Anxious crowds of Afghans still hoping to join the western evacuation airlift from Kabul have crowded airport gates less than a day after scores were killed in a devastating Islamic State suicide bombing.
As flights from Afghanistan resumed with fresh urgency on Friday, amid fears that the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) affiliate could attack again, more countries announced they had completed their evacuations with only days to go before the deadline for withdrawal by US-led troops.
With a Pentagon reporting continuing specific credible threats at the airport, they added that several countries appeared to be willing to work with the Taliban after the evacuation concludes to keep the airport open.
The UN security council joined international statements of condemnation of the Kabul airport bombings, describing it as “especially abhorrent” for deliberately targeting civilians and personnel assisting in the evacuation.
Thursday’s bombings near the airport killed at least 95 Afghans and 13 US troops, Afghan and US officials said, in the deadliest day for American forces in Afghanistan since August 2011.
Among the dead, the Foreign Office announced on Friday, were two British nationals and the child of another British national. The Pentagon said it appeared a single bomber who had caused the carnage at one of the airport gates rather than two as originally reported.
Amid warnings from UN agencies of an emerging “catastrophic” humanitarian situation, officials said they were planning for a “worst-case scenario” that would displace more than 500,000 across the country’s borders.
While the US has said more than 105,000 people have been safely evacuated from Kabul, as many as 1,000 US citizens and tens of thousands more Afghans are struggling to leave in one of the largest airlifts in history.
Sweden was among the countries ending their evacuation missions on Friday, the foreign minister, Ann Linde, announced.
“All in all, some 1,100 people have been evacuated by the foreign ministry. All locally employed embassy staff and their families have been evacuated,” Linde told a news conference.
The UK’s evacuation efforts were also expected to end on Friday, while the last German civilian plane carrying Afghans fleeing Taliban rule landed in Frankfurt on Friday.
With an end to the often chaotic airlift imminent, Afghans continued to arrive at the airport, even as countries shut down their visa processing.
The scenes at the airport, with people standing knee-deep in sewage and families thrusting documents and even young children toward US troops behind razor wire, have horrified many around the world as efforts continued to help people escape.
Jamshad, who gave just his one name, arrived early on Friday with his wife and three small children, clutching an invitation to a western country he did not want to name.
This was his first attempt to leave, he said: “After the explosion, I decided I would try because I am afraid now there will be more attacks and I think now I have to leave.”
Another man, Ahmadullah Herawi, said: “Believe me, I think that an explosion will happen any second or minute, God is my witness, but we have lots of challenges in our lives. That is why we take the risk to come here and we overcome fear.”
As the evacuation began to wind down, the head of US Central Command, GenFrank McKenzie, said further attempted attacks were expected.
Joe Biden has vowed to complete the evacuation of US citizens and others from Afghanistan despite the deadly attack at the airport.
The US president promised to avenge the deaths of 13 service members killed in the bombing, declaring to the extremists responsible: “We will hunt you down and make you pay.”
Following Thursday’s attack, dozens of Taliban fighters carrying heavy weapons patrolled the airport perimeter, and the group’s leadership asked Turkey to operate arrivals and departures, with Turkey saying it had not decided on the issue after meeting with the group at Kabul airport.
Turkey had been in talks before the former Afghan government’s collapse to secure and run Kabul’s strategic airport after the US withdrawal, but on Wednesday it started pulling troops out of Afghanistan – an apparent sign of Ankara abandoning this mission.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has faced domestic criticism for Turkey’s engagement with the insurgent group but has countered that Turkey does not have the “luxury” to stand idly by in the volatile region.
“You cannot know what their expectations are or what our expectations are without talking. What’s diplomacy, my friend? This is diplomacy,” Erdoğan said.
He added: “We will make a decision after the administration [in Afghanistan] is clear.”
Erdoğan said a meeting with the Taliban lasting more than three hours was held at the Turkish embassy in Kabul, without saying when the meeting took place. “If necessary, we will have the opportunity to hold such meetings again,” he said.
The president added that the evacuation of Turkish troops from Kabul, was continuing. He condemned Thursday’s attacks.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Biden said he had ordered the US military to draw up plans to hit back at those responsible.
“We have some reason to believe we know who they are,” he said, adding he had instructed military commanders to develop plans to strike IS “assets, leadership and facilities”.
The IS affiliate in Afghanistan has carried out many attacks on civilian targets in the country in recent years. It is far more radical than the Taliban, who seized power less than two weeks ago. The most prominent American attack on the group came in April 2017 when the US dropped the largest conventional bomb in its arsenal on an IS cave and tunnel complex.
The group more recently is believed to have concentrated in urban areas, which could complicate US efforts to target it without harming civilians.
Aid agencies have stepped up their efforts to help the country, with the UN refugee agency warning it was preparing for a worst-case scenario of 500,000 refugees fleeing over the country’s borders.
The UNHCR said the situation in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover last week “remains uncertain and may evolve rapidly”, with up to 515,000 new refugees fleeing.
The warning came as officials appealed for $800m (£580m) to fill a chronic funding gap for Afghanistan on Friday, with a senior aid official describing the situation as “catastrophic” with at least one-third of people expected to be facing hunger.
With warnings that medical supplies will run out in Afghanistan within days, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday it hoped to establish an air bridge into the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif with the help of Pakistani authorities within that timeframe.
Trauma kits and emergency supplies for hospitals, as well as medicines for treating chronic malnutrition among children are among priority items, said Rick Brennan, the WHO’s regional emergency director, describing the needs as “enormous and growing”.