PHOTO – The story behind this photo showing hundreds of Afghans evacuated aboard a single plane – LCI

It’s not just a simple photo. It is the allegory of chaos. The image of the flight from Kabul to Qatar has been around the world several times. Captured by a passenger and published by an American media, it shows hundreds of Afghans, men, women and children, crammed aboard a huge military cargo plane in order to leave the capital, this Sunday, August 15, a few hours later. that it fell into the hands of the Taliban. The US military confirmed the information, without specifying the final destination of the passengers.

The flight was not to leave with so many passengers, according to the details of a senior US defense official quoted by Defense One, a United States military news site. They are in fact inhabitants, desperate, who have done everything to leave the country. And managed, in the midst of the chaos that reigned at Kabul airport, to climb at the last moment on the half-open ramp of this US Air Force plane.

But instead of forcing them out, “the crew made the decision to go” explained the official, accepting on board 640 people, squeezed in the huge hold of the aircraft. A procedure approved by US authorities, according to the site. And similar to what has been done in the past. The same source points out that this operation is known as “ground loading”. Passengers, seated on the floor of the cargo hold, hang on to wall-to-wall cargo straps, using makeshift seat belts. The plane therefore took off with six times more passengers than its initial capacity.

“The unusually high number of passengers on board this aircraft (…) was the result of a dynamic security environment which demanded swift decisions from the crew”, said in a statement the spokesperson for the American command center managing operations in the region. “Ultimately, this made it possible to evacuate these passengers safely from the country.”

This is one of the largest number of people ever carried in this military aircraft, the Boeing C-17, operated by the United States military and its allies for nearly three decades. The specialized site recalls that the record is still held by a flight fleeing a typhoon in the Philippines in 2013. 670 people were then evacuated.

This C-17 is not the only plane to have carried so many Afghans out of the country, and several planes have left Kabul with similar figures, according to the official quoted by Defense One. But all the Afghans who wanted to flee the territory did not have the same luck. Gruesome videos on Monday showed hundreds of people running across the tarmac, scaling ramps, desperately clinging to the sides of a plane. Among them, at least three people are believed to have died after clinging too long to the hope of leaving.