As the Taliban moved on Kabul and locals fled, this Australian flew into its airport

This story is part of the August 6 edition of Good Weekend.See all 17 stories.

On the afternoon of August 14, 2021, when it had become clear that the Taliban were about to overrun the Afghan capital of Kabul, when almost everyone in the city with sufficient money or common sense was fleeing, as foreign embassies were burning documents and pulling out staff and as the city’s 4.5 million residents hung, suspended, in a queasy stasis, somewhere between mass denial and blind panic, photojournalist Andrew Quilty’s flight touched down at Kabul International Airport. He had been at a friend’s wedding in France. Now, just as everyone was trying to escape, he was flying in. He had an audio recorder, a new pair of jeans, a bottle of gin, a bottle of tequila, a generous supply of notebooks, and his camera. He looked out the window, at the sun-scorched tarmac and mustard-coloured mountains. “I was relieved to have made a decision about whether to return or not,” he tells me, sitting in his kitchen in Sydney. “But I was also extremely nervous. It was a roll of the dice as far as what was going to come.”

Quilty had been living in Afghanistan for nine years. While based in Kabul, he’d travelled regularly to remote provinces and regional capitals, interviewed villagers and soldiers and government officials, developing an insight into, and affection for, a country that has habitually found itself at the centre of world affairs, whether as a drug nursery, terrorist sanctuary or Cold War staging ground. But like most of his colleagues, Quilty’s time in Afghanistan was inevitably defined by the long-running war between the Taliban and the United States and its allies, including Australia. Now, the Taliban were nearing the gates of the city, and the US and its allies were on the run.

From the airport, Quilty caught a cab to his home in downtown Kabul. Then he took to the streets on his motorcycle. “There was a lot of nervous energy,” he says. Some local parks had filled up with families who’d fled the Taliban’s advance. Hundreds of people queued at the banks, desperate to withdraw their money. There was talk of Taliban sleeper cells, which were set to come alive at any moment. Manoeuvring his bike through the crowds, Quilty ran across a Belgian photographer he knew, who had also decided to stay, but who’d bought some guns for protection.

That night, Kate Clark, a former BBC journalist who had reported on Afghanistan since the 1990s, invited Quilty for dinner. Over an omelette and a glass of wine, Clark recounted the chaos – the random violence, raping, looting – that commonly accompanied transfers of power in Afghanistan. “She put the fear of god in me,” Quilty says. At 9pm, he returned to his home, where he caught up with other friends. Some were flying out the next day; others were debating whether to stay. “We knew the Taliban were moving fast, but we thought we might have a few days before they were actually inside the city,” he says. In fact, they would be there the very next day.

When the Taliban took over, Quilty had been reporting on Afghanistan for close to a decade. “I was getting a little weary,” he says, “and losing hope for the country and the people.” Credit: Kiana Hayeri

It’s a cold and rainy Monday when I catch up with Quilty, who is living in a one-bedroom art deco apartment in Elizabeth Bay, an upscale neighbourhood in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. The flat belongs to a photographer friend who is currently in New York. The friend hasn’t furnished the place yet, and Quilty doesn’t have any belongings to speak of, and so, except for an old Formica table in the kitchen, the apartment is almost entirely empty, and feels like a large, carpeted meat cooler. Perhaps the most functional space is a writing nook, overlooking a tree-lined street, where Quilty has been beavering away on a TED Talk. “It’s about the conundrum of being a journalist and a resident in a place like Kabul last year,” he tells me, padding about in a pair of socks. “I thought it’d be just kind of scribbling down some notes, but actually it’s 15 minutes long and I have to memorise it all.”

Quilty, who turned 40 last year, is compact and broad-shouldered; he used to surf a lot when he was younger, and still swims every day. He has blue eyes, tousled, mid-length hair and a rugged beard, and would look perfectly at home single-handedly helming an open ocean yacht, or indeed, as the lead character in an action movie about a swashbuckling young Australian photojournalist who spends years covering the war in Afghanistan. It’s difficult finding people to talk about him, since most of his friends live in exotic places, like Paris or New York or London, or are working on film sets in the Canadian wilds. He’s that kind of guy.

After returning from Afghanistan last November, Quilty worked on a book called August in Kabul. Released by Melbourne University Publishing this week to coincide with the first anniversary of the Taliban takeover, it chronicles with claustrophobic intensity the war’s final days, from the insurgents’ unstoppable advance to the collapse of the Afghan government and the anarchic evacuation, all of which Quilty witnessed, sometimes, quite literally, at point-blank range. August in Kabul evokes a stricken city; the sense of entrapment, the random gunfire, and the magical thinking of former president Ashraf Ghani, who just months before had told journalists that his government could fight the Taliban “forever”. (Ghani now lives in the United Arab Emirates.)

Much of the story is told through the eyes of the locals, including Hamed Safi, the head of media relations at the presidential palace, who juggles his loyalty to the government with his duty to his family; a prisoner, Hejratullah, who suddenly finds himself set free when the jail guards abandon their posts, and a young law student, Nadia Amini, who practises by standing pillows along her bed and pretending they’re a jury. Quilty also interviews US diplomats and servicemen, including Corporal Joseph Russell, a callow 22-year-old Marine who dreams of seeing combat but ends up guarding the airport, making wrenching, life-and-death decisions about who could enter and who couldn’t.

“The city that I loved and the community I loved are gone. They were decimated overnight.”

When the Taliban took over, Quilty had been reporting on Afghanistan for close to a decade. “I was getting a little weary,” he says, “and losing hope for the country and the people.” As disastrous as it was for the locals, the Taliban’s victory provided a logical full-stop to his time there. “The city that I loved and the community I loved are gone. They were decimated overnight.”

But coming back to Australia has presented its own challenges. “It’s frightening,” he says. “I have to figure out who I am outside of Afghanistan. It became my identity. Over there I had the authority to write about it all. But here – I mean, I wouldn’t even know what to point a camera at.”

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Andrew Quilty grew up in Mosman, a well-off suburb on Sydney’s lower north shore, and went to a nearby private school, St Aloysius’ College. The school largely served as a nursery for bankers and doctors, but the subject that most interested Quilty was art. (His cousin, incidentally, is painter Ben Quilty.) In year 12, one of his uncles gave him a Nikon F3 camera, which Quilty used to produce part of his HSC major work. After school, in 2000, he studied design at the College of Fine Arts, in Sydney’s east, before quitting to drive around Australia with some mates, surfing and taking photos. (A week into the trip, they were out surfing when their van was broken into. “They stole everything except my camera, which I’d hidden, the film I’d brought, and our CD collection, which we were offended by.” )

One of Quilty’s photos of southern Sydney’s Cronulla riots in December, 2005.Credit: Andrew Quilty / Oculi

He returned a year later to start a photography course at inner Sydney’s Ultimo TAFE, which he finished in 2004. It was at this point that Quilty appears to have jumped aboard some kind of turbo-charged career accelerator: in 2005, TIME published photos he’d taken of the Cronulla riots; in 2006, he began a job as a staff photographer at The Australian Financial Review. In 2007, he hosted his first solo exhibition. In 2008, he won his first World Press Photo Award, for a shot he took, while at the AFR, of two young children watching a horse race at a country meet.

Quilty performed well at the paper: he saw it as a challenge to make, say, a press conference on interest rates look interesting. And he had fun: he’d see live bands with the older photographers, and skateboard down the car-park spiral at the newspaper’s head office. Then, in 2009, he took four months off to travel with his surfboard and camera through Mexico, driving a $300 Subaru with steel mesh for a back window. The resulting photos found their way into a book, The Mexicans, which he self-published in 2011.

Holding a camera became second nature. “It’s what I would do if I had an afternoon free, or on weekends,” he says. “I loved the act of taking photos, observing things. It was also an excuse to engage, but from a bit of a distance. It doesn’t come naturally for me to talk to people and engage people, certainly in public. Whereas with photography you can do it at a remove, especially with documentary photography where you’re off, just shooting on the fly.”

After leaving the AFR he freelanced for a few years, before moving to New York in 2012. He hated it. “I was scrapping for work with a million other photographers,” he says. “I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was more about being part of the scene and networking and meeting people and bowing down to photo editors. It was more about relationships than talent, as I saw it.”

Then, in 2013, an Australian journalist friend told him she was planning to travel to Afghanistan. Quilty volunteered to join her. “We arrived in Kabul in the middle of winter and the light was incredibly soft,” he says. “On a superficial level, I found the beauty of the landscape instantly captivating.” He’d expected a certain hostility from the locals, “but the warmth and hospitality I received was unlike anything I’d experienced. The people have a mentality more akin to that of a small town; they have time to stop and say hello on the street, and that was intoxicating.” Quilty planned to stay for two weeks, but extended it to a month. He then extended it another month, then another. “By the end of that three months, I just knew I wanted to stay.”

In 2009, Quilty took four months off to travel with his surfboard and camera through Mexico. The resulting photos were self-published in a book titled The Mexicans.Credit: Andrew Quilty

Afghanistan is surely one of the most invaded countries in the world. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the British in the 1800s, the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. And, of course, the US and its allies in 2001. One of the main aims of the US invasion, dubbed Operation Enduring Freedom, was capturing Osama bin Laden, leader of the Islamist group al-Qaeda and the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. The US didn’t find bin Laden in Afghanistan, but it did topple the Taliban, in December 2001. (US Navy SEALs finally killed bin Laden, a decade later, in Pakistan.)

“When the Americans came, I was happy,” says Aziz Tassal, an Afghan journalist who Quilty often worked with. Tassal, who was 15 and at school in 2001, says life changed overnight. “The sun was raised, the dark became light. Music was allowed, there was no recruitment for fighting. We were all thinking of a bright future.”

Quilty speaks with a local at a Kabul market on the morning of Eid.Credit: Victor J. Blue

The US spent tens of billions of dollars rebuilding Afghanistan, constructing schools, bridges, health clinics, and training the Afghan army. Its efforts bore fruit: infant and maternal mortality fell, access to education increased, and women came out of the shadows. “I am a product of those 20 years of international contribution,” another of Quilty’s Afghan colleagues tells me. “I did my bachelor and master’s studies and now have a global view and understand human rights, and can talk on international issues.”

“In Australia, people react in a way they want to be perceived by the photographer. But in Afghanistan, that instinct hasn’t developed yet.”

By the time Quilty arrived, in 2013, the Taliban had been largely relegated to the countryside, and Afghanistan was – at least by local standards – relatively stable. The country even managed to hold a presidential election in April 2014. “Back then, in Kabul, you could walk the streets fairly freely,” says Quilty. “There was a sense of nervous optimism.” He would head out most afternoons to take photos, revelling in the buttery, diffuse light – an amalgam of dust and wood smoke – and the locals’ indifference to his camera. “In Australia, people react in a way they want to be perceived by the photographer. But in Afghanistan, that instinct hasn’t developed yet. It’s almost like you’re not there, which is perfect for a photographer.”

Quilty inside his home in Kabul that he shared with other journalists and a dog called Mushu. “It operated a little like a uni share-house.”Credit: Kiana Hayeri

He moved into a house with some other journalists, “a nice, big, simple but very comfortable home”, as he describes it, with enough room for a garden, vegetable beds and a dog called Mushu, which had been rescued from the street some years before. “It operated a little like a uni share-house,” he explains. In time, they built a pizza oven, a fire pit and even a hot tub.

Before arriving in Afghanistan, Quilty’s understanding of the country had been mostly shaped by the nightly news; by images of armed insurgents, suicide bombings and soldiers on patrol. The reality, of course, was infinitely more complex. An entire culture opened up to him like some colour-crazy flower, which he set about documenting with ravenous curiosity; the bird markets and wool-sorters, men tenderly washing a motorbike in a creek, boys smoking shisha in the snow above Kabul. And, of course, hellacious, mind-bending violence.

“Andrew was interested in the political dynamics, understanding which clans and tribes were important,” says Solène Chalvon, a French journalist who worked closely with him. “He had Pashtun friends, government friends, anti-government friends.” Even before the return of the Taliban, Afghanistan was deeply misogynistic. “You had this crowd of male journalists who had given up on women’s rights topics because they didn’t have access to women’s lives. They weren’t interested in this question. But Andrew was. And he really questions himself, his place and privilege, especially when it comes to gender.”

According to Quilty, expat life in Kabul was, at least when he first arrived, “fairly rock’n’roll, with, you know, parties with drinking and sex and drugs. People were cashing in on the war and making names for themselves.”

All that changed in 2014, when a suicide bomber destroyed a Lebanese restaurant that was popular with foreigners. “About 20 people were killed – a bunch of UN staff, some diplomats, maybe a couple of journalists. No one I knew, but I’d been there the night before for dinner, and it hit everyone really hard.”

Inevitably, the war made up the bulk of Quilty’s work. He picked up freelance assignments for Le Monde, The New York Times, TIME, Rolling Stone and
the BBC. He made a point of travelling widely, fostering connections in parts of the country that were rarely, if ever, reported on.

“Your safety relies on the Afghans you work with, and if you’re not a decent human being, you won’t get the support you need.”

“A lot of the foreigners working there lived in their compounds,” says Kate Clark, the former BBC correspondent. “But Andrew got out a lot. I particularly liked how he stayed in places and talked to people, and you got a sense of what was happening in people’s lives ... Your safety relies on the Afghans you work with, and if you’re not a decent human being, you won’t get the support you need.”

One of Quilty’s shots of a bomb blast in Kabul in 2019, which killed 103 people: “There were photos that day that I didn’t take, deliberately,” he says. Credit: Andrew Quilty

To begin with, Quilty almost always worked with a writer. But as the war dragged on and international interest waned, so did the number of journalists. He increasingly found himself working alone, taking the photos and writing the stories. In October 2015 he travelled to Kunduz, in the country’s north-east, where a hospital run by Médecins Sans Frontières had been attacked, mistakenly, by an American gunship.

Forty-two staff and patients were killed. Quilty was the first journalist, foreign or otherwise, to get inside the hospital, which had been reduced to a tangled mass of steel, concrete, unexploded ordnance and dead bodies, with everything layered in a fine grey dust. He’d been inside taking photos for about an hour when he came across a man, lying face-up on an operating table, arms splayed, naked but for a piece of plasterboard that had fallen, or been placed, over his torso.

Quilty’s photo of the scene, called The Man on the Operating Table, can’t help but leave you momentarily mute. You want to hold your hand to your mouth. It won a number of awards, including a Walkley Photo of the Year in 2016, together with that year’s Gold Walkley, and the George Polk Award for photojournalism. Quilty didn’t have a journalist with him in the hospital, so he wrote the story himself, which later appeared in Foreign Policy magazine.

Of course, the man on the operating table had a name: Baynazar Mohammad Nazar. He was 43, a husband and father of four. Quilty says Nazar’s wife told him that the world needed to see the photograph. But taking such shots still has ethical implications. “Early on, projecting my own Western experience of death and mourning, taking shots like these felt intrusive,” he says. “But what is culturally permissible to photograph in Afghanistan is very different to that in Australia. Photographing deeply intimate, personal moments like burials in Afghanistan was often welcomed by the family members of people killed in violent attacks – as some kind of acknowledgment of their existence.”

An injured man uses a piece of timber as a crutch to move away from the scene of a bomb blast in central Kabul, 2019.Credit: Andrew Quilty

Like many of his peers, Quilty had taken as axiomatic the injunction, by famous war photographer Robert Capa, that “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”. But there are limits. In 2018, he was confronted by the aftermath of an ambulance bomb in central Kabul, which killed 103 and wounded 235.

“I was surrounded by dozens of dead and mutilated bodies. There were photos that day that I didn’t take, deliberately, or which I took from a distance that felt removed from that person’s personal space.” He adds: “I suppose there’s a way to photograph these situations somewhat ‘respectfully’, but that’s never fully stopped me wondering whether it’s right.”

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One day in April 2019, Quilty was in a car, returning from a remote region of Kunduz when he got a call from Lars Boering, then director of the World Press Photo Foundation. The foundation had recently named Quilty a finalist in its 2019 Spot News Stories category, for his shots of the ambulance bombing in Kabul; in two weeks’ time, it would fly him to Amsterdam for the awards ceremony. “When I got the call from [Boering] there were five of us in the car, and it was noisy, so I asked him if I could call him back in 10 minutes, when I got to this guesthouse I was staying at,” says Quilty. “But he just said no, it couldn’t wait.” Boering then told Quilty that he had received an allegation of inappropriate behaviour against him, and that he was no longer welcome at the awards ceremony. His flights to Amsterdam, and accommodation, had been cancelled.

“All the blood just drained from my head,” Quilty says. He checked his emails. There was already a message from his photo editor at The Washington Post, cancelling an assignment that he’d had with the paper for later that week. Boering hadn’t given him any details about the allegation or who had made it. Desperate for information, Quilty called Daniella Zalcman, the head of Women Photograph, a group of about 1000 female and non-binary photographers from around the world. Zalcman claimed not to know of the allegation. He then called his agency, Agence VU, in Paris, which tried, unsuccessfully, to talk to the foundation.

In April 2019, Quilty received an allegation of inappropriate behaviour against him : “All the blood just drained from my head.” Credit: Kiana Hayeri

Quilty denies engaging in any inappropriate behaviour. It has nonetheless been profoundly damaging, personally and professionally. Some of Quilty’s most important clients have dropped him, including National Geographic, TIME, The Washington Post, and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. He emailed the photo editor at The Washington Post, whom he had considered a friend, but received no response. The World Press Photo Foundation wouldn’t take his calls, either: it took Quilty two years, through his lawyers in Amsterdam, to arrange a meeting. (The meeting was scheduled for last August, but Quilty had to cancel it to return to Kabul. He hopes to organise another one this September.)

Corroborating information is one of journalism’s core responsibilities. But it’s unclear what, if any, measures Quilty’s former clients took to verify the allegation made against him. When I asked the World Press Photo Foundation if they had checked the allegation before disinviting Quilty, they told me that the alleged incident had occurred three years ago, then referred me to him for further comment. The magazines and newspapers in question didn’t respond to my emails. When I eventually located the woman in question, she declined to comment.

Quilty’s agency kept him on, as have many of his other clients, including Le Monde, Rolling Stone and Foreign Policy. He says he lost a couple of friends; but most, such as Kate Clark, have been supportive. “For me, the whole point of the #MeToo movement was that you take [any accusation] seriously,” says Clark, “which means a proper investigation and a right of reply before judgment. That has been entirely absent in Andrew’s case.”

Quilty has suffered a kind of “social and professional death”, says Solène Chalvon. “It’s unbelievable,” she tells me. “I was so angry with the World Press Photo Foundation. You don’t, from a rumour, decide to ruin someone’s life. And it’s very bad for the cause. We have so many women who are benefiting from #MeToo, and when I see cases like Andrew’s, it just casts a very bad shadow on the whole movement.”

French journalist Solène Chalvon says that Quilty has suffered a kind of “social and professional death”: “I was so angry with the World Press Photo Foundation. You don’t, from a rumour, decide to ruin someone’s life.” Credit: Courtesy of Andrew Quilty

As the Taliban poured into Kabul last August, Quilty and Victor Blue, an American photojournalist who also stayed in Kabul during the collapse, grabbed their cameras and headed for the airport on a motorcycle. “We didn’t realise how bad it was,” says Blue. “There were thousands of people on the streets, with the Taliban trying to control them.”

After a time, Quilty and Blue parked the bike and proceeded on foot. They hadn’t gone far when they came across a young Talib with a machine gun and a length of rubber hose, which he was using to beat back the crowd. Quilty raised his camera and had taken five or six frames when the man turned around and saw him. Quilty told him he was a journalist and offered his press credentials. The Talib glanced at the papers, then began screaming: “Australia, f… you Australia! This is my country.” He pulled out a knife and held the tip of it to Quilty’s neck. Blue started yelling, “Don’t hurt him!” The Talib then began whipping Quilty with the rubber hose. “Really wailing on him,” says Blue. “We cranked up the bike and got away.”

When I mention this story to Quilty, he says he only vaguely remembers it. “There was so much going on.”

A young Talib belts Quilty with a piece of hose as the Taliban poured into Kabul last August.

Le Monde had commissioned him to take pictures, but it was too chaotic to get anything done. Besides, his main priority was helping his Afghan friends and colleagues escape. At one stage, Quilty was asked by an Australian news outlet to help arrange a flight for one of their young fixers. “I was told that there were Australian soldiers at Abbey Gate [one of the main entrances to the airport] who would take care of this guy and get him inside.” So Quilty hired two cars and set off, taking with him a family of seven, whom he’d met the day before and whose father was already in Australia. The crowd was so large that the closest they could get was about a kilometre away. Quilty told the family to wait, and headed into the crowd with the fixer, linking arms so as not to lose one another. “It was so jam-packed it was difficult to breathe,” he tells me. “There were young kids and people falling down and mothers carrying their toddlers, and you were so tightly crushed against them that I was afraid of suffocating them.”

It took 45 minutes to reach the gate. They then had to wade through an open sewer to get close enough for the soldiers to hear them. But the soldiers were British. They told Quilty that the Australians were further along the canal. Quilty and the fixer fought their way down, but couldn’t locate them. (He later discovered they’d packed up for the night.) They backed out of the crowd and returned to the family in the car. “I apologised and told them we couldn’t find the Australians. They were so gracious. They were grateful that I’d even tried.”

As far as he knows, the family is still in Afghanistan. So is the fixer. He’s in hiding now, moving from city to city, keeping his head down. “He’s got family there but he’s trying to stay away from them, so he doesn’t attract unwanted attention.” Quilty hasn’t given up. “I’m still trying with DFAT and Home Affairs to get him out. There’s not a lot I can do but I’m trying to keep him abreast of developments so he doesn’t think he’s forgotten.”

A year later, Quilty still feels guilty about that night at Abbey Gate. “Telling someone who’s on the run to be patient feels beyond heartless. Now, I’m just trying to make him feel like he hasn’t been abandoned.”

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