Escape From Kabul Airport also hears from the specialist unit of U.S. Marines tasked with managing the evacuation and whose plans are shattered when Taliban forces take the city at lightning speed. They speak openly for the first time of their hand-to-hand battle to reclaim the overwhelmed airfield whilst a humanitarian catastrophe unspooled around them. Taliban commanders and fighters who had recently taken the city describe how they encircled the airport perimeter and faced U.S. forces. AMOS: And do you think there’s long-term effect on those people? Do they feel like they were thrown to the wolves out there? But, Jamie, I do have one question about the film. We got access to the Taliban, which was fabulous, and it was the in-the-trenches viewpoint, which really gives it a lot of credibility. My hat is off to those Marines that you talked with. So the Marines that were sent in to the airport were part of the 24 th Marine Expeditionary Unit. So at any given time the Marine Corps in the United States have two Marine Expeditionary Units. These are regimental size units of about two (thousand) to three thousand deployable Marines that, basically, just float. But there were conversations that the Taliban were having with American forces as to the pace of their advance into Kabul because they knew that we would need to get our people out, and the decision was made that the only thing we needed the Taliban not to move on was the airport itself.

Escape From Kabul’ Review: Evacuation in Recap - The New ‘Escape From Kabul’ Review: Evacuation in Recap - The New

But did you have a sense from the ones that you interviewed that they were any different from their fathers? The movie lays out a clear timeline and is good at conveying the conflicted feelings that Afghans had about leaving their homes and that American troops had as they tried to maintain control of the situation. Still, “Escape From Kabul” is a short-term recap. A more robust movie, following these witnesses over several years, is still waiting to be made. ROBERTS: Yeah. I mean, they were at pains to tell me that, some of them, not least because I think, you know, they didn’t come in like some of their fathers may have where they’d taken people’s mobile phones or they’d remove televisions and, you know, they weren’t out there destroying cassette tapes and throwing them around like possibly they had in the past. I thought the sort of grinding on fight for the urban areas was somewhat more likely. I mean, it was the sort of the—you know, the problem with this kind of analysis and projection is that it’s always easier to predict a continuation of a trajectory that you’re on than a dramatic change to that trajectory. And you know, I was speaking with him. They were proud of their victory and they had this video, so he was kind of happy to share it when he understood that we saw this as a historic moment, too. Not necessarily in the same way that they did, but it was documentation all the same.

In terms of the State Department, we spoke with the acting ambassador at the time and we looked at the State Department’s story. But, again, I think we were drawn, really, to the three factors of the U.S. Marines, who were right there in the gates, the Taliban, and then the evacuees who got out and the evacuees who tried to get out.

Escape From Kabul” Preview Screening and Discussion of “Escape From Kabul”

You know, they won the war on this kind of hardline rhetoric and now they have peace. They’re in control of the place. So you’ve got the hardliners want to remain as they were and they think, you know, that’s why they fought jihad. That’s why they won the war. That’s how they got control. And so I think—and what he gets at in the film is that one of the huge challenges the Marines faced was, you know, Kabul International Airport was barely a functioning airport, and Jamie has amazing footage of showing what the Marines were having to do to keep the runways clear of people, at one point using Apache gunships for crowd control. I mean, literally flying helicopters about five feet off the ground just to move people off the airfield.At the same time, I think we lose sight of the fact that, like, you know, we are the United States of America and NATO. I mean, we have significant military resources at our disposal to change those dates, to bolster our forces. The entire Eighty-Second Airborne Division, for instance, out of Fort Bragg, one of their key divisional tasks is air fort seizure. That’s what they—that’s why they are parachute qualified. And so it was the U.S. that unilaterally decided what the date certain was going to be. It wasn’t the Taliban that set those terms. And, in fact, the whole reason for the negotiation with the Taliban was that the U.S. wanted to withdraw. I mean, there was a political decision to withdraw. So if you’re going to do that, at some point you have to set a date and it was the U.S. that set that date and changed it over time. The Joe Biden administration’s steadfast show of support for Israel in its war with Hamas has reignited a torrent of anti-American sentiment in many Arab and Muslim communities.