In the documentary Escape from Kabul, first-hand accounts and archival footage bring us back to a terrifying time in 2021
Over a year out, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan still seems, from afar, shocking, swift, baffling. In a matter of days, the Afghan government – and a fraught, nearly two-decade war by western countries to uphold it – collapsed. Escape from Kabul, a new, day-by-day account of the hellish last gasp of the war in Afghanistan, submerges in that confusion; by mid-August 2021, Kabul remained the only secure route out of the country, and tens of thousands of people crowded the airfield, desperate for a way out. “It was like doomsday at Kabul airport,” says Muslim Hotak, a student who tried to flee with 5,000 others in the initial run on the airport on 15 August 2021.
Escape from Kabul, directed by Jamie Roberts, embeds in the chaos, blending horrific images familiar to news consumers – crowds crushing toward a closed gate, children pushed against barbed wire, anguished people clinging to the wheels of a moving plane – with first-hand accounts of the evacuation. As with Roberts’s previous film Four Hours at the Capitol, which used first-hand accounts and archival footage for an on-the-ground accounting of the January 6 insurrection, Escape from Kabul trains specifically on a discrete event: the 15 days at Kabul airport before the US withdrawal deadline of 31 August 2021.
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