This year’s Afghan Independence Day was dominated by protests and gunfire Thursday. The video above shows some of that protesting and gunfire in Kabul.
A procession of cars and people near Kabul’s airport carried long black, red and green banners in honor of the Afghan flag. Those people began to flee as Taliban fighters fired their rifles. It wasn’t immediately clear if anyone died in the gunfire.
At another protest in Nangarhar province, video posted online showed a bleeding demonstrator with a wound from gunfire. And in Khost province, Taliban authorities instituted a 24-hour curfew after violently breaking up another protest. This comes after the Taliban killed one person while violently clearing a protest in Jalalabad.
Back in the United States, Pentagon officials gave an update on their efforts to get evacuees out of the country.
“Since the start of evacuation operations on August 14th, we have airlifted approximately 7,000 total evacuees,” Maj. Gen. William “Hank” Taylor said. “We’re ready to increase throughput and have scheduled aircraft departures accordingly. We intend to maximize each plane’s capacity. We’re prioritizing people above all else.” Taylor went on to say the military now has enough aircraft to get 5,000-9,000 people out a day, depending on how many people have been processed and other factors like weather.
Despite video and reports of violence against Afghans by the Taliban, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said there has been no Taliban violence against U.S. personnel.
“We haven’t seen them impede or harass or obstruct the movement of American citizens from the environs into the airport,” Kirby said.
Both Kirby and State Department Spokesperson Ned Price gave an idea of how the rest of the month will look before President Joe Biden’s deadline to withdraw from Afghanistan.
“We are going to do as much as we can for as long as we can,” Price said. “So what we did overnight was to send a message to all American citizens who had expressed an interest in repatriation.”
“There has been no decision to change the deadline and we are focused on doing everything we can inside that deadline to move as many people out as possible,” Kirby said. “And if and when there’s a decision to change that, then obviously that would require additional conversations with the Taliban as well.”
