The pain of watching my country fall to the Taliban

"I pleaded for help. No one wrote back." As the fighters advanced on Kabul, it was civilians who mobilised to help with the evacuation. In the absence of a plan, the hardest decisions fell on inexperienced volunteers, and the stress began to tell. Zarlasht Halaimzai, CEO of Refugee Trauma, explores the incredible but heart-breaking efforts to get people to safety in the most chaotic and dangerous context imaginable. "Witnessing the catastrophe in the ambiguous position of an Afghan outside Afghanistan brought back all the feelings of fear and pain that I had felt as a child when my family feared for our lives. Meanwhile, I was working, along with many others in different countries, on an impossible task: to do something – anything – about what was happening to people in danger."