As the Taliban moved on Kabul and locals fled, this Australian flew into its airport | TimElliottSMH
, when almost everyone in the city with sufficient money or common sense was fleeing, as foreign embassies were burning documents and pulling out staff and as the city’s 4.5 million residents hung, suspended, in a queasy stasis, somewhere between mass denial and blind panic, photojournalist Andrew Quilty’s flight touched down at Kabul International Airport. He had been at a friend’s wedding in France. Now, just as everyone was trying to escape, he was flying in.
That night, Kate Clark, a former BBC journalist who had reported on Afghanistan since the 1990s, invited Quilty for dinner. Over an omelette and a glass of wine, Clark recounted the chaos – the random violence, raping, looting – that commonly accompanied transfers of power in Afghanistan. “She put the fear of god in me,” Quilty says. At 9pm, he returned to his home, where he caught up with other friends. Some were flying out the next day; others were debating whether to stay.
Quilty, who turned 40 last year, is compact and broad-shouldered; he used to surf a lot when he was younger, and still swims every day. He has blue eyes, tousled, mid-length hair and a rugged beard, and would look perfectly at home single-handedly helming an open ocean yacht, or indeed, as the lead character in an action movie about a swashbuckling young Australian photojournalist who spends years covering the war in Afghanistan.
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