Image source, AAMAJ NEWS AGENCY/via REUTERS

Welcome to our continuing live coverage of the situation in Afghanistan. Here is the latest:

• The US says its anti-missile system in Kabul has intercepted up to five rockets, which were fired towards the capital’s airport - it is not clear who launched the missiles

• The US has carried out two separate drone strikes on Islamic State targets since Thursday, when as many as 170 people died in a suicide attack outside the airport - including 13 American troops

• Washington says it has facilitated the evacuation of more than 110,000 people from the airport since 14 August - a day before the Taliban took control of the city

• America is sticking to the 31 August evacuation deadline agreed with the militant group

• All other nations have already concluded their airlift operations

• The final flights returning British troops arrived in the UK on Sunday

• The BBC's Lyse Doucet in Kabul says she and her colleagues are still receiving urgent SOS messages from Afghans who feel threatened by the Taliban. They include musicians, university students and female politicians

Stay with us, as we’ll be bringing you all the latest developments, eyewitness accounts, pictures and videos, as well as our correspondents’ analysis, throughout the day.

Image source, Reuters

We're pausing our live coverage for now - thanks for staying with us. Here are the main developments of the day so far:

• A loud blast near to Kabul airport was later confirmed to have been caused by a US missile. American officials said they targeted a suicide bomber who was planning to carry out an attack
• Capt Bill Urban, from US Central Command, said he was "confident" they had hit the target - a vehicle carrying at least one person associated with the Islamic State group and a "substantial amount of explosive material"
• A rocket is also reported to have hit a house near the airport, but it is still unclear whether or not this is connected to the American strike
• US President Joe Biden had warned that another attack on Kabul airport was highly likely, with White House officials saying it could happen as early as today
• The US is carrying out its final flights out of Afghanistan, ahead of a 31 August deadline. The last UK troops, along with diplomats and officials, have already left Kabul
• More than 110,000 people have now been evacuated
• Meanwhile, journalists in Afghanistan are reporting that the Taliban have announced a ban on co-education - with boys and girls to "study in separate classes in accordance with Islamic law"

Image source, EPA

The United Nations has urged the international community "to keep supporting Afghanistan".

As countries including the UK and France complete their evacuation operations and pull out of the country, the UN said it was crucial "the outside world" continued to support the humanitarian effort.

"There's already a very serious humanitarian situation and that could get very much worse," said Rupert Colville, spokesperson for the UN Commissioner for Human Rights.

He said much of the infrastructure had broken down in Afghanistan, meaning supplies of food and medicines must to be brought in to the country before the winter.

"So the outside world really needs to step up and keep in the game in Afghanistan," he told the BBC.

George Bowden
BBC News

An Afghan refugee fleeing to the UK gave birth to a baby girl at 30,000ft while on an evacuation flight destined for Birmingham.

Soman Noori, 26, was on a flight from Dubai to Birmingham, having previously left Kabul, when she went into labour, Turkish Airlines said.

With no doctor on board, members of the cabin crew delivered the baby girl, named Havva, or Eve in English.

The airline said both mother and child are healthy.

You can read more here.

BBC correspondent Rajini Vaidyanathan tweets that she's spoken to a young Afghan man, whose sister - a doctor - isn't being allowed to go back to her clinic.

This is despite the Taliban saying publicly that they have asked women in medical jobs to return to work.

On Friday, a Taliban spokesman said they wanted all women healthcare workers to return to work, as pressure was mounting on Afghanistan's health services.

"The Ministry of Public Health of the Islamic Emirate advises all women employees in teh centre and provinces that they should attend work regularly," spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement.

When the Taliban were last in government, before 2001, women were not allowed to work.

France and Britain will submit a joint resolution to an emergency United Nations meeting on Monday, proposing the establishment of a safe zone in Kabul.

The safe zone would be under UN control and would offer shelter in the capital to people trying to leave Afghanistan.

"I cannot see who could oppose enabling the safety of humanitarian operations," French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters on Sunday, during a visit to Mosul in Iraq.

The situation in Afghanistan will be the focal point of Monday's meeting between UN envoys for Britain, France, the US, China and Russia.

President Macron said on Saturday that France was holding preliminary discussions with the Taliban about the humanitarian situation and the possible evacuation of more people.

Like the UK, France is one of a number of countries in the West to have ended evacuations from Kabul.

Across the globe, countries which have traditionally relied on American backing are suddenly starting to wonder if they should get themselves some re-insurance.

Only four months ago, President Biden sounded confident and reassuring: "We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit. We'll do it responsibly, deliberately and safely. And we will do it in full co-ordination with our allies and partners."

That isn't what happened. And a country which depended on American and Western support for an entire generation has suddenly found itself abandoned.

When the Taliban were thrown out in November 2001 by a coalition of moderate Afghan mujahideen, with Western support, an era of relative prosperity and personal freedom began.

By 2021, the war against the Taliban had dwindled to a security operation. A smallish Western force of around 2,500 kept the Taliban down and the country stable.

It was the announcement of the deadline for pulling out the Western troops that led to the sudden Taliban surge and the capture of Kabul.

Everything is uncertain now in Afghanistan.

President Biden's abrupt withdrawal means that peace, for the people of Afghanistan, is further away than ever.

Read more from John.

Image source, EPA

Since taking Kabul on 15 August the Taliban have stressed that their attitudes towards women and their approach to violence has changed, in an attempt to present a new image to the international community.

But retired senior military and diplomatic figures from the UK say this is unlikely.

"I don't think they've changed," Sir Nicholas Kay told Times Radio. Sir Nicholas was the ambassador to Afghanistan from 2017 to 2019. "One of their strengths, if you like, is their single-mindedness and their strength of conviction and their faith in what they are doing and their cause."

General Lord Richard Dannatt, who was chief of the general staff from 2006 to 2009, also told the radio station: "I'm not optimistic that we're going to see a very different Taliban over time that that which we saw 20 years ago."

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has insisted that the Taliban will be judged "not on the basis of what they say but what they do".

Image source, EPA

The Taliban has asked Turkey to run Kabul airport providing it retains control of security there, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said.

"What does the Taliban say with regard to the airport issue? They say 'give us the security but you operate it'," he said in comments published by the official Andalou news agency.

"How come we hand you over the security? Let's say you took over the security, but how would we explain to the world if another bloodbath took place there? It's not an easy job."

He added that he would make a decision about whether or not Turkey could run the airport "once calm prevails".

However it has seemed less and less likely that Turkey will agree to do so since Wednesday, when it began to withdraw its approximately 500 non-combat troops from Afghanistan.

The US says its drone strike in Kabul today was successful in "eliminating an imminent" threat to the airport, where evacuations are winding down.

Capt Bill Urban of US Central Command said he was "confident" that the target, a vehicle carrying at least one person associated with IS-K and a "substantial amount of explosive material", was destroyed.

"We are assessing the possibilities of civilian casualties, though we have no indications at this time," he said.

"We remain vigilant for potential future threats.”

Image source, PA Media

Conservative MP Johnny Mercer has called the government's handling of the withdrawal of British troops a "catastrophe".

The MP for Plymouth Moor View, who served in Afghanistan, wrote in the Sunday Times that the exit from the country was "shameful".

A former officer in the British Army, Mr Mercer wrote: "My rage is only quelled by tears, which inevitably give way to rage again. And so it goes on, day after day.

"The tears are for what has been lost: friends, fathers, bodies and minds. The rage is towards our leaders - that kind of generation-defining rage from which I hope defining change comes."

Image source, EPA

US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has said they will continue to carry out strikes in Afghanistan, after an attack at Kabul airport killed about 170 people.

"The president [Joe Biden] does not intend to start a new war in Afghanistan," he told CBS.

"That being said, he also is going to talk to his commanders about whatever set of tools and capabilities they need to get the people who attacked our troops at the Kabul airport and to make sure that we are degrading and debilitating the group, Isis-K, that conducted this attack.

"So yes, we will continue to take the kinds of over-the-horizon [remote] strikes like we did over the weekend against the Isis-K facilitators and plotters. And yes, we will consider other operations to go after these guys, to get them and to take them off the battlefield."

Isis-K, or IS-K, is the Afghanistan branch of the Islamic State jihadist group, which claimed the Kabul airport attack.

Sullivan also said they were "very closely tracking" the potential threat of attacks in the US: "What the intelligence community has assessed to date is that the relevant terrorist groups in Afghanistan do not possess advanced external plotting capabilities - but, of course, they could develop them."

Image source, EPA

More now on the reports that the US today carried out a military strike on suspected members of the Afghan branch of the Islamic State group, IS-K.

US officials have now said the operation - an air strike involving a drone - targeted a suicide bomber in a vehicle who was aiming to carry out an attack at Kabul airport.

"We are confident we hit the target we were aiming for," a military official told the BBC's US partner network CBS.

"Initial reports indicate there were no civilian casualties," the official said, adding: "Secondary explosions from the vehicle indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material."

A spokesman for the Taliban also said the US airstrike had targeted a suspected bomber travelling in a car, according to the Associated Press.

It comes after witnesses reported a rocket strike near the airport, although it is not clear if the two incidents are connected.

A bombing at Kabul airport last Thursday killed as many as 170 people, including 13 US troops.

US President Joe Biden has travelled to the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to honour the 13 US service members killed in the suicide bomb attack on Kabul airport on Thursday.

Up to 170 people, most of them Afghan civilians, died in the attack, which Islamic State's Afghanistan branch said it carried out.

The president and First Lady Jill Biden will "meet the families of fallen American service members who gave their lives to save Americans, our partners, and our Afghan allies in Kabul," Mr Biden's schedule says.

They will then honour the transfer of the troops' remains from an aircraft flown to the base.

Evacuations are continuing at Kabul airport, ahead of a deadline of 31 August for the withdrawal of all foreign forces in now Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

Mr Biden has already ordered one drone strike in retaliation for the suicide bombing.

Image source, Reuters

Journalists in Afghanistan are reporting that the Taliban have announced a ban on co-education.

Ziar Khan Yaad - a journalist for Afghan news channel Tolo News - said the acting minister of education had announced boys and girls would no longer be able to study together in universities "and will continue to study in separate classes in accordance with Islamic law".

In addition, freelance journalist Bashir Ahmad Gwakh tweeted that the Taliban Higher Education Minister had officially banned men from teaching women.

Since the Taliban takeover earlier this month, there has been widespread concern that women and girls in the country will once again be denied their human right to work and study, as was the case previously under Taliban rule.

There are still about 300 US citizens still waiting to be evacuated from Afghanistan, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says.

"We are down to a population of 300 or fewer Americans who are still on the ground there, and we are working actively in these hours and these days to get those folks out," he told US broadcaster ABC.

Some Americans have chosen to stay beyond the 31 August deadline, Blinken says, but he adds that "they are not going to be stuck in Afghanistan".

The US, he says, has "a mechanism to get them out".

The US has reportedly carried out a military strike in the Afghan capital Kabul today.

The strike targeted members of the Afghan branch of the Islamic State group, IS-K, Reuters news agency reports, citing US officials.

No further details of the US operation have been released and it is unclear if it is related to the rocket strike on a property near the airport reported earlier.

Footage shared on Twitter appears to show the aftermath of the explosion that occurred earlier near Kabul airport.

The video was posted by freelance journalist Shafi Karimi.

The BBC has not independently verified the footage. We'll bring you more details as we get them.

A health ministry official has told the BBC the recent blast was caused by a rocket that struck a house near to the airport.

The airport was not hit directly, the source said.

It is not yet known if there are any casualties.

The BBC is seeking further confirmation and more details will follow.