2025-04-23
30 分钟This is The Guardian. The Guardian Archive Long Read.
Hi, my name is Zalasht Halamzai and I am the author of I pleaded for help.
No one wrote back.
The pain of watching my country fall to the Taliban, which was published in 2021.
In summer of 2021,
there were ramblings that the Taliban were close to Kabul and were potentially going to take it over.
But no one really expected them to take the whole country or to...
come into Kabul without any resistance.
And I, much like many other Afghans around the world, woke up on the morning of August 15th, 2021,
with news that the Taliban were entering the city and that the Afghan government,
the elected president was going to fall and essentially that the state was going to fall completely.
And so the article is an account of those few weeks where people like myself were closely involved in evacuations of Afghans from Kabul.
And I wrote the article to convey the tragic and heartbreaking experience of Afghans who were working on evacuation and at the same time...
dealing with the fact that the country was going back to an autocratic regime that was going to roll back every bit of progress that was made in human rights and civil rights,
particularly roll back the rights of women in Afghanistan.
And so we were working on the evacuations and contending with a very, very dark future.
2021, when the Taliban took over, there was some voices, particularly European and American voices,
that were speculating that the Taliban had changed and that they weren't going to roll back women's rights and that the women of Afghanistan who had been campaigning and talking all along the peace negotiations that their rights were in danger,
that they were... being hyperbolic and hysterical.
And now, four years later,