Afghanistan: Before the Fall

I went to bed, thinking I could pack in the morning before my flight. But at 1:30 a.m. I started getting messages on social media from friends asking me if I was still in Kabul. They’d heard that the Taliban had entered the city. Was it true? No, I said. Surely not. But when I went outside, I heard gunfire nearby — the closest it’d been to my house in 20 years. There was no time to sleep. I began to pack, going through my life’s belongings, moving so hastily that I didn’t even pack a matching pair of socks. I took my camera, laptop, hard drives, and important documents. I did not have time, or space, to take everything I wanted. I instructed a friend to take what was left — my Pulitzer Prize, my World Press Photo Awards — and bury them in the backyard. To protect my loved ones, I wanted all signs of my life as a journalist erased. 

I finished packing just before dawn. As we drove to the airport, the streets were eerily quiet — a sure sign that something was wrong. Kabul is typically full of life in the early hours of the day. 

The scene at the airport was madness. We entered without passing through security, and found large groups of foreigners and Afghans desperate to leave the country. I secured my boarding pass and headed to the gate to board my flight, Turkish Airlines Flight 7070 to Istanbul. There, I saw a friend, a prominent women’s rights activist. We hugged and immediately we both began to cry. 

“Do you think we’ve lost Afghanistan?” she asked me. 

“Yes,” I said through tears. “I do.” 

My flight, it turned out, would be the last commercial flight to depart Kabul before the evacuations. I am convinced that if I had not been on it, I would be dead. Because of my status as a journalist, my name appeared on a Taliban list of targets. After arriving in the Netherlands, Taliban fighters texted me on WhatsApp and threatened to find and kill me. They didn’t realize that I was already out of the country. 

Sitting on the airplane, waiting for takeoff, I felt immense sadness. As the engines roared, I finally began to cry, the sounds of the engine obscuring my sobs. My life in Afghanistan — decades of friendship, of family, of love — was now over. They were years of happiness, excitement, and tragedy. Years in which I risked my life for the sake of universal values, of a free press, of a new and better Afghanistan. And now it’s all gone. I am a man without a home. A photographer without his subject. 

I am now in Amsterdam. I have a short-term visa and $200. I have no job, no bank account, and soon, probably, no valid passport. I do not know what will happen to me after my time here is up. But I am more worried about the people I’ve left behind.