The Sparrows of Kabul is Fred Smith's personal account of the mission to evacuate visa and passport holders from Kabul International Airport (KIA) in the two weeks after the city fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Soldiers and diplomats worked 20-hour days, in uncertain and difficult conditions, to help people in through the airport gates and out of Afghanistan. Meanwhile millions around the world worked their phones all hours of the night, desperate to extract friends, family and former colleagues braving the human cattle yards outside the gates of Kabul airport in a lastditch dash for freedom. This is not an official history but an extraordinary first-hand account touching on the things that matter: trust and transparency, hope and despair, sleep and insomnia, creativity and bureaucracy, self-help and self-sacrifice, family and friendship.
