The Taliban blindfolded me. I heard the click of a gun being loaded

A Taliban guard I could only sense steered me into a room I couldn’t see. I’d been wearing a hat against the winter cold, and he had turned it into a blindfold, pulling it down hard over my eyes. After manoeuvring me inside, he pushed me into a seat.
From my left, the way I had come in, I heard the sound of the guard leaving and closing the door. The room was stale and airless. For a moment I thought I was alone. But then, from my right, came the metallic clicks of a gun being loaded and charged. I froze, too scared even to breathe.
It was early February 2022, three days since a Taliban patrol had stopped my driver and me in the Afghan capital, Kabul. At first, we thought it was a routine security check, but it had turned into an abduction. They chained me up in their base overnight and the next day drove the two of us blindfolded to a prison complex in Kabul, where we were locked into basement cells.
It was 20 years since I had first set foot in Afghanistan. When I first arrived, as a BBC reporter, the Taliban had just been overthrown by the United States and Britain, which had invaded after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It was impossible to imagine then that the US and Britain would be reeling from defeat two decades later, and that the Taliban would have been replaced by … the Taliban.
And yet here I was as their prisoner. There was silence for several seconds after I’d heard the gun being loaded. Then a voice told me to take off my hat, in English.
Seated behind a desk was a powerfully built man wearing a black skullcap and a bulky camouflage jacket. “Don’t worry,” the Talib chuckled. “There are no bullets.” I forced a smile as he ejected the magazine and put the weapon on the desk.
“Tell me what kind of gun this is,” he continued. “I know it’s a handgun,” I said. “But I don’t know what kind.”
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“You’re lying,” he said, shaking his head.
I was terrified, painfully aware of the precious liberty I had lost. By then, I knew that the man interrogating and taunting me worked for the Taliban’s intelligence department. My Afghan cellmates had informed me that we were being held in their headquarters. But why?
This was my third trip to Afghanistan since the Taliban’s blitzkrieg reconquest in August 2021. But just before I arrived in Kabul this time, three of my colleagues had been detained. One of them was my driver’s brother. We were trying to find out what had happened to them when we were taken.
Was this a sign of the Taliban resorting to one of their old tactics: kidnapping westerners to use them as bargaining chips? I was deeply conscious of being from Britain, America’s closest ally in Afghanistan. There were certainly things the Taliban wanted. Their leaders were infuriated that the West had renewed its sanctions and frozen billions of dollars of Afghan reserves after its chaotic withdrawal, and was refusing to recognise the Taliban government.
Whatever the reasons, our captivity underlined how the Taliban’s old, authoritarian instincts were returning. Hopes that they would moderate themselves the second time around had faded as they closed girls’ schools, cowed Afghanistan’s once-vibrant media and — despite promises of an amnesty — abducted and killed many Afghans who had worked with the past government or British and US forces.
Now I was in their sights. My interrogator — I never learnt his name — was determined to prove that I had been working for the British government. “I’m an agent,” he declared at our first session, leaning across the desk. “And an agent always knows another agent.”
But as the interrogation progressed, his choice of questions also offered insights into his own background and hints as to how the Taliban had worn down and outsmarted the West and its Afghan allies. (Though they were assisted by the West’s tactic of killing huge numbers of civilians in night raids and airstrikes on the Taliban’s rural heartlands, squandering any goodwill.)
“It’s good to practise my English,” he said early on. “All I had were films and YouTube until now.” At one point, he asked me to list all the James Bond movies I’d seen — clearly as a precursor to accusing me of being some kind of 007 myself. But I couldn’t remember the last Bond film I’d seen, so I said The Spy Who Loved Me. I was showing my age. “What about Quantum of Solace?” he retorted, sounding shocked. It was his favourite.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his job, he also admitted to binge-watching the US television series Prison Break. “It’s very good,” he said. “I learnt a lot about America.” Again, he was astonished that I hadn’t seen it.
My interrogator had a full beard but a young face, and his English was nearly fluent. The subject of his questions ranged widely as he tried to catch me out, jumping from international politics to religious philosophy. “What is life for?” he asked. I had barely started speaking when he cut me off: “Life is for serving our Creator.”
Near the end of my first interrogation, he brought up Edward Snowden, the former US intelligence contractor and whistleblower, asking me to name the classified surveillance programmes that he had leaked. When I answered that I couldn’t remember, he glared and said: “You’re lying again.”
There was a long pause while he wrote on his papers, before he leaned forward again. “You’re hiding something, I can tell,” he said.
“I’m not hiding anything,” I said, feeling another wave of anxiety well up inside me.
He added another note and then said: “You’re going to be hanged.”
I barely noticed the guard appear before he blindfolded me again. Back in my cell, I slumped against the wall. “They’re just trying to scare me,” I told myself. “They are not going to hang me.”
But I had never felt so powerless. I couldn’t stop thinking about my family, worrying about them worrying about me.
Just then, one of my cellmates interrupted my thoughts with a tap on my arm. Pointing to an unoccupied mat, he told me to take it. There were not enough mats and blankets to go round everyone in the cell. But I was the only foreigner, and so they had agreed between themselves that I should have a set.
When I protested, saying I was happy to share, he wouldn’t hear of it. My other cellmates nodded their agreement. Putting his hand to his chest in a gesture of respect, he smiled and said: “You are our guest.”
It was hard to sleep on the stone floor, with the light on 24 hours a day and my mind churning with anxiety, so I was deeply grateful for that mat and blanket.
I was extremely lucky in another way. A week later, I and my colleagues, who had also been interrogated, were set free, helped by a campaign for our release that involved the UK government, former BBC colleagues and of course my wife, Natalia. But as I write this, many people — Afghan and foreign — remain in Taliban custody without charge, some being held as unacknowledged hostages.
Given the experiences others have had, I was preparing myself to be held for months while I was inside, so it was a huge relief to be reunited with my family.
I knew then that I wouldn’t be returning to Afghanistan for some time, not least because I couldn’t risk putting them through the same ordeal again. And just in case I had any second thoughts, one of the first things Natalia said to me when I got home was: “You’re banned from going back.” But the experience didn’t alter my affection for the country and its people, including my generous cellmates.
Three years since the Taliban seized control in the wake of the West’s pullout, they have ended most of the fighting for now. But the time I spent in a Taliban prison was a sharp reminder that it is force keeping them in power, not consent, and so Afghanistan’s wars may not be over. If I can, I will return to keep telling its story.
Andrew North is a former BBC Kabul correspondent and this is adapted from his book War & Peace & War: Twenty Years in Afghanistan, published by Ithaka Press on Thursday