“All of the checkpoints were Taliban. The police cars were full of Taliban.”
An Irish woman currently in Kabul has described the situation in Afghanistan as having “rapidly” deteriorated.
Aoife MacManus is one of 23 Irish citizens currently in the country and has been in the capital for the past two years working with marginalised children in the primary education sector.
Speaking to Morning Ireland, she said where she is right now is “relatively calm” but that her last 36 hours were “hectic”, seeing her forced to move around several times due to the “deterioration of the security situation”.
“I’ve been in some hairy situations in the last 24 hours… The situation as everybody knows… has deteriorated rather rapidly so plans that were in place for two days time became two hours time or became ‘let’s go in ten minutes’.
“When the Taliban were entering the city, they declared a curfew the other evening. We found out at about 7.30pm.
“We were told the curfew was happening between 8 and 9. We were all mobilised to leave where we were to move as close as we could to a secure compound near the airport.
“Within that hour of the news that this would happen and leaving, we passed four checkpoints on our way to the next place and they had already been, they were already mixed Taliban and police working together at the checkpoints.
“By the time we reached near the airport, there were many thousands of displaced people with their families with their luggage. We got stuck in the middle of those in our convoy of four cars.
“There was panic but there wasn’t angry panic. People were just waiting to try and get into the airport to try and leave with these special visas that the Americans are promising, that the British are promising.
“Instead of there being a chaos there, there was a calm where people actually physically lifted a car that had been abandoned from in front of us so that we could get to where we were going.
“But then within the next 12 hours, that crowd wasn’t so calm anymore. Things changed again.
“When we left there last night to come to where we are right now, the city had changed. All of the checkpoints were Taliban. The police cars were full of Taliban.”
MacManus also said she is with friends, as well as people who “really know what they’re doing”.
She stated that she has been in regular contact with the Irish Embassy in Abu Dhabi and that they are “talking about either military or repatriation flights with different EU countries.”
“Also my own organisation are still working on a plane for us to leave,” MacManus added.
“I feel confident that there’s a way out within the next maybe 24-48 hours”.
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