Originally published 2021-08-26.
In the week after the Taliban entered Kabul on 15 August 2021, journalists at the city's airport reported one of the most painful scenes of the evacuation: Afghan mothers, trapped behind razor wire in dense crowds, lifting or throwing their babies towards British and American soldiers and begging them to take the children to safety. Soldiers who witnessed it said some infants became caught in the wire. The reports were confirmed by several reporters on the ground, and video showed babies being passed over the heads of the crowd and over a wall to troops.
What reporters saw at the airport
Sky News chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay, reporting from Kabul on 18 August, spoke to a senior British officer whose men were holding back crowds. "It was terrible, women were throwing their babies over the razor wire, asking the soldiers to take them," the officer told him, adding that he was counselling some of his soldiers and that everyone had cried the night before.
"Women were throwing their babies over the razor wire, asking the soldiers to take them.”
— Sky News (@SkyNews) August 18, 2021
Sky’s @ramsaysky reports from Kabul as the relief operation to move thousands of people out of Afghanistan gets more desperate https://t.co/bD0bmICk8v
The i newspaper's editor described a report by war correspondent Kim Sengupta, in which a Parachute Regiment officer said mothers had tried to throw babies over the barbed wire to British troops and that not all of the children reached them. Other clips circulating the same day showed infants being handed forward through the crush towards the gates.
People are passing infants to the front of the crowd outside of the Kabul airport in the hopes that they’ll be evacuated. pic.twitter.com/iyJdfTnhgC
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) August 18, 2021
Context matters when reading these images. Passing a child to a soldier was not abandonment. Parents who could not get through the gates themselves were trying to get their children inside the one place they believed might offer a way out, and many hoped to follow.
Why families were so desperate
The Afghan government collapsed far faster than Western intelligence had predicted. President Ashraf Ghani left the country, the Taliban took the capital without a fight, and Hamid Karzai International Airport, guarded by US, British and allied troops, became the only reliable exit. Tens of thousands of people gathered at its gates.
Many of them had worked with foreign forces, embassies, aid groups or the former government as interpreters, soldiers, journalists or officials, and feared reprisals. Others remembered the first period of Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001 and did not want their daughters to grow up under it. On 16 August, footage showed young men clinging to a departing US C-17 transport plane; at least two reportedly fell to their deaths after take-off.
The scale of the evacuation
Between mid-August and 30 August 2021, more than 122,000 people were flown out of Kabul, the largest airlift of its kind. The United States ran the bulk of it. Britain's Operation Pitting, which ran from 13 to 28 August, evacuated more than 15,000 people, including around 5,000 British nationals, 8,000 Afghans and about 2,200 children. Paratroopers from 2 and 3 PARA helped hold crowds back at a processing centre set up at the Baron Hotel near the airport.
Some babies passed to soldiers were reunited with relatives inside the perimeter. A video of a US Marine lifting an infant over the airport wall on 19 August was widely shared; the Pentagon later said the baby was taken for medical treatment and returned to the father. Not every story ended so quickly. Two-month-old Sohail Ahmadi was handed over the wall the same day and then lost in the chaos. He was found months later living with a Kabul taxi driver, Hamid Safi, who had taken him in, and was returned to his relatives after a Reuters investigation.
The Abbey Gate bombing
The fears of an attack voiced by British ministers proved accurate. On 26 August 2021 a suicide bomber from the Islamic State affiliate ISIS-K struck at Abbey Gate, where crowds were waiting to be processed. Thirteen US service members were killed, along with an estimated 170 Afghan civilians and several British nationals. The last American flight left on 30 August, and the Taliban took control of the airport the next day.
What Taliban rule meant for women, then and now
The mothers at the wire knew what they were afraid of. In a November 2001 report, the US State Department described how the Taliban's first government had kept women out of most work and schooling and had restricted their access to medical care, with male doctors barred from properly examining female patients. The report linked those rules to Afghanistan's very high maternal and infant death rates at the time, citing UNICEF estimates.
The Taliban initially promised a softer approach in 2021. Within months, that promise was broken. Girls were barred from secondary school on 23 March 2022, the morning their schools were due to reopen. Women were suspended from universities in December 2022, and the same month female staff were barred from working for aid organisations, later extended to UN agencies. In December 2024 the authorities also banned women from medical training, a move Human Rights Watch warned would leave women without health care. The United Nations has called Afghanistan the world's most repressive country for women.
Why these images still matter
The scenes at the Kabul wire became a symbol of how the twenty-year Western mission ended: with a rushed withdrawal, allies left behind and civilians willing to risk their children's lives for a seat on a plane. Officers who were there said at the time that what their soldiers saw would stay with them for the rest of their lives.
For readers, the most useful takeaway is to look past the single shocking clip to the choices behind it. These were not parents giving up their children; they were parents making the only decision they thought could protect them.
Sources: Sky News, 18 August 2021; i news editor's letter; Wikipedia: 2021 Kabul airlift; Wikipedia: Operation Pitting; NBC News/Reuters: baby lost in airlift returned to family; US State Department, 2001 report on the Taliban's treatment of women; Wikipedia: Women in Afghanistan; Daily Wire (h/t).
COMMENTS