'I identified my brother after he fell from plane fleeing Taliban. His face was completely gone...

MILLIONS watched his body tumble out of the sky in a tragedy which has come to represent the death of hope for Afghanistan itself.

- By Marco Giannangeli

Zaki Anwari was just l7 and a striker with the national youth football team when he attempted to flee Taliban rule by clambering on to the fuselage of a US cargo plane in Kabul.

The images of his falling body in August 2021 echo those made famous by the “falling man”, following Al Qaeda’s September 11 strikes on the US almost 20 years previously,

It was those attacks which brought the West to Afghanistan, and which ushered in two decades of increasing prosperity, fledgling democracy and real hope for a historically luckless country.

The past two years have seen that hope snuffed out by a merciless fundamentalist sect riven with internal strife.

“Zaki and I were not yet born when the last Taliban regime took place but we were told lots of stories and the ugly face of the Taliban was in everyone’s mind,” said 20-year-old brother Zaker last night, from his home in Kabul.

“Because we had seen videos of women being beaten, men being beaten just for shaving their beards and wearing Western clothes we never imagined the country would allow them to return to power so easily. But in the end, the treacherous leaders ran away and turned the dreams of the Taliban into reality.”

Zaker’s life has been completely transformed from one of middle-class comfort to perennial misery – and fear.

“I lost my brother and I have lost my father, who died a few months ago of grief. Over time, my studies stopped and we lost our jobs and the shop. Then I lost my freedom,” he said.

“Now we live in secret; fearful that the next Taliban we are forced to deal with will be our last. I can’t go to college, I can’t do sports and go to football or the gym. We are alive but we are not living.