Blood is seeping from the dead man’s skull. He lies face down on the baking runway, and it pools around him like a halo.
The mobile-phone camera, clutched by someone sprinting across the Tarmac, captures another corpse. This man’s left knee has exploded into a mass of scarlet gristle. His right leg has been smashed; its foot is missing.
Finally I see a third man lying on his back. A man is tying a rag around his broken head to try to hold it together.
The footage was filmed on August 16, 2021. These desperate men had all fallen to their deaths after trying to cling to the wings and undercarriages of American planes fleeing Kabul Airport.
The previous day, the Taliban (the word means ‘students’ in Pashto, one of the two official languages), had seized the Afghan capital. The images captured that day became an indelible stain on the West.
The last man I saw in that footage was Khalid Hotak. Despite the help he received on the runway, he died from his injuries that day. Now I am sitting in a restaurant with his brother Zabihullah. ‘Khalid had a “secret” job,’ he tells me. ‘That is why he was so desperate to escape.’
I suspect that means he worked with the Americans – and in doing so, he was far from alone. The US, along with Britain, Canada and other allies, invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, less than a month after 9/11.
Over the following 20 years, Washington poured tens of thousands of men, $2 trillion and uncountable weapons into the country. According to America’s Brown University, more than $300 million every single day was spent on the conflict – for two decades.
David Patrikarakos, centre, with Taliban fighters in Kabul
An artillery weapon in Kabul displayed to mark the fifth anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power
The US built, or thought it had, a national army. It erected ministries and embassies. It fortified Kabul. Then, five years ago this summer, the Afghan Republic government, on which the Western coalition had spent so much propping up, collapsed.
Provincial capitals fell. Soldiers abandoned their posts. Then the Taliban fighters marauded through cities and towns, killing security forces and government officials while requisitioning more than one million weapons and other pieces of military hardware.
On August 15 – five years ago to the day – the Taliban reached Kabul. President Ashraf Ghani fled to the United Arab Emirates, where he remained until reportedly relocating to Lebanon earlier this year.
The Talib fighters smashed their way into the presidential palace and strutted beneath its chandeliers.
The ‘shock and awe’ of 2001’s Operation Enduring Freedom had scattered the mujahideen to the mountains and villages – but now they were back.
What kind of state is the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan today? I have come to find out.
In Kabul, the scent of baking bread mingles with the stench of open sewers. Armed Taliban walk the streets; children beg; and the ‘virtue and vice’ police patrol, scouting for the improperly attired or the sound of music – now banned along with concerts, TV dramas and films. Five times per day, without fail, the call to prayer sounds through the growl of traffic.
The city has been inverted. Once the Taliban attacked Kabul; now they control it.
David with the Taliban in Kabul
Five times per day, without fail, the call to prayer sounds through the growl of traffic
The armoured compounds fortified by the Americans are now maintained by the men they were built to repel. The US Embassy, which reportedly cost $800 million, lies abandoned, a monument to hubris.
Official signs of the Taliban’s victory against the West are everywhere.
In Public Health Square, state-sanctioned graffiti makes the point unambiguous: ‘Our Islamic system has been achieved at the cost of the blood of martyrs,’ reads one. ‘Our commitment is in place to bring and implement the divine Sharia law,’ runs another.
On my first evening, I visit a large hill overlooking the city, with a public park and a mosque dedicated to Mullah Omar, who founded the Taliban in 1994 and who died from tuberculosis in 2013.
As we snake up the road to the top, I see few women, but dozens of Talib fighters: walking; leaning from armoured trucks; casually holding automatic weapons in saloon cars.
Old, middle-aged, some practically boys – and every one a member or supporter of the regime, recognisable by the black turban that identifies him as a lifelong ‘student’.
We reach the summit. By a makeshift checkpoint is a small wooden building, and through its open window I see a wall bristling with automatic weapons. Fighters are checking in their AK-47s like coats.
Inside the park, the diving platform of the ‘Russian swimming pool’, built by the Soviets during their occupation of the country in the 1980s, comes into view.
Pumping water up the hill proved difficult, so the pool was rarely filled. Ever innovative, the Taliban would hurl their prisoners from the 10-metre-high platform on to the concrete below.
Survival was taken as evidence of innocence, death as evidence of guilt.
This is a totalitarian regime, but after securing the relevant permissions, I am free to travel without an official minder and to speak to anyone I want.
I ask a young man with a scruffy beard what he thinks of Taliban rule. ‘They are building many roads and improving the infrastructure,’ he replies. ‘We are happy with things,’ his friend chips in. I believe them: they clearly support the regime.
The call to prayer sounds, and men start flocking to the huge mosque, built in imitation of the 7th-century Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the world’s oldest surviving Islamic building.
Near it, flying high, is an enormous Taliban flag: 131ft wide and 85ft high, it was raised in March 2022. White, it features towering black Arabic calligraphy spelling out the Muslim ‘shahada’ or declaration of faith: ‘There is no god but God; Muhammad is the Messenger of God.’
In the Ministry of Information and Culture, I meet the ‘Deputy Minister for Publications’, Muhajer Farahi. In one corner of the silent waiting room are towers of English-language books: Farahi’s job is to oversee their vetting to decide whether they can be published.
He sits in his office barefoot, alongside two other Taliban, one of whom carries an automatic rifle. I ask Farahi what criteria he uses to decide whether books can be published. ‘Islamic law, national interest and our culture,’ he replies softly and deliberately.
For him and the rest of the Taliban the war with the West is not over, it has merely changed form.
The enemy might have left the battlefield, but the regime remains under attack through ideas spread via the internet, television, newspapers and literature. This is why Farahi believes his job as a censor is so important.
The Americans had the weapons and the money, he argues, but the Taliban had two more powerful things: faith and the people. ‘The civilian population was with us. They provided us with everything,’ he says. To him, the fall of Kabul in 2021 was a holy vindication.
Five years on, he remains just as sure of his cause. ‘[George W.] Bush commanded us to surrender, and God commanded us to succeed,’ he says. Then he smiles: ‘We have seen who was correct.’
Later that day, I meet Dr Sharafat Zaman Amar, spokesman for the Ministry of Health. He speaks excellent English and is keen to stress that if the Afghan people are suffering, it is only because of Western sanctions.
Dr Sharafat Zaman Amar, spokesman for the Ministry of Health, talks to David
As I am walking around Kabul, I get chatting with a baker. ‘There are fewer jobs, but it’s peaceful,’ he tells me
‘For the past three decades, the health system has been dependent on international aid,’ he says. ‘We need more time. And we must separate politics from health services.’
According to the British charity Afghanaid, 12.6million people here – out of a total population of some 50million – face ‘acute food insecurity’. Around 3.5million are children under the age of five.
When I put this to Dr Amar, he insists that the number of sites treating malnutrition has increased from roughly 800 under the American-sustained Republic to 3,200 under the Taliban, with around 1,000 additional staff.
As I listen to him seamlessly dodging questions, taking refuge in statistics and blaming the previous government for today’s failings, I watch him and it hits me: subtract the AK-47-toting armed guard, the bare feet and the fact we’re sitting on the carpet, and I could be talking to Wes Streeting.
The following afternoon, as I am walking around Kabul, I get chatting with a baker. ‘There are fewer jobs, but it’s peaceful,’ he tells me. ‘In the past, you couldn’t leave the house after 7pm: it wasn’t safe. Now you can go out.’
My photographer Adnan, who has worked in Afghanistan for years, agrees. ‘In 2021, Islamic State attacked the city and I saw a Taliban fighter rifling through a black bin bag of body parts collected at the scene to find his friend’s ID,’ he tells me.
‘Things were much more dangerous back then.’
Now order prevails. But at the cost of fear.
That evening, after dinner, I am accosted by a gaggle of children. They tug at my sleeve and waist, demanding money, until one spots a security vehicle by the side of the road. ‘Taliban, Taliban!’ the boy squeals – and they disappear into the night.
Another local is far more candid with me. ‘The economy is very bad,’ he says. ‘A lot of people have lost their jobs and aren’t able to find work.’
The UN estimates that 28 million people, about half the country, are living in poverty, with chronic drought and plummeting international aid.
‘We cannot speak freely,’ says the same local. ‘Several times the morality police have pulled my car over and asked if we were playing music. We say no, and then we turn it on again after we drive off.’
On my fourth day, I wander through Kabul’s main market, passing one shop displaying two severed goats’ heads on a platter buzzing with flies. Hawkers hang unrefrigerated chicken carcasses in the blazing heat.
I stop off at a ‘bone doctor’ who cracks various parts of men’s bodies. Some of the most common injuries he treats, he tells me, are from Talib fighters with shoulder pains from lugging their automatic rifles everywhere.
Later, I travel the potholed roads to Maidanshah, a city about 20 miles south west of Kabul, to meet deputy police chief and ex-fighter Samiullah Fateh.
David Patrikarakos talks to deputy police chief and ex-fighter Samiullah Fateh
David stands among men in green prison-style outfits at the 1,000 Beds Drugs Rehabilitation Clinic in north-east Kabul
Something of a local legend, he took part in perhaps 14 ambushes against the Americans. He thinks he is about 33 but he’s not sure.
Like many Taliban, Fateh wears his hair long in imitation of the Prophet. He is a Taliban fighter to his core. A few years ago he was shot in the chest fighting local resistance and proudly shows me a photo of the wound.
‘One ambush was against three American tanks,’ he says. ‘They would always send Afghans first to scout the area out.
‘We let them pass and when the US tanks appeared, we fired rockets filled with gasoline at them. We destroyed the first two tanks. The third retreated. We took the American weapons.’
What were the West like as fighters, I ask him? ‘You retreated a lot and screamed when you were injured,’ he says calmly.
He echoes what another fighter told us: ‘If you ever try and invade again, we will defeat you again.’
Following our interview, I go on patrol with Fateh, sitting in the back of his Ford truck – abandoned by the Americans – with a couple of armed Taliban. There is little crime now, I am told, though they still have the odd murder and drug-trafficking case. For all that the Taliban are violently anti-drugs, the problem remains impossible to stamp out.
One morning I drive to the ‘1,000 Beds Drug Rehabilitation Clinic’ in north-east Kabul. The Priory this is not. As I arrive, I am greeted by the sight of shaven-headed men dressed in identical green prison-style outfits.
After Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada banned narcotics in 2022, the regime destroyed poppy fields and slashed cultivation by 95 per cent in a single year.
The crackdown destroyed the livelihoods of farmers dependent on opium, but synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine remain a serious problem.
I walk through the facility’s dank, narrow corridors and arrive at the ‘detox centre’.
The men here are in withdrawal and are agitated. Obaidullah, 49, is a meth addict. He used to cart a wheelbarrow through the market, transporting goods for customers there, and he is openly furious with the regime.
‘There is no Taliban – only mafia,’ he snaps at me. ‘They came and took me from my house at night and brought me here. What kind of police do that?’
I ask him why he needs drugs. ‘I need it for my sexual power,’ he claims.
‘You don’t need detox,’ jokes our guide. ‘We should cut your penis off.’
Since 2021, UN investigators have documented extensive torture of Taliban detainees, including suffocation, suspension from the ceiling and electric shocks. Amnesty International further cites ‘tooth and nail extraction’ and waterboarding.
In March, UN human rights experts reported that at least 1,110 people had been publicly flogged in the country last year alone – that is nearly double 2024’s figure.
And if the regime has cleaned up the streets, that is nothing compared to the transformation it has wrought in the lives of Afghanistan’s women.
I meet Amira (not her real name) in one of the few restaurants that allows women to enter without their husband or a male relative. This area is not well-patrolled, and my photographer Adnan overhears Afghans speaking Pashto with British accents.
The dining room is behind a steel door, giving time to warn customers if the Taliban arrive.
She cannot forget 2021. ‘The Taliban came down from the mountains,’ she says. ‘They were dirty and bedraggled. Kabul was like a zombie city. Everyone had run away.’
The erasure of female freedom began with the children. In September 2021, girls were excluded from secondary education – a move made permanent the following March.
From December 2021, all women were required to have a ‘mahram’ (male relative) with them for any long-distance travel. Amira’s mahram is her brother.
‘He wants to leave the country,’ Amira tells me in Pashto. ‘I’m afraid of what will happen to me if he does. I will have even less freedom.’
In May 2022 the Taliban ordered that women cover themselves from head to toe in the full burqa, without even allowing a slit for their eyes to show (the niqab). Preferably, however, they would simply remain at home.
That November, women were excluded from parks, gyms and other public recreational spaces, and a month later the regime formally ‘suspended’ university education for all women.
What is it like to be a woman in Afghanistan today, I ask Amira? ‘It’s like being permanently in quarantine,’ she replies. I ask her if the Taliban can ever be defeated. She doesn’t need to think. ‘The Taliban are mostly Pashtun: the largest ethnic group here. I don’t see any other group capable of overpowering them.’
Five years of life under the Taliban have made one thing irretrievably clear to her, as this trip has to me: they aren’t going anywhere. For now at least, their victory seems complete.
