A heartbroken mother recalled the “pure terror” of her 2-year-old daughter being trampled to death at Kabul, Afghanistan airport by a stampede of people attempting to flee the Taliban’s oppressive rule.
“My heart is bleeding,” the girl’s mother, a former employee of a US. organization in Kabul, told the New York Times. “It was like drowning and trying to hold your baby above the water.”
The woman said her family — her husband, the 2-year-old daughter, disabled parents, three sisters and a cousin — had been trying to secure a flight out of the country from Hamid Karzai International Airport when the crowd surged towards the gates.
She tried to search for her daughter, but found her lifeless, trampled by the mob.
“I felt pure terror. I couldn’t save her,” she told the Times.
She said her daughter had remained “brave” throughout the chaos in the country.
When gunshots rang out in their neighborhood, she told the toddler that they were firecrackers, which the girl referred to as “crackers,” she said.
“My baby was such a brave child,” she said. “When she heard the gunshots, she would just yell out, ‘Crackers!’”
The mom said the family has no plans to return to the airport.
“I’d rather die a dignified death here at home than die in such an undignified way,” she told the newspaper.
Sky News global correspondent Stuart Ramsay was on the ground outside of the Hamid Karzai International Airport — where he reported seeing the frustrated crowd trying to get inside descend into chaos.
“At the front of the queue people were being crushed to death,” he wrote.
Paratroopers began pulling people from the crowd in the wake of the violence and medics attended to the wounded, the outlet reported.
White blankets were observed being placed over bodies, the report said.
The US Embassy said on Saturday that American citizens in Afghanistan should stay away from Kabul’s airport, the only way out, “because of potential security threats outside the gates.”
The advisory directly contradicted President Biden’s insistence on Friday that Americans could proceed to the airport freely.
At least a dozen people have been killed at the Kabul airport mayhem, with disturbing scenes of people falling to their deaths while clinging onto outbound US military planes last week.
