistan.

Biden said people fleeing Afghanistan were being assisted by more than two dozen countries in four continents.

Japan said it will send a military aircraft to Afghanistan on Monday to bring back its citizens.

More flights are expected to repatriate not only Japanese citizens but also Afghans working at the Japanese embassy or with Japanese missions, a government spokesperson said.

A United Nations flight transported 120 people from Kabul to Kazakhstan on Sunday, said U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

Passengers included U.N. personnel and members of non-governmental organisations who work with the United Nations in Afghanistan, he said, adding that it was the second such flight in the past week.

OPPOSITION

Leaders of the Taliban, who have sought to show a more moderate face since capturing Kabul, have begun talks on forming a government.

They face opposition from forces in northern Afghanistan, which said this weekend they had taken three districts close to the Panjshir valley.

Anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Massoud said on Sunday he hoped to hold peaceful talks with the Islamist movement but that his forces in the Panjshir – remnants of army units, special forces and militiamen – were ready to fight.

“We want to make the Taliban realise that the only way forward is through negotiation,” he said. “We do not want a war to break out.”

The Taliban said hundreds of their fighters were heading towards Panjshir, showing a video on Twitter of a column of captured trucks with the white Taliban flag but still bearing their government markings moving along a highway.

Reuters spoke to eight doctors in public hospitals in several Taliban controlled cities elsewhere in the country who said they had not heard of any violence or received any wounded or bodies of people killed in clashes since Thursday.

Source: Reuters

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A security alert on Saturday told US citizens to stay away due to possible “security threats outside the gates”.

Only those individually told to make the journey by a US government representative should do so, it said.

US defence officials said they were monitoring developments and looking at alternative routes.

No further details were given about the potential threat of an IS attack, and the group has not publicly threatened to carry out attacks in Kabul.

The US advice on Saturday came amid continued chaos outside the airport terminal and reports of people being crushed as thousands attempt to escape from Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover.

The militant group swept across the country and captured the capital, Kabul, a week ago.

Crowds have been gathering daily, hoping to be allowed on to a flight.

Those who work with the US and its allies, as well as people who have campaigned on issues like human rights, fear they may face reprisals at the hands of the Taliban if they are unable to leave.

What exactly has been happening at the airport gates on Saturday remains unclear.

However, Sky News’ chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay said that people at the front of the crowd of thousands were being “crushed to death”, with British soldiers pulling those in danger from the throng.

He has described it as “the worst day by far”, and said they believed people had died at the scene.

In a briefing on Saturday, the US Department of Defense said 17,000 people had been flown out of the airport, including some 2,500 US citizens.

An official said a “small number” of Americans and Afghans the US wanted to evacuate had faced harassment.

In some cases, they had been beaten on their way to the airport.

A spokesperson for the US State Department later told the BBC they issued the guidance to avoid large crowds outside the airport gates.

It is also because they now have the capacity to communicate with US citizens “on a personalised basis”, to give them “tailored instructions” on how to travel, the spokesperson said.

Other countries have also warned about the situation on the ground.

Germany’s government issued a statement saying the airport remains “extremely dangerous and access to the airport is often not possible”, while the Swiss foreign ministry announced the security situation had “deteriorated significantly in the last few hours” and postponed a chartered evacuation flight from Kabul.

US forces are currently controlling the international airport.

They are helping to evacuate their own citizens and those of other countries, including Afghans who worked with Western forces and fear for their safety under the Taliban.

But the US has set a withdrawal date of 31 August for their troops, and it is unclear what will happen after this date.

Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said that several countries from the alliance have proposed that Kabul airport remain open for evacuations beyond 31 August to allow them to get more people out.

The BBC understands the UK is one of these countries, and is requesting an extension of a few days.

Some fear they will not be able to evacuate all their citizens, or all the Afghans they believe to be in danger, as they struggle to process all those queuing at the airport and to step up the number of evacuation flights.

Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, told AFP news agency that it was “mathematically impossible” for the US to evacuate all Afghans with travel permits by 31 August.

The EU had “complained” to the US that their security was too strict and was stopping Afghans who had worked for Europeans to enter the airport, he said.

Speaking at a rally in the US state of Alabama on Saturday, former President Donald Trump criticised Joe Biden’s “botched” handling of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, describing it as the “most astonishing display of gross incompetence by a nation’s leader”.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair – who sent British troops into Afghanistan 20 years ago – said Mr Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was “imbecilic… tragic, dangerous and unnecessary”.

In his first public comments since the Taliban seized Kabul last Sunday, Mr Blair said in a statement on his institute’s website that the UK had a “moral obligation” to stay in the country until “all those who need to be are evacuated”.

Meanwhile, the Taliban are trying to consolidate their control over Afghanistan.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the group’s co-founder, has now arrived in Kabul and is set to join talks on establishing a new government.

He is the most senior Taliban leader now in the country and is likely to become a leading figure in any Taliban-led government.

A Taliban official told Reuters news agency that they hoped to have a model for governing Afghanistan within the next few weeks.

It will not be a democracy like in the West but it will “protect everyone’s rights”, he told the agency.

Mr Baradar signed an agreement with the US in 2020, in which the US agreed to withdraw all its forces from Afghanistan.

Source: BBC

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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 U.S. troops fired to disperse crowds and people clung to a U.S. 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.

U.S. 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.

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.

Media reported two people fell to their deaths from the underside of a U.S. military aircraft after it took off, crashing to their deaths on roofs of homes near the airport.

A U.S. official told Reuters U.S. troops had killed two gunmen who had appeared to have fired into the crowd at the airport.

Despite the scenes of panic and confusion in Kabul, U.S. President Joe Biden defended his decision to withdraw U.S. forces after 20 years of war – the nation’s longest – that he described as costing more than $1 trillion.

But a video on Monday of hundreds of desperate Afghans trying to clamber onto a U.S. military plane as it was about to take-off could haunt the United States, just as a photograph in 1975 of people scrambling to get on a helicopter on the roof of a building in Saigon became emblematic of the humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam.

Biden insisted he had to decide between asking U.S. forces to fight endlessly in what he called Afghanistan’s civil war or follow through on an agreement to withdraw negotiated by his predecessor, Republican Donald Trump.

“I stand squarely behind my decision,” Biden said. “After 20 years I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces. That’s why we’re still there.”

Facing a barrage of criticism, from even his own diplomats, he blamed the Taliban’s takeover on Afghan political leaders who fled and its army’s unwillingness to fight.

The Taliban captured Afghanistan’s biggest cities in days rather than the months predicted by U.S. intelligence, in many cases after demoralised government forces surrendered despite years of training and equipping by the United States and others.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the hasty pullout of U.S. troops had a “serious negative impact,” China’s state broadcaster CCTV reported, adding that Wang pledged to work with Washington to promote stability.

Blinken also spoke on Monday with counterparts in Pakistan, Russia, Britain, the European Union, Turkey and NATO about ensuring regional stability, the State Department said.

U.S. Charge d’Affaires Ross Wilson dismissed in a Twitter message what he called false reports that he had left the country, saying he and staff remained and were helping thousands of U.S. citizens and Afghans.

NEW REGIME

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani left the country on Sunday as the Islamist militants entered Kabul, saying he wanted to avoid bloodshed.

The U.N. Security Council called for talks to create a new government in Afghanistan after Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned of “chilling” curbs on human rights and violations against women and girls.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai said she was “deeply concerned” and called for world leaders to take urgent action.

She urged Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to open their country to refugees.

Former Afghan faction commander and prime minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, said he would travel to Doha on Tuesday to meet a Taliban delegation, accompanied by former President Hamid Karzai and former foreign minister and peace envoy Abdullah Abdullah, Al Jazeera TV reported.

Many Afghans fear the Taliban will return to past harsh practices.

During their 1996-2001 rule, women could not work and punishments such as public stoning, whipping and hanging were administered.

Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen told Dunya News that the group would improve the security of Kabul and “respect the rights of women and minorities as per Afghan norms and Islamic values”.

Shaheen added the new regime would ensure representation of all ethnicities and that the Taliban were keen to work with the international community to rebuild the country.

Shaheen said on Twitter that the group’s fighters were under strict orders not to harm anyone.

“Life, property and honour of no one shall be harmed but must be protected by the mujahideen,” he said.

Source: Reuters

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“All the flights from Kabul airport have been temporarily cancelled and the passengers should not come to the airport until informed,’’ the statement said.

The cancellation of the flights took place in the wake of Kabul’s fall to the Taliban on Sunday and the mass migration of Afghans amid fear.

The civil aviation authority in the statement expressed hope for early restoration of normalcy, noting that the massive rushing of passengers to the airport in the chaotic situation could lead to looting and other disorderly situation.

The civil aviation authority has been trying to resume the flights as soon as possible, the statement said.

Taliban, meanwhile, in a statement told Kabul residents that their lives and properties were safe and they could carry on with their works.

Source: Xinhua/NAN

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