Seven people in the crowds near Kabul airport died amid the chaos of those fleeing the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence has said.

The MoD said in a statement on Sunday that “conditions on the ground remain extremely challenging but we are doing everything we can to manage the situation as safely and securely as possible”.

It added: “Our sincere thoughts are with the families of the seven Afghan civilians who have sadly died in crowds in Kabul.”

On Saturday, a Sky News correspondent watched as UK paratroopers began pulling people from the mayhem before medics checked vital signs of those left on the floor after a crush and then covered bodies in white sheets.

Sky Chief Correspondent Stuart Ramsay said he saw at least three bodies.

British soldiers have been inside the airport boundary attempting to help evacuate British people and Afghans with the right to come to the UK.

Thousands of people gathered outside the gates of the Hamid Karzai International Airport trying to escape from the country, fearful about what would happen following the Taliban’s lightning takeover of the country.

On Wednesday, 17 people were injured in a stampede at a gate to the airport and, on Monday, at least five people were killed during chaos on the ground and at least one fell from a US military plane after hundreds of desperate people flooded on to runways at the airport.

US military planes have been making rapid, diving combat landings at the airport due to a new, perceived threat from the Islamic State group affiliate in Afghanistan.

US officials didn’t offer specific detail about the IS threat but called it significant.

There had been no confirmed attacks as yet by the IS militants, but the US embassy in Kabul on Saturday asked Americans waiting to be evacuated not to approach the airport because of potential security threats at the gate.

Militants from Islamic State in Afghanistan have in the past battled Taliban fighters.

Witnesses have said the Taliban imposed some order around the airport on Sunday, ordering those outside the gates form orderly queues and preventing crowds from gathering elsewhere nearby.

Meanwhile, a soldier who was filmed by Sky News holding a baby who’d been passed over razor wire, whose photo has been printed on the front page of nearly every British national newspaper and beamed around the world by the Associated Press wire service, insisted he was just doing his job.

It came as former British prime minister Tony Blair – who entered the war in Afghanistan by sending UK troops into the country with the US – broke his silence over the crisis by accusing US President Joe Biden of an “imbecilic” decision to pull US troops out.