It could’ve been scheduled for any day, but Zeinab Rezaie’s flight happened to be scheduled for that day.
The night before Kabul fell, Rezaie and her family had been glued to the chaos on the news, and in the early morning, as she and her husband, Ali Karimi, drove toward the city center on the way to the airport, their new reality became clear. Everything was suddenly different. Afghanistan’s capital had always bustled with commuters at this early hour. Now it was nearly deserted. Storefronts were shuttered. Only the bearded young men from the mountains, with their big guns, walked the streets. “The face of the city was changed,” Rezaie says.
For the young couple, the drive was tense; there was no telling what might happen if their car was stopped at one of the new makeshift checkpoints. Rezaie had made sure to cover her hair that morning, and Karimi wore traditional Afghan garb. Rezaie watched the Taliban fighters stare into every car, stopping and searching a handful. “Maybe they were looking for former soldiers or for guns or for people in uniform,” she says. She didn’t know for certain. Rezaie had spent years working with a foreign non-governmental organization (NGO), which she suspected could make her a target. And: “I don’t know what would have happened to me if they had learned I was [traveling] to the U.S. on a visa,” she says.
Illustration By Avinash Weerasekera
Arriving at a checkpoint, Rezaie and Karimi lowered their eyes as a Taliban soldier looked them over and, after a bated breath, waved them on. Their car drove forward, and soon enough they were at Hamid Karzai International Airport, where more Taliban soldiers with raised guns tried and failed to keep order as masses of scared citizens swarmed the entrance.
“I remember everything from that morning,” Rezaie, now 27, says of Aug. 16, 2021, the day after the Taliban seized Kabul’s Presidential Palace (following President Ashraf Ghani’s fleeing the country). In less than two weeks, the Taliban had captured 26 of the country’s 34 provincial capitals, returning to power 20 years after the U.S. ousted the fundamentalist Islamic militia. Rezaie walks through the early hours of that fateful day with precise detail, but one image remains clearer than the rest. Beyond the fear and the conquerors’ ineptitude, both burned into her memory, she remembers most vividly a pile of shoes outside the airport’s front doors. The incongruity of it all haunts her.
