When Taliban fighters got tired of waiting for evacuations to be processed, they would kill and beat Afghan civilians, a British soldier has claimed.

The 22-year-old private, from London, was deployed to Kabul with his parachute regiment on August 17 after the Taliban took over Afghanistan and nations rushed to get their people and their allies out of the country.

The soldier, given the false name John for his own safety, told Metro.co.uk how he and his colleagues worked on ‘crowd control’ for most of their time there.

In the panic that ensued after the Taliban takeover thousands of people tried to flee the country.

Huge masses of people ended up gathering outside the airport gates, begging soldiers and officials to help them.

As per the Taliban’s agreement, militants were cooperating with British and American soldiers, helping them to filter passport and visa holders through the airport gates.

But the radical fighters ‘got frustrated with the speed everything was moving at’ and ‘would just start taking it out on the crowd’.

‘When they got frustrated, they would start beating the crowd and they were killing people, they’d be firing their rifles in the air,’ John said.

At one point people broke out into some type of chaos which the corporal compared to riots. But while British troops used shields to keep people from flooding into the airport, Taliban fighters were apparently ‘riling them up on the other side’.

John chose to speak out about what he saw in Kabul because he feels ‘everyone has forgotten’ about what happened there.

He believes this is in part because of the way the Taliban has been trying to repaint itself as more liberal than it was when the group last ruled the country – from 1996 to 2001.