At Kabul airport a sense of calm resignation

NEW YORK: In the final hours on Monday of the US military presence in Afghanistan, hope dwindled among the Afghans seeking to escape the country via the international airport in Kabul, the focal point of the US evacuation effort since the Taliban takeover of the city just two weeks ago. As the US military raced toward a Tuesday deadline to withdraw from America’s longest war, sporadic violence has been reported in recent days in Kabul, underlining the perils ahead for the country.
While scenes of chaos had played out at the airport for days, as thousands scrambled for a way out of the country, by Monday evening a sense of calm and resignation had descended. A few hundred people were waiting outside the airport perimeter, but were kept at a significant distance by Taliban fighters guarding the area. A few planes â€" mostly C-17’s, large military transport aircraft â€" took off and turned west into the setting sun. Around 1,200 people had been airlifted from Kabul in the last 24 hours, the White House said Monday morning.US fighter jets and drones could be seen circling overhead. Taliban fighters said they were preparing for the possibility that the American troops could be gone by day’s end, hours ahead of the deadline.
Thousands of Afghans who had hoped for a way out of the country are facing the reality that they are unlikely to find one before the withdrawal ends. One former interpreter for US Special Forces, who asked to be identified only by his nickname, Mike, had approval for a Special Immigrant Visa, but was unable to get into the airport. “I’m still in Kabul and I don’t know what to do,” Mike said in a phone interview. He described the frustration of knowing that many others had left without the same documentation, and his fears of returning home to a village where everyone knows he worked for the Americans. “We wake up in the night and think about what’s going to happen to our life and to our children,” he said.

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