Fall of Kabul (2021)

On 15 August 2021 Taliban fighters entered Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, almost without a fight, as President Ashraf Ghani fled the country and the Western-backed Islamic Republic collapsed. The city's capture capped a lightning offensive launched in May, while American and allied troops were completing their withdrawal, and it brought the war in Afghanistan to an end. In the two weeks that followed, a vast airlift carried more than 123,000 people out of the country before the last American forces left on 30 August.

In February 2020 the United States and the Taliban signed an agreement in Doha under which American troops would leave Afghanistan; the Afghan government was not a party to it. After the deal the United States sharply reduced its air strikes, depriving Afghan forces of a key advantage, and many analysts regard the agreement as a major cause of their later collapse. In April 2021 President Joe Biden announced that the remaining troops would be gone by September.

The Taliban began a nationwide offensive on 1 May 2021. They first took rural districts, then, from 6 August, a cascade of provincial capitals. Herat fell on 13 August and Mazar-i-Sharif on 14 August, and on the morning of 15 August Jalalabad fell, closing the last route to Pakistan through the Khyber Pass. American intelligence had estimated in July that the government might survive six to twelve months after the withdrawal; five days before the end, one assessment still gave Kabul 30 to 90 days.

On 15 August Taliban leaders told their forces to halt at the gates of Kabul, but fighters moved into the city anyway and met almost no resistance from the army or police. They took over the Pul-e-Charkhi prison, releasing its inmates, and Bagram air base with its detention centre also fell. While negotiators discussed a transfer of power at the presidential palace, Ghani, urged by his national security adviser, left by helicopter with a small circle of aides, without telling most of his ministers or American officials. That night he wrote that he had left to avoid bloodshed. Taliban fighters occupied the empty palace, and the movement declared the war over and the return of its Islamic Emirate, which it had first proclaimed in the 1990s.

With every border crossing in Taliban hands, Kabul airport, guarded by American and allied troops, became the only way out. Roads to the airport were gridlocked and long queues formed at its gates. Between 14 and 30 August the United States and its partners flew out foreign diplomats and civilians, Afghans who had worked with them and others at risk such as journalists and activists, in the largest non-combatant evacuation in American military history. On 26 August a suicide bomber of the Islamic State's Afghan branch struck the crowds at the airport, killing more than 180 people, among them 13 American service members. Days later an American drone strike aimed at suspected bombers killed ten civilians from one family, including seven children, a mistake the Pentagon later admitted.

The United States froze about $9.5 billion of Afghan central bank assets, the IMF blocked access to its funds and money-transfer firms suspended services, and the country slid into an economic and humanitarian crisis. The new authorities filled government posts only with men, and restrictions soon returned on women's movement, employment and education, with girls kept out of secondary school and women barred from universities. Anti-Taliban forces led by Ahmad Massoud and the former vice-president Amrullah Saleh resisted in the Panjshir valley until the Taliban took it on 6 September, though a smaller insurgency continued. Two years later, up to 150,000 Afghans who had assisted the Americans were reported to be still in Afghanistan.

Our 2010 map shows Afghanistan during the years of the international military presence; the country's borders did not change when the Taliban returned to power.