Six days on a small boat in rough seas: my terrifying, death-defying escape from the Taliban
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In an instant, Sam Pordale went from a world of privilege to becoming a refugee in imminent danger. He talks about how he lost everything and began to rebuild his life. On 15 August 2021, 21-year-old Sam Pordale and his father found themselves part of a huge, panicked crowd of people all trying to get to Kabul airport and away from the Taliban militants who, just hours earlier, had taken control of Afghanistan’s capital city.
![[Sam Pordale with Coventry’s former lord mayor and lady mayoress, Jaswant Singh Birdi and Krishna Birdi]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/023ebf44e7fd127b76d58f82c0a68a017ded177f/286_166_1557_1946/master/1557.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Between the crowd and the entrance to the airport, Pordale could see a Taliban checkpoint, where heavily armed men were holding lists in their hands and checking people’s documents. Pordale, whose father had until that morning held a high-ranking position in the democratic government, knew that their chances of getting to the airport and on to an evacuation flight were blown.
![[Pordale is now co-president of Warwick Student Action for Refugees]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0ad1879cffd9d44cdadeb5f0cc3b4d04c251040e/0_1177_2268_2266/master/2268.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Pordale turned to tell his father that they had to get away, but he had disappeared, vanished without a trace into the crowd. “At that point I didn’t know I’d never see him again,” he says. “But I did know that I was now on my own and it was up to me to find a way of getting out of Afghanistan.”.
![[Sam Pordale, seated and smiling, on the University of Warwick campus]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3b5d5b62053cd8e3b38a1ee2d6b13a7413cd89c6/0_209_5312_3187/master/5312.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
The Taliban’s advance across Afghanistan in the chaotic days before the withdrawal of US and UK troops had been so fast and everything had unravelled so quickly that Pordale says he and his father had not thought of an escape plan. “My mother and my siblings were already in Turkey and I’d stayed in Kabul to help my father, but in those days when the provinces were falling to the Taliban, my father just couldn’t accept that this could happen and everything we’d been working towards would disappear,” he says. “It was only that morning of the 15th, when we woke up and realised that [President] Ashraf Ghani had fled, that we came to our senses.”.
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