As the city of Kabul fell, Lina hid in her home with five children, gripped by fear.
Taliban fighters were moving through the capital unchecked, looking for high-value targets like her husband, an Australia-trained senior officer in the Afghan military.
Lina knew the government vehicles and weaponry at her home would immediately give them away.
But calls to her husband were ringing out. She hadn’t heard from him for days.
Finally, about 3pm, she got through.
“He picked up my call, saying only two words: ‘I’m OK’,” she says through a translator. “He said ‘you guys need to be considering about yourselves, take care of yourselves, don’t worry about me’.”
“Then the phone went off.”
With that, Lina found herself desperately alone in a resurrected Taliban state, her ties to the old government and the west putting a mark on her back.
Halfway across the world though, something remarkable was happening.
A small group of friends – Australian and Afghan military and government figures – had been watching the speed of the Taliban’s advance for weeks.
Fearing for those who had worked with Australian forces, they privately agreed to work in the shadows to help people like Lina and her family.
The group, comprising five Australians and nine Afghans, gave themselves an unofficial name: the 21st Kabul Lancers.
Its members say it formed as a “private and personal humanitarian venture to assist friends and acquaintances” and acts independently of government.
By tapping local contacts and maintaining communication channels with a network of officials working on the evacuation, the Lancers have helped hundreds of Australian-affiliated Afghans and visa holders escape the Taliban since mid-August.
They organise safe houses for those in danger, help individuals bypass Taliban checkpoints, and during the now-completed air evacuation forewarned coalition troops stationed at Kabul airport of impending arrivals. The Lancers worked with authorities to assist with visas and find routes of escape to third countries, before getting people to Australia.
All up, the 21st Kabul Lancers say they’ve helped 250 people obtain visas and escorted 100 to Kabul airport for evacuation. Among them are Australian-trained Afghan soldiers, interpreters, journalists and politicians.
Captured by the Taliban, beaten and handcuffed
As Lina contemplated a desperate escape, her husband used his Australian connections to reach out to the Lancers, asking that they help his wife.
They quickly got to work. One of their Afghan members, Rahman, a sergeant in the 111th capital division of the Afghan National Army, had already made several dangerous escort trips to the airport.
The sergeant, Rahman, had been deployed with the ANA to meet the Taliban’s advance on Kabul but was ordered to withdraw by his battalion commander.
Rahman volunteered to help Lina.
The Lancers guided Rahman and Lina to one another, bypassing Taliban checkpoints, and organising a meeting spot away from the crowds massing before the airport.
“I saw the family which was in a very bad situation. Everyone was scared … because they were very much threatened by the Taliban. I joined them just to try and get to the airport,” Rahman tells the Guardian through an interpreter.
Lina and Rahman were told to get to a gate to the south-east of the airport, where they could link up with coalition forces.
“Once we started heading to the airport, we saw there were several Taliban checkpoints, vehicle checkpoints, they were asking people, they were checking people, they were using bad words,” Rahman says.
Rahman and the family were forced to stay for two nights on that road, in the summer heat, with no food and very little water.
In the morning, British troops opened the airport gate, triggering a rush to get through.
Rahman lost Lina and her family in the chaos.
While he was searching for Lina, the Taliban found him, handcuffing him and taking him to a detention site.
“ I had every single document with me since my enlistment in the army,” he says. “[Records showing me] attending the training courses that were organised by the US forces, the coalition forces, I had certificates that I was working with the coalition forces as part of the ANA contribution.”
“If the Taliban checked and searched my bag, I was gone.”
Rahman told the Taliban fighters he was just trying to get to his family at the airport gate.
Eventually, a commander allowed him to go back to the airport, escorted by Taliban fighters, to retrieve them. He found Lina, and the Taliban agreed to let him go.
For Lina, the last moments at the airport are a blur. She lost consciousness and woke to find herself in safety.
“There was a time when I opened my eyes, I saw I was in the Australian camp inside the airport,” she says. “There were nurses running around helping me. I got up and asked them ‘where are my children?’.”
After Rahman’s escape from the Taliban, he knew his luck was about to run out. His chances of surviving another encounter with Taliban fighters were slim. So he reluctantly decided that his escorting of Lina was the last run he could make for the Lancers.
Both Lina, her children and Rahman were able to get out. They are now in hotel quarantine in Melbourne.
The Lancers’ genesis
The morning of 15 August started like any other for Aryan, Rahman’s brother, who was also an officer with the Afghan National Army.
He arrived at his office, a heavily guarded military compound in Kabul, about 10am, and got to work.
“It was a normal day,” Aryan recalls.
“No one knew the Taliban was entering the capital that day. There wasn’t any expectation for that.”
All that changed in an instant.
From his office, Aryan saw armed men in civilian clothing appear. It was the Taliban.
Aryan could scarcely believe his eyes: where were the security forces that were guarding the compound?
“After a while, I identified that there was a sort of protocol between the senior security adviser of that compound and the Taliban. The Taliban were telling them ‘you guys will be OK, you will be secure and protected, but you need to drop all of your equipment and everything you use. You have to be unarmed’.”
Aryan escaped using an emergency exit and fled to another nearby compound, where he hid, unsure of what to do.
While he hid, he received a message from an old friend, an Australian who he knew from his training at the Royal Military College Duntroon in 2018 and 2019.
“I told him the story of what happened and from there he started helping me and directing me and guiding me, because I didn’t really know what I had to do. It was a really tough situation.”
Aryan was told to get to the airport. He began walking, evading the Taliban checkpoints and changing direction every few hundred metres to shake any tails.
“We should have fought to the death, but when you are in a position where your own colleagues and your own security forces who are appointed to provide the security, they are not really on your side, they are making their own deals with the enemy, how could I be fighting?” he says.
It took him three hours to get to the airport. Along the way, he gathered critical intelligence for the Lancers, using the skills he had learned at Duntroon. He mapped out the Taliban ground presence, found gaps in their patrol routes, analysed their checkpoint coverage and observed the behaviour of Taliban fighters at the checkpoints towards civilians.
When he finally got to the airport, he was safe. His Australian contact had forewarned authorities at the airport of Aryan’s associations with Australia.
Aryan did not stop resisting the Taliban once inside the airport. He began linking his Australian friends up with other Afghan colleagues and officials working on the air evacuation.
It was this success that proved the genesis of the 21st Kabul Lancers and the creation of an impromptu rescue, escape, and evasion network.
“A group of four friends convened and began consolidating networks and contacts to look for avenues to assist, and this became the basis of the 21st Kabul Lancers,” an anonymous member of the Lancers says.
“Once Aryan’s group was evacuated, it was clear others needed assistance.”
‘The Taliban have not changed’
Just before midnight on 31 August, a C-17 military transport took off from Hamid Karzai international airport.
It was to be the last US military flight out of Kabul.
Taliban fighters shot into the air in celebration and entered the site. The Taliban government’s spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, held a press conference to declare the defeat of another superpower.
Aryan counts himself lucky. But he is adamant he wouldn’t have made it out without the Lancers.
“I would say that it wasn’t possible without their support and their guidance.”
Despite the loss of the airport, the group’s work goes on. Aryan is acting as their interpreter as they continue to help people still stuck in Afghanistan.
Those who have escaped now fear for the country they’ve left behind.
“The Taliban have their own very specific definition of sharia law. They’re trying to implement the sharia law within that environment,” Aryan says.
Lina, who hopes to be reunited with her husband soon, is now in quarantine in Melbourne.
She is scathing of the Taliban’s claims that it has changed.
“They were beating everyone. We had children in our hands and we were requesting water, they were not only not giving us the water, but also beating the children and the women,” she says.
“The Taliban have not changed. They are the Taliban they were 20 years ago.”
