THE COLLAPSE OF KABUL

 

I received the news that would change my life on the morning of August 15, 2021. I was busy supervising the painting of a room in preparation for my younger brother's wedding two weeks hence in my hometown of Kabul, Afghanistan when the phone rang. On the line was my wife's brother Haseebullah Talash, who worked as Senior Digital Editor for the Afghanistan branch of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He had just left the Passport General Directorate, the main entity for issuing passports in Afghanistan. His voice was rattled: “I have been running for over an hour. The Taliban are here. They are about to enter the city. Do not leave the house. If you are outside, get home as soon as possible,” he said in Pashto, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan (Dari being the other). I was shocked and wondered how this could be possible. As I understood it, there were tens of thousands of American forces and ANDSF in Kabul to keep precisely such a takeover from happening.

I lived on the 4^th floor of a building in the Russian-named 1^st Mackroryan, a complex of multistory concrete buildings constructed by the Soviets in 1970s. I wasn’t far from the US Embassy and the Headquarters of NATO's Resolute Support Mission. While talking on the phone on the balcony of my apartment, I saw black smoke hovering over the US Embassy. I could only assume that they were burning sensitive documents and materials.

I ran back inside and turned on the news to see both local and global channels showing footage of people running wildly in every direction, while others were trapped in cars as chaos unfolded in the streets of Kabul. As my brother-in-law described the Taliban coup, he recalled a chilling detail: “I saw Afghan policemen quickly changing from their uniforms to ordinary Afghan clothes and escaping before even the civilians could leave.”

As late as 3:00pm that day, the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and his defense and interior ministers were still trying to convince the people that Kabul would not fall to Taliban, and that even if it did happen, there wouldn’t be bloodshed. President Ghani said, in what turned out to be his last statement from Arg, the Afghan Presidential Palace, “It is an obvious necessity, as I have instructed the Ministers of Defense and Interior, to have forces from National Directorate of Security along with the National Police and the National Army to take full responsibility for the security of all residents. It is our responsibility and, it is a responsibility that, God willing, we will take on appropriately. Secondly, those people that are thinking of rioting, looting, and killing people, will be dealt with in full force. My request is to establish phone lines for complaints and information directly to both the Interior and Defense Ministries, and especially to the National Directorate of Security so that the networks of people including neighborhood representatives, police districts and local councils are contactable.”

An hour later, news broke that Ghani and all other high-ranking Afghan government officials had fled the country.

While the crisis was intensifying throughout the day, an increasing number of US and NATO Forces chinook helicopters could be seen flying over Kabul. I soon learned that most of the Western embassies, including that of the US, had relocated to Kabul International Airport (also known as HKIA—Hamid Karzai International Airport). Meanwhile, prisoners from the notorious Pul-e-Charkhi prison, the largest jail in Afghanistan located in the East of Kabul city, had broken loose. Among them were hundreds of Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS-Khurasan (the ISIS branch mostly active in eastern Afghanistan) militants as well as other criminals. Thousands of Taliban as well as Al-Qaeda and other militants had been captured and imprisoned by the ANDSF since 2002. The Taliban always released prisoners when they captured a province, which, of course, added to their manpower and ability to intimidate their enemies. In one of the videos that I saw posted on Facebook, three prisoners who were still in the prison had filmed themselves, declaring, “We are free! We are coming for you!” as they threatened those they blamed for their incarceration.

Initially, Taliban announced that they would not enter the city without coordination with the Kabul Administration—a term the Taliban used throughout the American occupation to refer to the US-backed government of Afghanistan. But Taliban forces quickly overran Kabul. Videos of Taliban entering different parts of the city and occupying police districts (equivalent of police stations/departments in the US) soon made the rounds on social media. In most of them, Taliban militants and commanders claimed that they entered Kabul only to prevent the looting of public and private properties. And in nearly all of the videos, entire districts looked to be abandoned by police, and Taliban faced no resistance. At 9:00 pm that first night, Taliban decreed a strict curfew that I heard via the loudspeakers of the mosque near my house: “No one shall leave their homes between 09:00 pm and 08:00 am so that the Mujahidin of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan can identify those who intend to loot public and private properties, and to prevent them from doing so.”

As Kabul fell, AWA Advocacy warned that Taliban would conduct door-to-door searches and strongly advised everyone to destroy anything that documented their work with foreigners. AWA Advocacy was a Facebook page established by members of the US Congress, US military, and Afghan interpreters to help SIV applicants with their cases. SIV stands for Special Immigration Visa and is a US Department of State program established to help Afghans and Iraqis who worked with the US military as interpreters immigrate to the US, thereby escaping Taliban reprisal for conspiring with enemy forces. As I followed the news on social media, I realized that most pro-government people who worked for the Afghan government or for Western countries and organizations had already removed their profile pictures, and some had even deactivated their accounts. They all knew that Taliban would be seeking reprisals from anyone who had worked with foreign forces.

This stark and undeniable fact presented me with a serious problem. I worked as an interpreter for foreign military troops (Italians and Americans, specifically) from 2008 to 2012 and then again from 2017 to 2021. I had dozens of letters of recommendation, letters of appreciation, and certificates and coins awarded by high-ranking Italian and American military officers. I had two letters of appreciation from US Army General John W. Nicholson and a coin from US Army General David McNeil, both Commanders of US and NATO Forces in Afghanistan. Also, I had hundreds of pictures from the eight years I had worked for US and Italian troops, including a picture with then-Commander of CENTCOM, US Army General David Petraeus. I had copies of all my contracts, letters of employment, and job descriptions. And most valuable in terms of my immediate future, I had fifty-plus pages of documents for my SIV case. My interview at the US Embassy in Kabul was scheduled for August 30, 2021, for which I had prepared a complete package including passport-size photos required for visas for myself, my wife, and our infant daughter.

Worse than that, it was impossible for me to delete all the posts I had made over the previous ten years on Facebook speaking out against the Taliban or in support of the Afghan government, and I couldn’t deactivate my account because I had to follow AWA Advocacy. I knew that the group would be a crucial ally in the coming days, and that I would need access to their information and support if I were to move my family to safety. I decided to keep my Facebook account and simply delete as many posts as possible. I also removed my profile picture and cover photo and removed my photo from my WhatsApp account.

For many years already, as foreign forces were focused on winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, Taliban concluded that in order to thwart their missions, they needed to target the interpreters. If there were no interpreters, the foreign forces could not communicate with the local population and, in times of joint operations, with ANDSF. Initially, interpreters were easily identified as they did not wear military uniforms. Once this course of action of the Taliban was discovered, foreign forces began issuing uniforms to the interpreters. Still, they were easily identified because they did not carry weapons. To counter this, foreign forces placed interpreters among their troops on foot patrols.

When the US initially began the relocation of Afghan interpreters several months before the fall of Kabul, Taliban were well aware of the plan and quickly tracked down people they considered “spies of the infidels.” If Taliban captured travelling members of ANDSF, they would demand guarantees that they would not serve in the ranks of ANDSF any longer. But when they captured interpreters, Taliban had orders to execute them on the spot.

One of the tactics that Taliban used to identify ANDSF members and interpreters was by establishing checkpoints on roads and stopping any vehicle they deemed suspicious. They would ask anyone who looked frightened for his phone. Then, they would dial a random number on his phone, telling the person on the other end that they were members of ANDSF and that they had detained the individual for working with the Taliban. If the person on the other end said that the detainee was an ANDSF member or interpreter, he would face Taliban’s brutal punishment.

All of these factors created a reality wherein those who had worked with foreigners at any time saw no future for themselves and their children under the Taliban. And of course, many of us remembered the pre-2001 Taliban regime very well. We knew that women would be confined to homes, girls would not be allowed to attend schools, men would be forced to grow beards and cut their hair short, watching television and listening to music would be banned, the economy would crash, there would be no employment, poverty and hunger would skyrocket, and no one would be allowed to criticize the regime. With all this in mind, most interpreters felt they had no choice but to evacuate, and hopefully immigrate to a safe country, even though there would be significant danger in merely trying to leave Afghanistan.

I frantically sorted through all of my documents, took pictures of those for which I didn’t have soft copies, and emailed them to my brothers, one in the US and the other in Afghanistan. I also forwarded as many other emails as possible to them before deleting everything. Then, I tore all the documents and pictures into small pieces and asked my wife to burn them in the kitchen bit-by-bit so they would not produce any smoke. Then, I flushed the ashes down the toilet. I gave the coins to my younger brother to dispose of, to be scattered one-by-one into different dustbins in Mackroryan area.

It took over ten hours to destroy or hide all the materials that would put me and my family in lethal danger from Taliban looking to settle scores...