Sports Desk: About 200 people, among them US nationals, have been cleared by the Taliban to leave Kabul on a Qatari flight, a source with knowledge of the matter told CNN on Thursday.
It is unclear at this stage how many Americans are expected to be on board the flight to Doha or what the nationalities of the remaining evacuees may be.
It will be the first commercial flight to depart from Kabul's international airport since the Taliban seized control of the country in mid-August.
Several passengers waiting to check into the Qatar Airways flight from Kabul to Doha have said their final destination is Canada.
“We are going to Canada, we are Canadians,” one man told an Al Jazeera Arabic reporter at the airport in English. Another two men also said they were bound for Canada.
Live pictures showed Qatari and Taliban officials touring the airport tarmac, where a Qatar Airways Boeing 777 stood.
The Taliban's acting foreign minister, Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaki, earlier thanked Qatari special envoy Mutlaq Al-Qahtani for his country's efforts in restarting flights out of Kabul International Airport, the Taliban said in a statement posted on an official account.
A US official told CNN that the Taliban's agreement for the 200 or so people to leave on a charter flight came after US Special representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad had been pressing the Taliban to allow departures.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday blamed the grounding of charter flights in Mazar-i-Sharif, northern Afghanistan, on the Taliban, saying that the militant group was not allowing them to leave.
The Taliban claimed “that some of the passengers do not have the required documentation,” Blinken said.
CNN has reached out to the White House, the US National Security Council and the Taliban for comment on Thursday's developments. The US State Department declined to comment.
The last US military planes left Kabul's airport just ahead of an August 31 deadline, marking the full withdrawal of American forces. That landmark moment came only two weeks after the Taliban seized control of the capital.
By the time the US completed its withdrawal, more than 122,000 people in total had been flown out of Kabul airport since July and more than 6,000 Americans civilians evacuated.
