The chaos, desperation and violence around the airport in the Afghan capital Kabul are growing hourly: On Friday, a German citizen was shot and injured on the way to the airport. The man was a civilian, as confirmed by Vice Government Spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer.
The man was in mortal danger and would soon be flown out, it was said in Berlin. In order to avoid such incidents in the future, Germany is now even considering flying out German citizens and local people who are also to be evacuated from the city controlled by the radical Islamic Taliban by helicopter.
Violence doesn’t stop people
An advisor to the Afghan UN mission in New York had previously tweeted that a family member had been shot in the head at the airport on Thursday. Despite the danger, the onslaught of people trying to get onto the airport site continued. Taliban fighters fired into the air at the entrance to the civilian part of the airport and whipped around to drive people away, an eyewitness reported.
- Video: The ORF correspondents Paul Krisai (Moscow), Benedict Feichtner (Brussels) and Christophe Kohl (Washington, DC) comment on NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
There is a civil and a military area at the airport. The amount of access to the military part is “large and unpredictable,” reported a CNN reporter. Pictures showed US soldiers shooting into the air to make people back away from the floodplain walls.
Many people’s nerves are on edge because the time pressure is increasing: The USA actually wants to complete the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan by August 31st. However, the evacuation operations of other armed forces, such as the German Bundeswehr, depend on the protection provided by the currently 5,200 US soldiers.
US President Joe Biden expects up to 65,000 people to want to be brought to safety by the US. It is possible that US troops will remain in Kabul after August 31 – that is not certain. It is also uncertain how the Taliban will behave.
The Taliban torture and kill
The human rights organization “Amnesty International” reported, citing eyewitnesses, of “brutal killings” by the Taliban in Ghazni province in July. Six men from the Shiite Hazara minority were shot dead and three were tortured to death in one village.
