Escape from the Taliban

Deeba first left Afghanistan in 2002, fleeing a war-torn country and an abusive husband shortly after she was captured by the Taliban and nearly sold to an Arab Shaikh, narrowly escaping due to a small twist of fate.

In June 2021, Deeba returned to visit family in Kabul to organise the engagement of her son. Regardless of the Taliban's progress, she felt safe to travel after reassurances from the Afghan and US Governments that the Taliban would not be able to take major cities. One morning, to her surprise, she awoke to the news that President Ghani had escaped and Kabul was in the hands of the Taliban. What ensued was a desperate rush to leave the city to return to the USA, enduring bomb blasts and crushing crowds at the airport.

This is a harrowing account of one woman caught in the US withdrawal of Kabul, giving a first-hand account of what it was like to be a civilian caught up in the chaos as well as giving an invaluable insight into the life of a woman in Afghanistan.

Escape from the Taliban by Bashir Sakhawarz includes 15 colour illustrations.

Author: Bashir is an award-winning poet and novelist. Since his first poetry collection was awarded first prize for New Poetry by the Afghan Writers' Association in 1978, he has published seven books in Persian and English. His latest novel, Maagir The Snake Charmer, was entered for the Man Asian Literary Prize by the publisher and was long-listed for the 2013 Economist Crossword Book Award. Other works have been published in the Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the European Society for Central Asia (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), Images of Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2010), Language for a New Century (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), English Pen, Asian Literary Review, Cha Literary Journal, East of the Web, and Litro. He is the winner of the 2015 Geneva Writers Group Literary Award for Fiction.