[LA Times] At a dusty traffic circle just outside the Kabul airport, amped-up Taliban fighters had corralled hundreds of unarmed Afghans. There, under a punishing afternoon sun, another tragic and tumultuous scene from the U.S. withdrawal played out on Tuesday.
The young men with the Taliban numbered only in the dozens, but the crowds cowered before them. The men fired automatic weapons indiscriminately into the air, and sometimes aimed them at the assembled men, women and children.
The beatings seemed to be administered almost at random, but with chilling deliberateness. Sticks, lengths of rubber hose, knotted rope, rifle butts — the fighters wielded them all.
Some of those on the receiving end of the blows were trying to slip away through a hole in the fence to get inside the airport perimeter, but others were simply squatting on the ground, trying to shield themselves.
This photographer, trying to capture an image of a fighter pointing his gun at the crowd, was whipped in the leg.
Gunfire could be heard every few moments in the traffic circle, which was blocked off by Afghan army vehicles commandeered by the militants when the capital fell. One fighter, after letting loose a volley of shots, directed a smile at one of his comrades.
At least a dozen people were wounded. A woman and child were left covered in blood; a few men in the crowd pulled them across the street to safety, hustling them into a yellow Toyota Corolla taxi that then sped off. An elderly man in a bloodstained sports jacket carried a limp child, whose eyes were open to reveal only the whites. 
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