The tumultuous summer that changed the world

In Afghanistan, August 2021 started ominously.

The Americans and their allies were leaving the country, finally ending their long war after reaching an agreement with the Taliban, and leaving the defense of the country to the security forces they had trained and supplied for years.

But the Afghan forces were already beginning to fail.

By the end of the summer, the insurgents had taken control of dozens of districts, swiftly rampaging the countryside as one outpost after another was withdrawn.

But none of the 34 provincial capitals had fallen. Even.

The United States provided limited air support to the besieged Afghan forces below, and there was little hope that the US-sponsored firepower would continue after the United States completely pulled out.

President Ashraf Ghani it had reorganized its military leadership and militia units led by Afghanistan’s powerful and notorious warlords of the past had taken up arms to defend their economic fiefdoms.

Then that August 6 Zaranj, the capital of the province of Nimroz on the border with Iran, suddenly fell into the hands of the Taliban.

Like dominoes, other provincial capitals have also begun to collapse, even in places likeo Kandahar, where the Afghan forces had resisted for months.

By the morning of August 15, the Taliban had almost surrounded Kabul, the country’s capital, and thousands of US soldiers had landed to evacuate the US embassy.

By the end of the day, the West-backed government, including Ghani, had fled and the American flag above the embassy had been removed.

What would have become crowds of tens of thousands of Afghans began forming at the gates of the international airport, fearful of what their new Taliban rulers would do.

Others, however, were relieved, grateful that a violent siege of the city had been averted, just as had happened during the civil war of the 1990s.

When the group of rebels upon entering Kabul, some districts of the city celebrated his arrival.

Instead, the violence revolved around the airport as crowds rushed to the gates, wedged between Taliban rifle butts, in a desperate attempt to establish security in the sprawling capital of some 5 million people, and the barrels of rifles of the Americans who defended the gates.

By the end of that month, tens of thousands of Afghans had been evacuated from Kabul to countries around the world.

The last American cargo planes had taken off, leaving behind debris and celebratory Taliban gunshots.

Thirteen Americans and nearly 200 Afghans were killed. in a suicide bombing by the Islamic State group, and soon after, the United States responded by mistakenly killing 10 civilians in an air attack aimed at punishing the Islamic State group.

The end of the long US war in Afghanistan had been short and violent, and now a new chapter of the Taliban government was opening, as the group was trying to suddenly switch from a guerilla war to a government for some 40 million Afghans.

Now, we have seen that the Taliban, in fact, have returned to many of the gods repressive forms and the hardliners who characterized his regime in the 1990s.

But when last year’s summer ended, nothing was clear except that the world had changed, for right a blink of an eye

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