Scenes from Afghanistan: Videos captured celebratory whistling and honking in Kabul.

The last vestiges of the American presence in Afghanistan departed around midnight in Kabul, signifying the end of a two-decade occupation and meeting the Aug. 31 deadline that President Biden had set for the full withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Speaking via video at a news conference at the Pentagon late Monday afternoon, Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., head of the U.S. Central Command, announced the completion of the military’s exit and the mission to evacuate American citizens and allies.

He said the last C-17 transport plane had lifted off from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul at 3:29 p.m. Eastern, transporting Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue, the head of the 82nd Airborne Division, and Ross Wilson, the acting U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

“Tonight’s withdrawal signifies both the end of the military component of the evacuation, but also the end of the nearly 20-year mission that began in Afghanistan shortly after Sept. 11, 2001,” General McKenzie said.

Aug. 30, 2021, 3:39 p.m. ET

Aug. 30, 2021, 3:39 p.m. ET

For days, there had been chaos at the airport in Kabul as thousands scrambled to leave Afghanistan. But by Monday evening, just hours before the U.S. deadline to withdraw troops, a sense of resignation had descended on the area.

A few hundred people were waiting outside the airport perimeter, but were kept at a significant distance by Taliban fighters guarding the area. American fighter jets and drones could be seen circling overhead, and a few planes — mostly C-17s, large military transport aircraft — took off and turned west into the setting sun. Early Monday morning, a White House spokeswoman said around 1,200 people had been airlifted from Kabul in the previous 24 hours.

Taliban fighters said they were preparing for the possibility that the American troops would be gone by day’s end, hours before the deadline.

Text by Megan Specia, Jim Huylebroek, Matthieu Aikins, Dan Bilefsky and Matt Stevens.

Stark images and video from Kabul on Monday showed people gathering around a charred vehicle that appeared to have been used to launch rockets.

“The situation here is that people are terrified and worried about the future,” a man at the scene said. “They are worried that the rocket launching might continue.”

The U.S. military said it shot down rockets aimed at the Kabul airport Monday morning. A U.S. official said that the rockets were brought down by a counter-rocket system, and that there were no initial reports of casualties. It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the rockets.

Aug. 30, 2021, 10:27 a.m. ET

Aug. 30, 2021, 10:27 a.m. ET

Hours after a U.S. military drone strike in Kabul on Sunday, Defense Department officials said that the strike had blown up a vehicle laden with explosives, eliminating a threat to Kabul’s airport from the Islamic State Khorasan group.

But at a family home in Kabul on Monday, survivors and neighbors said the strike had killed 10 people, including seven children, an aid worker for an American charity organization and a contractor with the U.S. military.

“I saw the whole scene,” said Samia Ahmadi, whose father and fiancée were both killed. “There were burnt pieces of flesh everywhere.”

Capt. Bill Urban, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, said on Sunday that the military was investigating reports of civilian casualties.

As America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan wound down, with just two days remaining before President Biden’s Tuesday deadline to complete the American withdrawal from the country, officials said a U.S. military drone strike blew up a vehicle laden with explosives in Kabul on Sunday. The strike thwarted an imminent threat to Hamid Karzai International Airport from the Islamic State Khorasan, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command said. The suspected site of the strike is shown in video footage above. Possible civilian casualties were being investigated.

Afghans fleeing fighting in the country’s provinces ended up in this makeshift camp, which stretches between the north and south lanes of the main route in and out of Kabul. There is little shelter from the sun. Sheets, scarves, curtains and tarps are tied together to form flimsy walls, the wind blowing them aside along with clouds of dust. Piles of trash and portable toilets overdue for maintenance attract swarms of flies.

Mohammed, 32, from Kunduz, was one of the first to arrive in the camp 20 days ago and became a de facto leader. On the floor of his makeshift shelter, he laid out page after page of names and phone numbers, a registry of the displaced. He said of the original 1,000 families he had noted, more than half left the camp after the fighting subsided. Those still at the camp either lost their home to fighting and have no where to go, or they can’t afford the return trip. He and his family were in the camp for lack of resources. “If the Taliban helps us, we will go home. We don’t even have money to eat,” he said.

Photos and text by Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Evacuees from Afghanistan arrived at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, exhausted and grateful to have landed in the United States after a deadly terrorist attack outside the airport in Kabul.

The evacuees, many of them holding infants and clutching the hands of their children, waved at reporters, flashed the thumbs-up sign or raised their hands in salutes.

One of the evacuees was Ahmad, a permanent U.S. resident who lives in Washington State, according to a video of the arrival filmed by The Associated Press. He went to Afghanistan to get some of his immediate family members out, but he was unsuccessful.

“Well, I would say the last six or seven days have been the toughest days of my life,” he said Friday. “And you kind of feel lucky if you can get just through those gates.”

Afghans continued to try to get into the airport and leave Kabul on Saturday, even amid ongoing threats of terrorist attacks. The refugees were driven by the fast-approaching Tuesday deadline for the United States to end its evacuation efforts.

Children rode in the back of a minibus near the airport on Saturday. In the streets, families set up temporary shelters at a park near the airport as they waited to get inside. Afghans walking through the airport entrance passed armed Taliban fighters. On Saturday evening, members of the Badri 313 Battalion, an elite unit that the Taliban has assigned to guard the airport, performed evening prayers outside its gate.

Photos by Jim Huylebroek and Victor J. Blue for The New York Times, Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, and EPA, via Shutterstock. Text by Maria Cramer.

Many of the Afghan civilians injured by the blast in Kabul on Thursday were transported to a nearby hospital run by the nongovernmental organization EMERGENCY.

A New York Times photojournalist went there on Friday and captured several scenes, including a man with a gunshot wound being moved to the care center and a survivor recovering in a wheelchair.

At another hospital roughly two miles away, a survivor spoke of being thrown into a drainage canal after the blast. Horrific images of the canal in the moments after the explosion that circulated on Thursday appeared to show bodies of those who perished intermingled with the living.

Afghans who lost loved ones in the attack near the airport spent Friday in mourning.

Across Kabul and outside the capital, they gathered in prayer, knelt along roadways and shielded the dead from view with garments, cloths and other coverings. Some carried coffins to burial sites, while others painstakingly dug graves into the dusty, stubborn terrain.

“Our hearts are on fire,” one man said. “For how long must we lose our lives and be humiliated? This is really a big loss for all of us.”

The morning after a deadly explosion shook the area near the Kabul airport, a space that for days had been filled with large crowds of people seeking to be evacuated, it had almost entirely cleared out, leaving only grim reminders of the casualties hours before.

Images of the area from Friday showed mounds of debris clogging a thin stretch of space between an airport wall and a canal. Blood splatter baked onto the stone barriers under the day’s hot sun, a visceral reminder of the destruction.

Backpacks and clothing were scattered all over the scene — items that were left behind in a hasty and chaotic attempt to flee the mayhem. Taliban guards stood watch in the desolation.

As night fell on Kabul late Thursday, scores of people injured by a blast near the airport were taken to nearby hospitals so they could receive urgent care.

Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., head of United States Central Command, said in a televised briefing Thursday that 12 U.S. service members had been killed, and 15 wounded. That number was later revised to 13 American service members and as many as 170 others killed, with over 200 wounded, according to Afghan health officials.

The attack was near a crowd of families at the airport gates who were desperately hoping to make one of the last evacuation flights out. Gunfire was reported in the aftermath of the explosion.

The Islamic State released a statement claiming responsibility for the attack.

The deaths on Thursday came on what was likely to be one of the final days of America’s 20-year presence in Afghanistan. It will go down as one of the U.S. military’s highest single American tolls of the war.

Speaking Thursday evening from the White House, President Biden honored the lives of the fallen service members, calling them “part of a great and noble company of American heroes” and evoking the memory of his own deceased son, Beau, to talk in personal terms about the pain of loss.

“We’re outraged as well as heartbroken,” Mr. Biden said.

He also later issued a direct message to the attackers: “To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive, we will not forget, we will hunt you down and make you pay.”

A New York Times journalist reporting from inside a nearby hospital saw dozens of people who were severely wounded or did not survive.

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   Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

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   Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

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   Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

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   Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

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   Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

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   Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

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   Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

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   Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper, Megan Specia, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Jim Huylebroek, Matthieu Aikins, Victor J. Blue, Fatima Faizi, Najim Rahim, Fahim Abed Sharif Hassan and Matt Stevens contributed reporting.

At least one explosion rattled the area outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Thursday, killing 13 American service members and at least 170 others just hours after Western governments had warned of a security threat there.

John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said Thursday that there were at least two blasts that he said were the “the result of a complex attack.” On Friday, officials clarified that there had been only one explosion, at the airport’s Abbey Gate, a main entryway to the international airport.

Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., head of United States Central Command, said in a televised briefing Thursday that 12 U.S. service members had been killed, and 15 wounded. That number was later revised to 13 U.S. service members killed, and Afghan health officials said Friday that as many as 170 others were killed in the attack, with at least 200 wounded.

For much of the past week, Kabul and its airport have been the focus of international attention as thousands of people have tried to flee Afghanistan after the Taliban swept into the capital.

But many other cities across the country fell to the Taliban before Kabul was conceded. And in those places, Afghans have been left to assess the wreckage resulting from the Taliban takeover, and to rebuild and contemplate what life will be like moving forward.

The Taliban seized Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital of southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, a few days before Kabul fell. But it had been under siege since at least May, when the Taliban began an offensive there as the American withdrawal got underway.

Long lines formed outside banks in Kabul on Wednesday as Afghans clamored to withdraw funds for the first time since the Taliban swept into the city.

The rush on banks, which have been closed for days, underscores the strain Afghanistan finds itself under now that its economy will no longer be propped up by American aid. Cash and fuel have quickly become scarce, and the price of food — which was already is short supply — has risen.

People in line at one bank branch on Wednesday said they needed to access their assets to buy basic staples. They also said they had received conflicting messages about when banks would open, so came just in case.

“We came here today to get money. Not only today, but also yesterday, the banks were closed and we stood in front,” an Azizi Bank customer said. “Some people say they will be open, but it hasn’t happened yet.”