An Afghan-American scholar describes the chaos at Kabul's airport and being aboard a plane bound for the U.S. The author was in this crowd, finally boarding a plane to leave Kabul. Afghan scholar Hanif Sufizada, who works at the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha, got caught in Kabul during the chaos of the U.S. military pullout, when thousands of Afghans fled to the airport, seeking a way out of the country.

Editor Catesby Holmes sent Sufizada an email on Aug. 17, 2021, telling him that she hoped he was OK – and his email back let us know that he wasn't. Sufizada's dispatches from Aug. 17 and 18 advance an important story: He brings an on-the-ground account of his struggle to leave Afghanistan and the impossible and irrational obstacles he had to overcome in order to flee – all of which he faced even though he is a U.S. resident with a green card and a family in Omaha.

Sufizada, an economics scholar and former Afghan government official whose most recent story for The Conversation was "The Taliban are megarich – here's where they get the money they use to wage war in Afghanistan," wrote us from Qatar on Wednesday morning, Aug. 18, that he finally secured passage on a plane out of a U.S. military base in Qatar and is headed back to the U.S.

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