While Joe Biden, who is at a peak in the polls, blames the Pentagon for having guaranteed him a kind of two-year stability in Afghanistan that has not been achieved, every day in Kabul we see women crying nonstop and husbands going near the airport, defying blows. firearm, to find a seat on any flight to any place. Only request: away from this hell.
Even those who have the documents in order to leave are unable to move due to the chaos that reigns around the airport area. And as soon as they try to get close, the bullets of the Taliban guarding the entrances discourage anyone.
Same situation of total chaos in the embassies of the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Canada. Queues of two kilometers of people waiting to have visas to leave the country, an almost impossible mission also because the embassies lack staff.
The displaced from the Herat or Kunduz camps are all crowded into areas of Kabul that have become makeshift camps. There are also many women hidden there who, leaving the uniforms of policeman, doctor, nurses hide in the crowd to avoid being taken, imprisoned and maybe killed.
There are many testimonies of women, in the fields of Park Shari and Sarai Shamali, who say they prefer death to a similar agony under a 40-degree sun in makeshift tents with plastic roofs, without water or food.
Even many Taliban who have never seen the modernity of the capital and do not even know it ask citizens to show them streets and are photographed near the few sports cars and Mercedes that are, totally fascinated by something they had never seen.
The banks have been closed for a week and the ATMs empty. Nor do credit cards work for Westerners.
In the general case, the Sikh community feels in danger. Over 5,000 of them left Kabul before the Taliban entered. It was a rich community of over 10,000 people, today they are less than 500 faithful.
The very few weddings seem more than funerals due to the atmosphere of sadness and fear that hovers over the few guests. In the streets you can no longer hear any music other than the religious one that many shopkeepers, to avoid problems with Islamic students, have decided to make heard.
Door-to-door searches continue in search of collaborators, who are taken away and in some cases executed without trial, and of women who held relevant positions in the previous society. In the streets, women and young women have disappeared, already affected by the first decree banning mixed classes in universities. In affluent neighborhoods, no one is likely to walk in Western clothes. The cafes, formerly a meeting place for small groups of single women, are now closed. Those women are stuck in the house and many have already bought or commissioned burqas.
In the poorer neighborhoods, on the other hand, groups of women covered in markets can be seen challenging the Taliban rather than starving.
A dramatic situation in continuous and rapid evolution. From the last Westerners who have to leave the country, to opium smokers, who cannot stop smoking overnight, there is a continuous succession of dramas in the drama of a country left in the hands of the barbarians and which is sinking into the Middle Ages.
But a small part of the citizens, especially traders, seem to be quite happy with the arrival of the new masters. But it is really a minority.