On Thursday morning, near the Abbey gate of the Kabul airport, the tide of people who had turned up was almost even greater than in days before.
The warnings from the US authorities, who assured that there was a high possibility of a terrorist attack that would lead to deaths, did not prevent thousands of Afghans from trying, together with their families, as they have been doing for more than a week, to enter the airfield enclosure from that side.
It was getting more and more difficult and risky.
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The Taliban, in fact, were already operating very close to the access doors, beating people or shooting into the air to intimidate the crowd.
Sometimes a single Taliban, armed with a stick or a baton made of plastic-lined chains, was able to drive back a cowering crowd.
The fact indicates to what extent the Taliban inspire terror in the Afghan population.
The certainty that there are fewer and fewer days to escape - Germany has already said that it is leaving this Friday, for example - spurred people, laden with suitcases, waving their documents in the air.
Days ago, there was still a certain solidarity among those who struggled to enter. A kind of collective help from which the elderly and children benefited. But that, as hope is lost, also fades. So on Thursday there were more ugly gestures among the congregation, more shoving and dirty attacks to win a position closer to the door.
Even there, in the front row of this increasingly dangerous hell, right next to the hardest of the queue, there were street vendors offering bottles of water or bags of potato chips.
The most requested, however, was a drink that is very popular throughout Kabul: an energy soda that is a fake copy of Red Bull.
To get there, the street vendors must pass the Taliban's controls and overcome all the difficulties that the others save.
But they do and there they are.
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At that same Abbey gate, where that same morning there were thousands of people fighting among themselves to gain access, even at the risk of taking a shovel or a bullet from the Taliban, a suicide bomber, according to the first information, blew himself up around six minutes quarter of the afternoon (local time).
The warnings of the US government, in the end, proved true.
Near the door, in the vicinity of the Baron Hotel, another attack took place.
Dozens of people were killed, including 12 American soldiers.
There are more than 140 injured, according to the first data.
Thus, the daily and growing chaos that is reproduced every day on the perimeter of the airport was added the chaos that carries any deadly terrorist attack.
The Taliban quickly closed access to the area to all vehicles.
Ambulances began to circulate in that part of the city, sounding sirens.
There were those who, desperate, abandoned the attempt at once: a family of 13 members, who had been camped around the airport for five days in a row, trying to get in, resignedly returned to Kabul.
Many of the injured were taken to the Kabul Emergency Surgical Center hospital for war victims.
There, the guards placed stretchers at the entrance, on the street.
As ambulances arrived, they took the wounded man onto one of the stretchers and rushed him into the hospital.
A street vendor of water and fruit who was there claimed to have counted more than 40 ambulance arrivals.
On Thursday morning, at the North Gate of the airport, controlled exclusively by US forces assisted by Afghan police, there was also more influx of people.
The warning of the possible attack had not been of much use in this place either.
There was also more nerves on the part of the policemen, who kept firing into the air to try to control and contain the crowd.
They fired almost continuously, taking no care to frighten the children, who covered their ears and burst into tears.
The roar deafened those who were there for quite some time.
One of these policemen, angry and scared at the same time, even pointed his rifle at a man who peacefully showed a foreign passport and who insisted on going inside the airport but was not finally allowed access.
A citizen with a British passport suffered a heart attack when he heard the shots fired into the air by Afghan soldiers and had to go to hospital.
There were those who approached this North gate on foot, walking several kilometers.
But there were also rows and rows of buses from different organizations that transported entire families or specific groups of people on them.
Many did not even get off the buses when they saw the chaos that surrounded them a dozen meters away.
Now, after the terrorist attack, there is an added risk of being beaten, crushed and drowning in an avalanche.
But it remains to be known what will happen this Friday.
If the two deadly attacks will convince people that they must resign themselves not to leave the country and remain at the mercy of the Taliban or if, on the contrary, they will continue to go to the entrance gates of the airport in spite of everything.
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