Kabul’s airport is the epicenter of a desperate and deadly scramble to escape the Taliban

The airport is the epicenter of a chaotic scramble to escape the country for tens of thousands of people — including international workers, Afghan interpreters and woman now at risk under Taliban rule.By Sunday morning, the number of people at the airport awaiting flights had swelled to 18,500, with another 2,000 at the gates waiting to get in, a source familiar with the situation told CNN.One reason for the chaos was the decision to issue electronic visas to Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants, without names or document numbers. The visas were then copied as screen shots and sent by Afghans to thousands of other Afghans who were not eligible for access to the airport, the source said.Among the harrowing images of families scaling the airport’s boundary walls, a At the Ramstein US Air Base in southwestern Germany, flights of evacuees were arriving roughly every 90 minutes over the weekend. With a capacity of 5,000 people, one of the largest US air base in Europe was filling up fast with people sheltering in temporary tents before continuing their journey to the US. The US military hopes to evacuate 5,000 to 9,000 people per day, but so far has not met that goal. It faces massive challenges as it works towards an August 31 deadline to leave the country, and Biden has indicated the US may have to stay beyond that date if all Americans have not been evacuated yet.The pace of the evacuation effort slowed after a bottleneck developed Friday as space at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, one of the leading destinations for flights, neared capacity, forcing the US to scramble for other locations.Among those criticizing the US withdrawal is former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was leader when his country helped the US push the Taliban from power in 2001.”The abandonment of Afghanistan and its people is tragic, dangerous, unnecessary, not in their interests and not in ours,” Blair wrote Saturday in an article published on his Institute for Global Change think tank website.He added that the decision to pull troops out of the country had been done “in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars.'”CNN’s Sarah Dean, Sharif Paget, Barbara Starr, Oren Liebermann, Ellie Kaufman and Nicole Gaouette contributed to this report.