The security situation in Afghanistan “is not under control,” France’s president said after at least two blasts went off outside the Kabul airport on Thursday.
“The situation has profoundly deteriorated around the military airport,” Macron told reporters in Ireland as he met with Irish Prime Minister Michael Martin.
“It has been a few days that France and other allies have been doing their best in this situation,” he added. “We will keep doing so as long as the conditions will allow it at the airport. And at the moment I am speaking, we are in an extremely tense situation, leading us to coordinating with our American allies and to call everyone to remain cautious in this situation we can’t control.”
The blasts in Kabul left U.S. troops and others wounded or dead, disrupting efforts to evacuate Afghans and citizens from countries across the world.
No groups have claimed responsibility for the bombings yet, though western officials had warned in recent days of the danger posed by the ISIS terrorist group and its affiliate ISIS-K.
Macron said the situation in Afghanistan is “extremely dangerous” and that the tension there “is increasing greatly.”
French officials are in discussions with the Taliban, the terrorist group that controls Afghanistan, on evacuating the remaining French nationals in the country, Macron added.
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, meanwhile, told reporters at The Hague that some Dutch citizens would not be evacuated from Afghanistan.
“There are Dutch citizens with their families and others we had wished to bring to the Netherlands, that we can’t take with us now,” Rutte said.
“We are frantically working with others to see how we can support them as well as we can. We have intensive contacts within Europe, with the French, the Germans and the British, Macron, Merkel, Johnson, and foreign and defense ministers and with countries in the region, to see how best to do that,” he added, referring to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
In Ottawa, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was confronted with a question about relatives of a person trapped in Afghanistan claiming he would have blood on his hands if the person were killed there.
“I can’t imagine the despair, the anguish that so many individuals are facing … this is a horrific situation,” Trudeau said, hours after the Canadians announced they were ending their evacuation efforts.
From The Epoch Times
