The comments were made after a firefight between unidentified gunmen and US, German and Afghan guards at the airport left one Afghan guard dead and three wounded, underscoring the fragile security situation around the site and throughout the capital.
The fight, which took place at just after 7am Kabul time at the north gate of the airfield, started when former Afghan security forces who are acting as guards exchanged fire with the gunmen.
The gun battle occurred on the same day the US military reported its biggest day of airlifts out of Afghanistan by far. About 10,400 people were ferried to safety in the 24 hours up to early Monday morning, more than twice the 3,900 flown out in the previous 24 hours on US military planes.
In further evidence of the tense security situation surrounding the continuing evacuation, French special forces entered Kabul to escort about 260 Afghans working for the EU to the airport.
Thousands of soldiers have poured back in to manage the frantic airlifting of foreigners and Afghans – many who fear reprisals for working with western nations – out of the Taliban-controlled country.
“If the US or UK were to seek additional time to continue evacuations – the answer is no. Or there would be consequences,” the Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen said on Monday. Staying beyond the agreed deadline of 31 August would be “extending occupation”, he added.
According to the Taliban, foreign forces have not sought to push back the deadline to leave the country, despite remarks by the US president, Joe Biden, that US troops might stay longer to oversee a “hard and painful” evacuation.
One of the most serious issues hampering the evacuation effort has been access to the airport itself from Kabul amid reports of people being stopped at Taliban checkpoints, convoys mobbed by those desperate to flee, and deadly crushes at the airport’s gates.
The German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, described the situation at the airport as becoming more and more chaotic, and said Germany had been in touch with the US, Turkey, other allies and the Taliban, “with the aim of facilitating a civil operation of Kabul airport to enable the evacuation of people [beyond August 31]”.
On Monday, France’s envoy to Afghanistan announced that French special forces backed by the US army had helped 260 Afghans who worked with the European Union delegation to reach Kabul airport.
The ambassador, David Martinon, wrote on Twitter early on Monday that the Afghans had been “welcomed at the French embassy’s waiting area prior to boarding. Bravo to the EU.”
In another incident, German special forces rescued a 19-year-old German Afghan who had travelled to Kabul before the Taliban takeover to visit her grandmother.
The woman – whose dramatic appeal to Germany’s foreign office a week ago urging them to rescue her, her 12-year-old brother and her mother, made headline news – is reported to have been picked up by German special forces, the KSK, outside the military zone around Kabul airport on Sunday night.
The developing situation around the airport came as the Taliban moved quickly to confront the first signs of armed opposition to their seizure in power, after fighters in Baghlan province, about 75 miles north of Kabul, claimed to have retaken three districts in the Andarab valley on Sunday.
Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said the group’s forces had surrounded nearby Panjshir, the only one of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces yet to fall to the militants, amid mounting scepticism over whether it will hold out.
Several Taliban opponents have gathered there, including Amrullah Saleh, the vice-president in the toppled government who claims to be the acting president under the constitution.
Ahmad Massoud, son of the slain commander of the Northern Alliance militias that partnered with the US to drive the Taliban from power in 2001, is also in Panjshir.
In interviews with Arab media outlets over the weekend, Massoud said his fighters would resist any attempt to take the province by force but that they were open to dialogue with the Taliban.
Mujahid said there had been no fighting in Panjshir yet and that his group was seeking a “peaceful solution” to the standoff.
The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan just over a week ago as the US and its allies withdrew troops after a 20-year war aimed at overthrowing the group and hunting down al-Qaida after the 9/11 attacks.
The US on Sunday sought the help of six commercial airlines to transport people after their evacuation from Afghanistan. Biden said people fleeing Afghanistan were being assisted by more than two dozen countries in four continents.
Biden’s comments came as a Moscow-led security bloc echoed other countries in voicing its concern that the Taliban had not yet started forming a transitional government in Afghanistan.
“It raises serious concern that the promises of Taliban representatives to help form a coalition government reflecting the aspirations and interests of all Afghan nationalities have not yet entered the implementation stage,” said Stanislav Zas, the secretary general of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation.
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