WASHINGTON: US troops guarding the evacuation effort at Kabul airport fired some shots overnight as “crowd-control” efforts, but there were no indications of casualties or injuries, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday.
Kirby told a news briefing that no shots were fired by American troops at Afghans or anyone else. Kirby said the number of US troops at Kabul’s international airport reached about 4,500 on Wednesday and several hundred more were expected over the next 24 hours.
A Taliban official separately said Taliban commanders and soldiers were firing into the air on Wednesday to disperse crowds at the Kabul airport.
“We have no intention to injure anyone,” the official told Reuters.
Chaos has continued outside the airport, the official said, blaming Western forces for a “chaotic evacuation plan” from Afghanistan.
Kirby said US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley will brief the media on developments in Afghanistan at 3pm EDT (1900 GMT).
Amid the withdrawal of US citizens and other foreigners from Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul, hundreds of frightened Afghan citizens had thronged to the Hamid Karzai Airport in a bid to leave the country on Sunday night and Monday.
In order to prevent hundreds of civilians running onto the tarmac, the US forces fired in the air at Kabul’s airport.
“The crowd was out of control,” a US official had told Reuters by phone.
The firing was only done to defuse the chaos, he added.
The US troops are currently in-charge at the airport, helping in the evacuation of embassy staff and other civilians.
At least five people were killed, witnesses said, although it was unclear whether they had been shot or crushed in a stampede as people stormed the runway.
According to media reports, three people fell to their deaths from the underside of a US military aircraft after it took off, crashing on the roofs of homes near the airport.
Meanwhile, the chairman of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee said that the US military should stay in Afghanistan beyond the planned withdrawal date, Aug 31, to ensure complete evacuation of Americans and Afghan allies, if needed.
“We need to make sure that every one of those individuals that we know put their lives on their lives are out,” Democratic Representative Gregory Meek told MSNBC.
“If that means we should stay longer, in my estimation, we should do that. If that means, that even if we have to bring more troops in to make sure we can get them out safely, we need to do that.”