Another man, his face so badly damaged as to be unrecognizable, stands next to him. The person who filmed the pair on a phone can be heard panting heavily, having come upon the bodies shortly after they fell from the plane onto the tarmac, a day after the Taliban seized power in Kabul. It was a moment that shocked the world last August: some Afghans were so desperate to escape the Taliban’s hard-line Islamist fighters that they clung to a moving military transport plane even as it took off. Mohammad Rezayee, whose son Zabi, 17, was killed at Kabul airport when he clung to a moving plane. His other son, Zaki, 19, has never been found CHARLIE FAULKNER Thousands of
