AN IRISH woman working as a teacher in Kabul has spoken out about the fear and chaos across the city as the Taliban take control of Afghanistan.
Aoife McManus has spent two years working in the Afghanistan capital of Kabul, teaching children of primary school age, but is now among over a dozen Irish citizens trying to flee the country to escape the Taliban.
Ms McManus, originally from Ashbourne in County Meath, spoke to RTÉ Radio One's Morning Ireland this morning where she described the terrifying scenes of people trying to flee the capital.
The situation "deteriorated rapidly", with people packing up their lives "in 10 minutes" and fleeing to the airport or the borders to try and escape-- and despite the Taliban having entered the city just hours earlier, "there were already mixed Taliban and police working together at the checkpoints".
McManus was one of the thousands of people at Kabul airport yesterday, where several people lost their lives in stampedes, shot by US soldiers or, horrifically, falling from a plane after trying to cling to the wheels to be flown to safely.
"By the time we reached the airports there were many thousands of displaced people", she told presenter Mary Wilson.
Schoolteacher Aoife McManus also spoke to TG4, the Irish-language station, where she spoke as Gaeilge about the panic in Kabuk (Screengrab: TG4)"There was panic," she said, "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 and British are promising."
The Irish Government recently confirmed that there were 23 people in Afghanistan with Irish citizenship or dual citizenship, and they were aware of 15 people who were attempting to flee hte country.
Ms McManus is one of these people, and she told the programme that her teaching organisation as well as the Irish embassy in Abu Dhabi are working to get her and her colleagues out of the country, but this is proving difficult in part due to the utter mayhem at Kabul airport.
She is "confident" she will be able to get out of Afghanistan in the coming days via a military flight, but "the logistics of getting [from] where I am to where a military flight would go from" will prove difficult.
Sher reassured her family and friends at home in Ireland that "I'm as safe as I can be ... there's every effort being made to leave."
