Saw panic, desperation amongst Afghan’s to escape Taliban rule, says Indian Express journalist Shubhajit Roy

Parikshit Luthra spoke to two Indian journalists - Shubhajit Roy, Associate Editor Deputy Chief of National Bureau at Indian Express and Nayanima Basu, Diplomacy Editor at ThePrint who spent 4-8 days in Afghanistan leading up to the Taliban takeover. They were witness to the chaos and the tension prevailing on the streets of Kabul immediately after the Taliban's takeover.

Roy said, "When I landed in Kabul, there were women, children, men, families who were all huddled up together in parks and mosques across Kabul. Then next morning I went to the passport office and people had queued up for days and hours, waiting in the heat and they had come all the way from different provinces carrying documents to get the passports made to get out of Afghanistan. So people were trying to exit Taliban rule in Afghanistan in one way or the other. This told me the panic, the desperation amongst Afghan's to escape the Taliban rule that they could sense in the air was coming."

Basu said, "I was there for about 10-days in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif. When I landed in Kabul, it was a different city altogether - you could catch a cab, I could go to my hotel, there was security, there was tension, there was a lot of fear within people even at that point of time but there was belief somewhere deep down within the people of Kabul that Kabul is not going to fall anytime soon and for 10-12 days or maybe a month we are secure. However then stories of the Taliban closing in at that time was very heavy, Kandahar had fallen, Herat fell after I reached there and by the middle of the week that I was there, it started becoming very clear that Kabul is going to fall very soon."