Afghanistan conflict: I watched Kabul fall to the Taliban
- The Taliban’s lightning advance on Kabul caught not only the US off guard, but ordinary Afghans too
- Sonia Sarkar was on the ground as the mood went from normal to frantic in a matter of days. On Thursday, she attended a wedding where unveiled girls danced to Bollywood hits; now some women are in hiding, fearing ‘life is over’
When New Delhi-based journalist Sonia Sarkar arrived in Kabul last week intending to report on the implications of the conflict between Afghan forces and the Taliban on the back of the US troop withdrawal, life in Afghanistan’s capital seemed normal. People were visiting high-end cafes, malls and attending huge weddings. Little heed was paid to the thousands of wounded people who had entered the city after their hometowns were taken by the Taliban. All that changed early on Sunday morning as it became clear that the Islamist group were poised to enter Kabul. Here is her first-person account.
On August 11, when I landed in Kabul a little before dusk, my visit started with warm messages from my contacts who welcomed me and told me to be alert. One said: “See, everything is normal in Kabul, life is going on.”
I started receiving frantic messages from the same set of Afghan contacts asking me to “leave at the earliest”, and “go anywhere from here but just leave”.
Ironically, barely six hours before I heard the news of the fall of Jalalabad, I had been planning to travel there to report on how it was the only major city not to have fallen to the Taliban.
By 8am, when I left my hotel, the early morning anxiety on social media and private text messages had spilled on to the streets. People were standing in long queues in front of banks and ATMs.
