10,000 people were reportedly waiting for over 8 hours to evacuate Kabul on US flights
- Some 10,000 Afghans were waiting to be evacuated from the Kabul airport, according to a CNN reporter there.
- The Afghans are "processed and ready to go," but Qatar was not accepting any more people from Kabul.
- The flights resumed after more than 8 hours of waiting.
Some 10,000 people were waiting for flights out Afghanistan at Kabul airport, but flights didn't depart for more than 8 hours, CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward reported on Friday.
Ward said on Twitter that soldiers told her 10,000 people had been processed for evacuation, but Qatar had hit its capacity for Afghan refugees, and new flights hadn't taken off.
As of 11:30 a.m. EST, Ward said, per CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins, that no flights had left Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport for at least eight hours.
As of 1:40 p.m. EST, flights resumed, a defense official told Politico reporter Lara Seligman.
In a speech about troop withdrawal and ensuing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan on Friday, President Joe Biden acknowledged the pause of flights, saying there was a backlog of processing refugees at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, where US flights from Kabul over the past week have been heading.
"We paused flights in Kabul [for] a few hours this morning to make sure we could process the arriving evacuees at the transit points," he said.
In previous remarks, Biden blamed Afghan leaders and said their military trained by US troops lacked the "will to fight."
There are also questions over the ability of remaining US troops to safely evacuate Americans outside of the Kabul airport, which is behind a perimeter established by the Taliban.
Over 20,000 Afghans qualifying for visas to come to the United States are estimated to still be in Afghanistan, while some 6,000 have already been flown out.
More chaotic scenes have emerged from the rush to flee Afghanistan as the Taliban takes over, including one of a child being lifted over a wall at the Kabul airport and handed to American soldiers.
The Taliban has declared Afghanistan as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the same name they used when ruling the country under their brutal regime in the 1990s.