None of us slept the night of Aug. 19.
There were four USA TODAY editors and a reporter on a WhatsApp chat with Afghan journalist Fatema Hosseini, U.S. Navy Reserve Lt. Alex Cornell du Houx and Ukrainian military commander Iryna Andrukh.
Alex, in his civilian capacity, was guiding Fatema through the Taliban gantlet at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan – a crush of people, gunfire and tear gas. Iryna, in Kyiv, Ukraine, was directing a special forces soldier in the military portion of the airport who was trying to find her.
When Kabul fell to the Taliban on Aug. 15, USA TODAY London-based correspondent Kim Hjelmgaard reached out to Fatema, our freelancer in Afghanistan. “I hope you are OK,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message. “Tell me how I can help.”
She needed a way out. As a young, educated woman, an outspoken journalist and member of the Shi’a Hazara ethnic group, among the most oppressed in Afghanistan, she was a Taliban target. Her parents’ home in Herat had already been ransacked.
