Life and Death at Abbey Gate: The Fall of Afghanistan and the Operation to Save our Allies

by Mikael Cook with Robert Conlin

Editor’s Note: The following is an eye-opening excerpt from Mikael and Robert’s book: Life and Death at Abbey Gate: The Fall of Afghanistan and the Operation to Save our Allies.

The group’s name, #DigitalDunkirk, was inspired by the historic World War II evacuation effort, when hundreds of British civilian boats assisted the British Royal Navy in evacuating Allied troops in danger of annihilation by the German Army from the French beaches of Dunkirk.

In total, 338,226 troops were rescued and brought back to England. This time around, we didn’t have boats, nor beaches, and we weren’t saving our own troops. We had cell phones, computers, and social media, and we were saving our Afghan friends.

The fact that it happened completely organically, with no command structure or hierarchy, and there was hardly any evidence of ego or self-promotion, made it seem like some kind of fairy tale about a lost civilization where people put their own needs aside and went above and beyond to help others in need because it was just and worthy.

Many of us found ourselves entering this group in the same fashion—by accident. Most of us tried the proper government channels, filling out the required paperwork, only to be told, “Just have them shelter in place for now.” But this mission was personal for most of us, and we knew that wasn’t the solution. These were our friends’ lives, and they were being hunted by a brutal enemy. So we set up shop on the internet.

We started  assembling teams of anyone and everyone who could help. From alphabet soup entities such as CIA and NSA agents, to military veterans who served in Afghanistan, to congressional staffers and many more. Individually, we brought little more than the name of the Afghans we wanted to help and our varied experience and skills, but collectively we formed a formidable army.

It was all these people dropping everything in their life for a week, two weeks, three weeks and more, to get this done. With almost no sleep the whole time, because falling asleep might mean an urgent missed message between them and a facilitator on the other end in Kabul. Catnaps with one eye open became the default sleeping method.

We started setting up TOCs (Tactical Operations Centers) and creating message threads on encrypted messaging apps such as Signal to pass information. Group members might have been texting and talking with someone on the ground at HKIA, drawing on the constantly updated intel and resources out in the dozens of dedicated chat rooms to provide updated information on gates that may have just closed, or routes to avoid Taliban patrols, or visual signals to use to get the attention of a Marine at the gates.

The initial plan was for evacuation flights to take off from both HKIA and Bagram, but the decision to turn Bagram over to ANA forces in early July prompted Pentagon planners to focus on HKIA. The Bagram decision was, and still is, a head-scratcher for most. When U.S. troops literally slipped away on the night of July 1 after shutting off the electricity at the airfield, it removed the most valuable U.S. asset from the drawing board.

Instead of having a heavily fortified and easily defensible facility with two operating runways and a huge infrastructure capable of mass evacuations just 25 miles from Kabul, the NEO planners were left with the one runway, limited infrastructure and the exposed and hard-to-defend position that HKIA presented.

From a tactical standpoint, it remains hard to understand. The Pentagon disputes the assertion that the ANA wasn’t told of our decision to leave, which is said to have led to a crisis of confidence about their ability to hold on to Bagram. A spokesman for Afghanistan’s vice-president claims the decision to abandon the airfield was the starting point of the Afghan collapse. 

Whether that was the case or not, the end result is that the epicenter of American involvement in Afghanistan—the sprawling base that at one time housed tens of thousands of troops, a variety of fast food restaurants like Popeyes, Pizza Hut and Burger King, a shopping mall, gyms, video game rooms, even a Harley Davidson store—was in ANA hands for 45 days until the Taliban overran it.

Bagram also contained the Parwan Detention Facility inside a renovated hangar building. Built in 2009, the prison housed up to 3,000 Taliban, Al-Qaeda and ISIS prisoners. The U.S. handed control of Parwan over to the ANA in 2014 after a 2012 incident in which U.S. troops burned 46 Qurans which they claimed Taliban prisoners had used to pass messages to each other. Some Afghan base employees witnessed the burning, and when word got out, it spread like wildfire across the country. Five days of rioting by outraged Afghans led to 30 deaths, including those of four Americans.

That’s not the only fallout from giving up control of Parwan. One of the Taliban’s first orders of business when they seized Bagram and then Kabul from the ANA on August 15 was to release over 12,000 prisoners from Parwan and Pul-e-Charkhi prison outside the capital city.

Over 6,000 Taliban prisoners walked free, but inexplicably, so did 1,800 ISIS-K inmates.2 ISIS-K was formed in 2016 by disaffected Pakistani Taliban fighters who felt that the Taliban wasn’t devoted enough to jihad. The two groups are sworn enemies. After killing Omar Khorasani, the imprisoned ISIS-K leader in Afghanistan, they set the rest free to fight them another day. It goes to show that dysfunctional leadership is a universal condition.

One of those set free was Abdul Rehman Al-Loghri, the son of a merchant from Logar Province and a former engineering student at a school in New Delhi, India. He was arrested in a foiled suicide bomb plot in the Indian city in 2017 and transferred by the CIA to Bagram, where his interrogation led to U.S. drone strikes on ISIS members up to 2019.3 It’s a mystery how he survived in Parwan after he ratted on his ISIS colleagues and likely had them killed.

Twice lucky, Al-Loghri slipped into the chaotic streets of Kabul with other former Parwan inmates as the Taliban stormed into the city the same day. It was the perfect cover to navigate the road to redemption for the shamed jihadist.

Eleven days later, his path would intersect with 2/1 Marines at Abbey Gate.

Abdul Hadi Hamdan, a Taliban commander leading troops at HKIA, claimed to have over 1,000 fighters wearing suicide vests patrolling the airport. Sergeant Zielinski watched one of them intently as the military-aged male fidgeted with a cell phone connected to what appeared to be wires leading into his chest rig.

The rules of engagement prevented him from reacting unless there was an imminent threat to Marines. He watched as the man melted away in the crowd. Sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews, a sniper from 2/1 Weapons Company, had a military-aged male who fit the description of the bomber sighted in his scope. He requested permission to engage from his battalion commander after the psychological operations team confirmed the target, but the request was denied.

_______________________________

This first appeared in The Havok Journal on December 20, 2023.

About the Authors:

Mikael Cook is a former U.S. Army Staff Sergeant and veteran of the war in Afghanistan. During the August 2021 evacuation of Afghanistan, Mikael was a part of the #DigitalDunkirk team that saved thousands of Afghan allies who had been left behind. He was personally responsible for the evacuation of 20 of our allies, most of whom have now joined him in Michigan. Mikael is an active member of the veteran community and continues his advocacy work for the Afghan allies left behind.

Robert Conlin is a writer living in midcoast Maine. A US Navy veteran and graduate of the Boston University School of Communication, he’s also a former newspaper and wire service reporter and editor.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.