LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s ambassador to Afghanistan said his team had evacuated about 700 people on Tuesday and hoped to scale up the operation in coming days.
Western nations are scrambling to get diplomats, civilians and eligible Afghans out of Kabul as the Taliban makes first efforts to set up a government after their lightning sweep into the capital.
“Yesterday we got about 700 people out,” ambassador Laurie Bristow said in a video posted on Twitter on Wednesday and filmed from an impromptu handling centre at Kabul airport.
“We’re trying to scale up the speed, the pace, over the next couple of days, we’ll put everything we can on this for the next few days, trying to get out everyone who we need to get to safety as soon as we can.”
Bristow also posted a photograph from what he called the ‘Evacuation Handling Centre’ showing staff in military fatigues hunched over a laptop while an armed soldier looked on.
When asked on Wednesday whether Britain hoped to take 1,000 people out of Afghanistan a day, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s spokesman told reporters they were “aiming to operate at that capacity”. [L9N2LZ00M]
(Reporting by William James; editing by Michael Holden)
