Evacuation flights out of Kabul are taking off almost empty despite tens of thousands of Afghans trying to flee the country after the Taliban formed a ring of steel around the airport and barred most people from reaching it.  

One Australian Hercules C-130 aircraft with room for 120 people took off with just 26 on board today, the government has confirmed, while a German Airbus A-400M with room for 150 was carrying just seven people when it departed yesterday.

That is despite there being around 50,000 Afghans gathered at the airport who have been promised sanctuary by western nations. One particularly harrowing piece of footage showed women pleading with US troops that ‘the Taliban are coming for me’. 

America, Britain, Canada, and Germany are among those who have pledged to take tens of thousands of Afghan refugees each as part of a ‘big-hearted’ response to the collapse of their country that has failed to materialise. 

Most of those at the airport do not have travel documents, witnesses told MailOnline, and with most embassies closed or moved within the airport perimeter they now have almost no way to obtain them. Meanwhile, those with documents say they daren’t go near the airstrip for fear Islamist guards will haul them away. 

And one airport worker told MailOnline that, even with correct documents, it took them two days to reach the terminal building after passing through five checkpoints along the way. 

Pressed over why Australia is not taking more migrants today, defence minister Peter Dutton rubbished other country’s promises to take tens of thousands – saying bluntly: ‘I don’t think that is going to happen.’

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was among those making promises on Wednesday, saying that 25,000 Afghan refugees will be allowed to come to the UK over the next five years. But he was slapped down by Kier Starmer who said people are physically unable to board the evacuation flights. 

Meanwhile Sir Nick Carter, head of the defence forces, said the UK will attempt to fly out 1,000 people today on seven planes – despite having managed to extract just a few hundred people so-far this week.   

Witnesses at the airport gates today said that very few people were being allowed through large metal gates that have been set up at the civilian entrance, with dozens of people trying to push through each time the gate was opened – prompting nervy guard to fire into the air. Seventeen people were later injured in a stampede.

A source at the airport told MailOnline that some people trying to get into the airport are carrying documents, mostly for nearby Gulf states, but the vast majority were terrified citizens with no paperwork who hoped to get out of the country after seeing images of people running on to American planes on the news.

Meanwhile similar scenes played out at the north entrance, where thousands of people and cars gathered overnight and today, with Taliban guards firing bullets over the heads of terrified men, women and children in order to keep them back. 

Some who have braved the gates told of how they were crushed, trampled and molested amid the crowds without making it on to a flight. Others said Taliban fighters beat the crowd with sticks, lengths of rubber hose, knotted rope, and rifle butts, often pointing guns at people and on at least on occasion opening fire.

In a sign of how dire the situation has become, White House spokesman Jen Psaki was forced to admit Tuesday that there is no guarantee that all US citizens and visa holders will be able to leave the country before troops pull out on August 31.  

‘Our focus right now is on the task at hand, and that is day by day getting as many American citizens, SIV applicants, as many of the vulnerable population who are eligible to be evacuated to the airport and out on planes,’ she told a press conference.

Flights that were supposed to be carrying thousands of people out of the country each day have so-far been taking off with just a few hundred aboard, with the UK having evacuated just 306 citizens and 2,052 Afghans so far – with thousands more waiting. 

At least 12 military flights took off from Kabul yesterday, including three UK planes as the Ministry of Defence aims to ferry up to 7,000 Britons and Afghan allies out. Most are heading to other stable parts of the Middle East, where the passengers catch charter flights back to Britain.

Some 370 UK embassy staff and British nationals were flown out by the RAF on Sunday and Monday, adding to the 289 Afghan nationals transported last week. 

There are at least 56,000 people who need evacuating from Afghanistan – including 22,000 flying on US special immigrant visas, 4,000 British nationals, 10,000 refugees Germany has said it will accept, and 20,000 bound for Canada. In reality, that number is likely to be far higher once diplomatic staff from other countries with relations with Afghanistan’s former government are taken into account.

The US said it may issue 80,000 special immigrant visas to those who helped with combat operations and are likely to face revenge attacks from the Taliban, while 7,500 troops guarding the airport – including 6,000 Americans and smaller numbers of British, Turkish and Australians – will also need to leave.

Spain, France and India confirmed their diplomatic staff were evacuated yesterday. Russia and Indonesia said their embassies will be partially evacuated, while the EU mission said staff including its ambassador Andreas Von Brandt are still in the country and will need to leave.

Tempers were already fraying around the airport on Tuesday as gunmen opened fire into crowds, with harrowing images showing a young child with a bloodied head being carried by a man while a woman lay wounded in the road behind them.

The US army’s General Frank McKenzie is leading 6,000 US troops and 900 British soldiers who are trying to evacuate as many as 50,000 Afghan refugees and thousands of other foreign citizens, including aid workers and diplomats, who live in Kabul.

For the moment, the Taliban say they are giving ‘amnesty’ to foreigners who wish to leave. But amid tense scenes at the capital, which fell to insurgents with astonishing rapidity, fears are growing that the tentative calm could fall apart at any moment.

Vice Admiral Sir Ben Key, who is running the British evacuation operation, told the BBC the UK will be bringing back as many people as it can, as quickly as possible, until either demand is met or ‘the security situation means that we’re no longer operating with consent’.

But eligible individuals have to make the trip to the airport themselves when called to do so, and the Taliban now control the access points, he added.

Sir Ben said that his forces face a race against time, and they are ‘alive to the uncertainty’ of the situation.

Tories hammered Boris Johnson over the ‘catastrophic failure’ in Afghanistan today – as the PM swiped at Joe Biden saying the ‘successful’ Afghan mission could not continue without ‘American might’.

As the desperate evacuation effort continues in Kabul, the PM defended his handling of the chaos insisting there was a ‘hard reality’ as a result of the US stance.

Mr Johnson told the recalled chamber – packed out for the first time since last year after Covid restrictions were dropped – that the ‘sacrifice’ of British troops was ‘seared into our national consciousness’. He said the ‘core mission’ had been achieved as Afghanistan had not been a hotbed for terrorism.

However, he was immediately assailed by Tories, with defence committee chair Tobias Ellwood saying the West had ‘ceded the country to the very insurgents we went to defeat’. Theresa May said Afghanistan would now be a breeding ground for extremism, accusing the PM of operating ‘on a wing and a prayer’ and hoping it would be ‘alright on the night’. Former chief whip Mark Harper said there had been a ‘catastrophic failure’.

Labour leader Keir Starmer said the premier had displayed ‘staggering complacency’, pointing out that his last visit to Afghanistan as Foreign Secretary in 2018 had been a ploy to avoid a vote on Heathrow Airport expansion.

There were also calls for the government to go further and faster in providing safe haven for Afghans who face the threat of persecution under the new Taliban regime. Labour’s Chris Bryant said only 5,000 of 20,000 refugees were set to be accepted this year, raging that the rest were being asked to ‘hang around and wait until they have been executed’.

Gen. McKenzie, whose forces now operate in a country almost completely dominated by the Taliban, has warned that his troops will respond forcefully to defend the airport if necessary, as US troops, backed by British SAS and Royal Marines special forces, guard the perimeter with snipers on rooftops, and machine gunners and armored cars guard the runway.

In other developments:

• An exclusive poll for the Mail revealed that the British public believe Mr Biden is most to blame for the crisis, and two-thirds say the decision to pull out of Afghanistan was wrong;
• The poll also showed that the public fear the turmoil will lead to fresh terror attacks on our soil;
• The Taliban’s leaders claimed they would ‘like to live peacefully’;
• Mr Johnson suggested the new Taliban government could be recognised internationally if it upheld human rights standards;
• Emmanuel Macron was under fire after he said France would ‘protect’ itself from migrants fleeing the crisis;
• It was claimed the Foreign Office had pulled all of its diplomats out of Kabul apart from the ambassador himself – creating havoc for Afghan interpreters wanting to leave;
• Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab conceded he would not have left the UK for a five-star Crete holiday had he known what would unfold over the weekend;
• It emerged that Afghans who apply to come to Britain are being rigorously checked for links with radical Islamist groups and crime;
• The Archbishop of Canterbury condemned the ‘tragic failures’ in Afghanistan and called for rapid humanitarian help for its people.

The White House today confirmed that the Taliban had promised that civilians could travel safely to the Kabul airport, but reports of insurgents beating and shooting Afghans trying to enter could rattle the uneasy deal between the country’s new rulers and their Western adversaries.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid was keen to present the Islamists as a reformed group at a press conference on Monday, pledging to safeguard women’s rights, stop reprisal attacks, wipe out the drugs trade, and live in peace will allies and enemies alike.

But that paper-thin veneer was already being torn up on Tuesday as video emerged showing the Taliban tarring alleged thieves and strapping them to trucks to be paraded through Kabul, firing at crowds trying to escape to the US-controlled airport and going house-to-house to round up looters.

The so-called ‘Angels of Salvation’ are dragging suspects from their homes at gunpoint and lining them against walls after chaos broke out in Kabul following the Taliban takeover.

Footage shows an alleged car thief with his face covered in black tar and strapped up to the back of a truck, with his hands tied behind his back as people gather around to gawp.

A traffic cop stands nearby and waves through traffic, seemingly unperturbed or unable to prevent the rough justice as commotion builds around the accused man.

Other footage shows Taliban fighters outside Kabul airport wielding AK-47s and rocket launchers, marching towards the terrified crowds and firing warning shots into the air.

Former civil servants and those who worked for foreign countries are prisoners in their own homes and living in fear as the Taliban go from house-to-house to interrogate people on who they are and what they do.

An ex-interpreter reported seeing his house being raided via an app on his phone as he remains holed up in a safehouse.  

Australia on Wednesday said it had no plans to allow in refugees and cast doubt on the promises being made by other nations.   

Australia plans to provide just 3,000 Afghans with visas over a year, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said.

‘I note that some are talking about figures of 20,000 but can I tell you there are no clear plans about that. Australia is not going into that territory,’ he told a news conference.

Australia deployed 39,000 troops over two decades as part of US and NATO-led operations in Afghanistan.

As Australia’s air force evacuated 26 people – including Australian and Afghan citizens – in a first flight from Kabul, Defence Minister Peter Dutton cast doubt on the capacity of other countries to honour their pledges.

‘I don’t think that, firstly, is going to happen and, secondly, there is no way in the world you can guarantee the security arrangements with that sort of movement of people,’ Dutton told the national broadcaster ABC.

‘Let’s see whether people put their money where their mouth is,’ he said. 

Truck-loads of Taliban fighters armed with AK-47s and rocket launchers now wait outside the airport and man the gates into it, as their blood-soaked organisation returns to power following a 20-year conflict with a global superpower that had sought to destroy them.

As of Tuesday afternoon, 12 flights had taken off, many heading to nearby cities like Doha, while others have landed at RAF bases in Cyprus.

But tens of thousands of desperate civilians who worked for the coalition are still stuck in Kabul and facing certain death unless they can be flown out of the country.

The Pentagon says it is aiming to have a flight out of Kabul every hour so that it can evacuate 9,000 people per day.

It comes after Taliban leaders held an extraordinary press conference on Tuesday to proclaim the group’s return to government and to portray the outfit as a new, modernised force. 

During an astonishing 40-minute appearance, they said there would no revenge attacks, their opponents will be ‘pardoned’ and women will be allowed to work and study as a ‘very important part of society’.

But on the streets of Kabul, the reality of life under Taliban rule was setting in, with ‘terrified’ women reportedly confined to their homes, and militants going door to door hunting for ex-government workers.

This year alone, the Taliban have murdered seven Coalition Forces translators, with many more wounded. The father of a US translator was also shot dead yesterday according to his family.

Around 1,700 so-called locally employed staff who worked with British forces and their family members have now been approved to come to the UK. A further 200 are having their claims assessed.

But while many are at Kabul airport waiting for a flight out, many more are in hiding in the city or elsewhere in the country, too terrified to brave the streets. As the Taliban tighten their grip, they face an uncertain future.

Last night, an interpreter called Ahmed shared his harrowing story. He said: ‘My wife and I were hiding in the basement of a storeroom, but the man who gave us shelter got scared when the Taliban were nearby and asked us to leave.

‘We are about half a mile from the airport. Now we have found somewhere else, a private place. I have to speak quietly because the Taliban checkpoint is nearby. Other interpreters are hiding nearby, they have children with them, so it is worse for them.

‘The Taliban have positioned their gunmen at the airport and are demanding to see paperwork and visas. Apparently they let you through if your papers are valid but I do not trust them. A mistake now could cost us our lives.’

Remarkably, in spite of the presence of 7,000 elite US troops and 900 British Special Forces and Paratroopers at Hamid Karzai International Airport, the Taliban are calling the shots.

Admiral Key said the Taliban could withdraw their consent at any time. He added: ‘We have to be pragmatic and honest. The Taliban are controlling what and how much we can achieve. We do not know how long we are going to have to do this and we may find the security situation makes it untenable for us to continue to evacuate people.

‘The Taliban are providing the security tapestry around Kabul now – they are the providers of security, not us. At the moment we have their consent. They are happy so long as we are going about our business [of withdrawing].’

The revelation that the Taliban are already dictating terms last night caused further anxiety among those waiting for flights to the UK. Only one mercy mission left Kabul yesterday – an RAF Voyager aircraft carrying 250 passengers which was due to touch down at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire last night.

It is not known how many of those on board were eligible Afghans and how many were UK passport-holders.