Ali's message arrived on my mobile phone at 5:26 p.m. on August 15, 2021.

"I'm fine," he wrote.

“As you know, the President has left the country.

The Taliban have entered the city.” In Kabul that evening everyone was afraid of thieves and robbers, he wrote.

"I hope everything goes well tonight and the next few days." I texted back "good luck!" and for him to be extra careful.

The sad irony was that Ali had come to Kabul with his family just a few days earlier to avoid the Taliban.

It was just the beginning of her journey.

Christian Meier

Political correspondent for the Middle East and Northeast Africa.

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We had met Ali Kaveh in Herat, his hometown, a few weeks before the fall of Kabul and the end of the Afghan Republic.

From the start he radiated something special.

It was a look at the end of a long interview that drew me in to him.

In the family living room we had talked about his story, about why he hadn't left the apartment for months.

Ali was a sociologist and also spoke as such: he analyzed Afghan society and his own position soberly, as if from an observer's position.

But as we prepared to leave, he looked at us for a moment with a look that spoke of very different things: uncertainty, fear, and panic.

Like he doesn't want us to go.

In Herat, the big old city in western Afghanistan, we – the FAZ photographer and the reporter – encountered all kinds of emotional states.

People were worried, frightened, reassuring, combative, undecided, resigned, desperate, seeking protection, confused.

But it was the meeting in Ali Kaveh's living room that stuck in my memory.

From his apartment we drove briefly to the center, where we visited the Blue Mosque with its magnificent Persian architecture.

Then we went straight to the airport and back to Kabul.

Not long after, the Taliban captured the "Pearl of Khorasan."

"Herat has fallen," Ali wrote.

He had fled to Kabul just days earlier, just in time.

The reason for his escape and for our meeting was that the Taliban were after Ali.

At least that's what the Afghan secret service agent told him.

On January 26 of last year, he said, Ali received a phone call and was summoned to the local office.

There the man said to him: "We have information that you are on a death list." The Taliban actually planned the assassination, but were then unable to carry it out.

But it can still happen, anywhere, anytime.

"We informed you, you know now," said the secret service man.

"I shouldn't leave the house, change my place of residence, change my car and do everything else to avoid an attack," Ali repeated the instructions on how to behave that he had received.

He moved to relatives.

After a while, however, he saw no point in it and decided to live back home with his wife Mozhgan and their two children, Ayda and Rayan.

They installed bars on the windows.