describe a city at dawn
Answers
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• It's not very often that journalists find themselves participants in the world's leading news story. Some put themselves there. Not me, I didn't choose to be sitting less than a 100 metres from where an American bomb was about to land in the Afghan capital.
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• Nor did I time my live television broadcast for BBC World TV so that the cameras were rolling when the bomb blew me off my chair, and off the air. But that's what happened on the night the Taliban were deserting Kabul. Fortunately, none of us were injured, nor were colleagues from the Associated Press across the road.
• After a second bomb hit the headquarters of Al-Jazeera television a little further down our streets, we hopped in our jeep and drove across Kabul to the venerable Intercontinental Hotel, where at least we could get bombed in company.I had come to town a week earlier to reopen the BBC bureau there.
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• It had been summarily closed and my colleague Kate Clark ejected a year ago. The Taliban didn't like her forthright reporting on one of their many barbarous acts—the destruction of the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan.
• Why the Taliban were happy to have me there is something I may never know. But it was an opportunity I couldn't resist, a chance to complete nearly six years of reporting on the constantly shifting sands of Afghanistan by being there when the Taliban regime either collapsed, or fought off the Americans.
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• Now we all know what happened, and it wasn't the defeat of the world's only superpower by lightly-armed irregulars led by a one-eyed delusional Mullah Omar preaching a strange mix of Deobandi Islamic and Pashtoon tribal chauvinism of the narrowest, village-level variety.
• On the night of November 12, the same night that the Americans nearly killed me, the Taliban fled from Kabul—a once-cosmopolitan city that they had terrorised during five years of capricious, violent rule.
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