‘The Taliban were surprised to find a woman who was not afraid of them’
telegraph.co.ukHundreds of Afghans running frantically alongside an American military plane at the airport in Kabul. People clung to the plane’s undercarriage as it taxied along the runway and then took off; some fell to their deaths or were crushed under its wheels.The final American withdrawal from Afghanistan began in May 2021, the Afghan forces melted away, and after Kandahar fell to the Taliban on 12 August, people were predicting it would take three months for Kabul to collapse.
In the end it took one weekend.At noon on 15 August, the Taliban reached the gates of the capital, and took command of the city with fewer than 1,000 men and little resistance.That day was Rangina Hamidi’s 45th birthday.
Hamidi was Afghanistan’s minister of education, appointed by President Ashraf Ghani in 2020, the first woman in that post for 30 years.
As the deadline for American withdrawal approached, Hamidi had vowed not to leave. But with the abrupt departure of President Ghani on 15 August, and fearing for the well-being of her daughter, the family – Hamidi, her husband Abdullah and Zara, now 11 – left Kabul on 24 August, arriving several days later, via Doha, in Washington, DC. ‘I have never cried more in my life,’ she says.Six months on we are in a sunny flat in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, where the family have settled and Hamidi is working at a university, while still attempting to support a social enterprise, Kandahar Treasure, that she set up in 2008.
Read more on telegraph.co.uk
