"My God," the flight inspector, who heard that 800 people were huddled in a lone U.S. Air Force plane departing from Moshe Hamid Karazi Airport in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, blurted out.
U.S. Air Force personnel crammed Afghan refugees aboard the plane, realizing that this was the only way to save them from the clutches of the Taliban, which took over the capital and the entire country this week.
"How many people did you say you had on the plane? 800 people? My God, thank you for being able to take off at all," the flight inspector at the US Air Force base in Qatar was told to tell the pilot of the C-17 plane, in a recording revealed in the American media.
Hundreds of civilians aboard the military plane,
Pictures released from the plane show hundreds of people sitting on the floor of the aircraft in heavy density. Media outlets in the United States have revealed that the decision to evacuate the civilians in the military aircraft was made by the commanders on the spot, out of humanitarian considerations.
On the ground in Kabul, the rescue flights operated by Western countries have resumed. Last night, Turkish authorities announced that they would not be able to secure the evacuation process themselves as planned but said the country would be involved in aiding the evacuation. France Germany and the United States have already evacuated hundreds of their citizens Moshe Moshe as well as several hundred Afghan citizens fleeing for fear of persecution by the Taliban.
The U.S. military, aided by other foreign security forces, managed to evacuate thousands of refugees from the runways after yesterday saw heartbreaking sightings of civilians climbing on planes taking off from the airport, the only gate out of the country, with some falling from the planes to their deaths.
Documentation posted on social media but not officially verified showed Taliban people shooting to death civilians trying to climb over the airport fence, with the aim of escaping from Afghanistan. In one of the videos, a Taliban man is seen aiming his weapon at a civilian climbing the airport wall and firing. It is not clear if the citizen was injured.
Despite the severe violence, the organization outwardly adopts diplomatic language. In a statement issued today by the Taliban, the citizens of Kabul were called back to work. Qatari members even made it clear that the fighters were instructed to "respect the stay of all foreigners in Kabul and not to intervene or prevent their departure."
Former United States President George W. Bush, who led the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, today expressed "deep sorrow" at the crisis in the country but did not criticize the current administration for its decision to withdraw from the country.
