Taliban tighten grip on Kabul airport as thousands of Americans await evacuation

The Taliban were still tightening their grip on Afghanistanthe capital of Kabul on Wednesday, with activists controlling access to Kabul airport. While U.S. nationals said they were unable to make it to the runway for scheduled evacuation flights, those flights continued to take off, carrying Western diplomats, workers and their families – and the Afghans who assisted them – out of the way. from the country.

Note: This article includes an image of injured children that some readers may find distressing.

CBS News correspondent Roxana Saberi and her team were among those who descended overnight on a U.S. cargo plane that took them to Doha, Qatar, in the Persian Gulf. She and her crew were on the plane with around 300 Afghans who fled the Taliban, most carrying little hope and relief.

“If they find me, they will kill me,” Sayed Jalal-Zaheer told Saberi on the plane. He said he worked as a translator for the US military and had just obtained US visas for himself and his family.

They left behind thousands of Afghans so desperate to escape that hundreds stormed the runway at Hamid Karzai International Airport on Monday, some clinging to a US military plane as it took off. Amid the chaos, the US military shut down the facility for hours. When limited flights resumed, Saberi and his team headed for the airport.

Inside, they saw some of the estimated 4,000 US troops preparing to airlift thousands of US nationals and Afghans, and just after midnight local time, they joined them, taking off on the transport plane. US military with Afghan men, women and children as the United States helps flee the Taliban.

Back in Kabul, the rush to escape continued on Wednesday. A NATO security official told Reuters news agency 17 people were injured in a stampede at the airport gate as the United States and other Western countries stepped up their efforts. evacuation efforts, facilitated by the expansion of the flight authorization for a limited number of civil aircraft.

The Taliban have deployed a large force around the airport and warned Afghans without passports or travel documents not to show up. They used guns and batons to hit people as they tried to control the crowd outside the airport, but the group vowed not to hurt anyone who tried to get out of the country.

No less than 10,000 US nationals and their families are still in Afghanistan. Christina Ruffini of CBS News received messages on Tuesday from a family who said they received an email from the US government telling them to go to the airport for evacuation, but when they tried they encountered beatings of fire and chaos and returned home. squat.

Ruffini on Tuesday urged State Department spokesman Ned Price to explain what the government was doing to ensure that U.S. nationals could evacuate.

Price said the US government “was doing everything in our power to secure a passage, to create a safe passage for civilians. Of course, that includes US citizens’ and Afghans applied for US visas.

“We will continue to do whatever we can,” Price said, stressing that it was “a fluid security environment” and adding that if the United States was “in a position to do more, I can assure you that we will do as much as we can. “

On Wednesday, Price said more than 1,000 people, including 330 US citizens and permanent residents, had been evacuated from Kabul by US military flights the day before.

“We have evacuated over 3,000 people so far, including our staff,” he said. “In addition, as we said, we have transferred almost 2,000 Afghan special immigrants to the United States.

On Tuesday, he urged US nationals still in the country to go to the airport only after receiving notification of a place on an evacuation flight, and even then: “If they feel there is no it is not safe for them to get to the airport, they should not be trying to do so.

But time may be running out. President Biden set August 31 as the deadline to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and it was not clear on Wednesday whether growing pressure from a group of bipartisan lawmakers convince the administration to extend that date until the thousands of American troops facilitating the Kabul evacuations have completed the task.

In what appeared to be a charm offensive, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said in his first-ever televised press conference on Tuesday that in addition to letting people leave the country, the Taliban would respect women’s rights – within the parameters of Islamic Sharia law. law – and would not take revenge on former enemies.

“I don’t believe them,” Jalal-Zaheer told Saberi.

He said if his children and other children who were on the plane with him Tuesday night see Afghanistan again, he hopes it will be with the country at peace and without the ruling Taliban.

Tucker Reals of CBSNews.com contributed to this report.