I spent a 12 months embedded with the Taliban’s zealots

If you want to see the warped, misogynist hypocrisy of the Taliban regime, and how harmful it is even to itself, there are two scenes in the documentary Hollywoodgate that capture this perfectly. 

They are about a female doctor, the wife of a powerful Taliban warlord, Mawlawi Mansour, and yet she appears in neither scene. In fact, with a handful of brief exceptions there are no women in the film at all.

Hollywoodgate is Egyptian filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at’s astonishing new documentary, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and sees him embed with a unit of Taliban fighters right after American troops fled in 2021. 

In the opening minutes, Nash’at’s camera follows Mansour and his ragtag group of fighters as they take control of a US airbase, abandoned just days earlier by the retreating Americans. They rummage through fridges of beer, and hangars where seemingly sabotaged Black Hawk helicopters have been abandoned. ‘See what treasures the Americans have left us,’ one gloats.

Then they find the medicine. Shelf upon shelf of the stuff. Enough, one says, to supply an entire hospital. Mansour instructs his men to examine the expiry dates. His wife is a doctor, he tells them proudly. Then they bumble off again, gazing with childlike awe at the riches around them.

At the end of the film, Mansour and his cronies have fixed the choppers and apparently mastered the warfighting technology of the world’s greatest superpower – but when they re-enter the medicine store they realise they have blown it: a year on, most of these pills have expired. Mansour is furious. His wife, says Nash’at, would have known what to do.

But, of course, Mansour’s wife – the doctor – is at home. Afghanistan’s ‘vice and virtue’ laws ban women from education, almost every form of paid employment and, most recently, from even speaking in public. The drugs have been wasted and the sick have perished. After a year on the US base, the Taliban can kill with more firepower than ever before, but it can’t cure the dying. Because Mansour’s clever wife – and thousands of Afghan women doctors like her who could have helped – are locked in their houses.

Nash’at captures Mansour boasting about his wife repeatedly during the film. ‘Out of all of the women in the village, he picked the doctor,’ the filmmaker smiles sadly when we speak over Zoom. ‘They ban women from getting an education, but they all want intelligent women as partners, so he picks the only educated woman and forces her to follow his ideology. He’s very proud of the fact that his wife is a doctor. But she’s sitting at home and, in the meantime, he and his team waste medications that if his wife saw for one second, she could have used to save people’s lives.’

Nash’at, now 34 and from a conservative religious family, became a journalist when he protested during Egypt’s Arab Spring in 2011. He headed out to Kabul to report on the Taliban takeover, hoping to interview the leadership council. He arranged access through a fixer but, when he arrived, his fixer got cold feet and stopped answering his calls. Just as Nash’at was about to leave, his translator suggested he meet a young soldier, lieutenant M J Muktar, who introduced him to Mansour.

On 12 September 2021, Nash’at arrived at Hollywood Gate One, the entrance to a former CIA airbase on the outskirts of Kabul that gave Nash’at the name of the film. He had been given very clear rules – he could only film the Taliban and was forbidden to point his camera at ordinary Afghans.

All the same, he catches shots of women in full blue burqa, all of them kneeling and begging for money, whether lining the streets or outside a mosque. ‘In the world of the Taliban, women are only allowed out if they are beggars,’ Nash’at explains.

‘They go to the bakery every day when it’s about to close to get the bread that wasn’t sold. Otherwise they cannot leave the house or even raise their voice in their own home. If a man is passing in the street and hears them, he can punish them.

Who gives a society the right to do that?’

It was too dangerous for him to talk to a woman while he was there, or even look at one, Nash’at says. He felt unsafe the whole time he was in the country. The reasons for that are clear. ‘That little devil is filming us,’ one Talib says early on. ‘I hope he doesn’t bring shame on us in front of China.’ Mansour explains Nash’at has been given permission to film, to which the fighter replies that if his intentions are bad, ‘he will die soon’.

‘I’m dealing with people who have been in 42 years of war,’ Nash’at says. ‘Everyone is suffering from PTSD. Any moment, something could happen.’

Sometimes he slept at the base, sharing a room with Muktar. The young Afghan would regularly scream in his sleep – ‘like he’s running from an air raid’, Nash’at recalls with a shiver. ‘I tried to talk to him about it but he would refuse.’

Other times Nash’at would sleep in the town and have to pass through checkpoints – five in every road. He was stopped at each one when Mansour, his warlord protector, wasn’t around. ‘I was just this Arab, and they could be ugly to me, like they were ugly to their own people, bugging me, making me vulnerable.’

I had assumed Nash’at’s Islamic background would have kept him safe, but he gives a cynical laugh. ‘They couldn’t care less about my background. They saw pictures I had with presidents [Nash’at had filmed world leaders such as Heinz Fischer, the former president of Austria, and Mahathir Mohamad, the former prime minister of Malaysia], and they hoped I’d be a propaganda tool for them. The Taliban leaders understand what propaganda is today. The Hollywood-style portrayal that was imposed on them – they as “the evil ones” – they are using for themselves now. They want to do the portraying. I was supposed to be that propaganda.’

And yet, between Nash’at’s highly constructed propaganda shots, something human does slip through. About an hour into the film, Nash’at follows Muktar into Hamid’s Copy Shop to print off a picture with a Taliban chief. That morning, a decree had been issued: women must cover their faces. The camera focuses on the TV screen where the female news presenter is veiled. ‘Face covering. That’s how Kabul should be,’ says Muktar. ‘Not for me,’ says one of his friends. ‘I don’t like it this way.’ Muktar nods and looks away awkwardly.

‘Many did not want women to be covered up,’ Nash’at explains. ‘Many wanted women to travel freely, to be able to talk, and were sad that women were not going to be educated. I’ve sat with Talibs in the car as they played music, which is forbidden, but when I tried to film, they said, “No, no, you’ll put us in danger.” For all that, Muktar also said if his leader asked him to throw himself in the fire, he would do it without thinking.’

Nash’at’s film avoids showing violence. When Mansour’s men head out to ambush a group of insurgents – there were several different groups of Afghans resisting Taliban rule in the early months – he chooses instead to film young girls laughing and playing. ‘Under eight years old are allowed to go outside in the street,’ he says. ‘This is the last glimpse of freedom for women that you could see, when the guys are out there killing the resistance. I wanted to show beauty in this world that is so ugly, at the time when something so ugly is happening. I just couldn’t handle all the stress.’

Indeed, the stress was so great that throughout filming he flew back home to Germany, where he now lives, for bouts of therapy just to keep filming, with the whole project taking almost a year.

The final sequence shows a military parade to celebrate the first anniversary of the American departure. Nash’at was the only journalist there. He films Mansour nervously ensuring his planes will work, violently cuffing Talibs who try to sneak on to flights to the parade and seeing delegations from Russia, Iran and China board Afghan aircraft to attend the ceremony.

An immaculate parade follows – troops in perfect order, tightly drilled, rank upon rank. Black Hawk helicopters and A29 attack planes swoop overhead. This is no longer a ragtag insurgent force; it’s a well-trained, well-equipped army.

That was the last day Nash’at spent in the country. Just before the parade, agents from the Afghan secret service asked him to come to their headquarters and show them the footage he’d shot. He told them he had the parade to film, so they gave him 24 hours. As soon as the parade was over, he fled to the airport and paid cash for a seat on the first flight out. He’s only just getting over the fear he felt as he made his escape.

‘I’m just very thankful I was not born in that environment – suffering poverty, being rejected by the whole world from the very first second you’re born.’

He seems both angry and sad. ‘They were born in war, they know nothing but war, then the West invades and says, “We’re the good ones, here to save the women”.

But no women were saved. The US went, and the women are left behind. No one speaks up for them now. There are no protests for Afghan women, the White House doesn’t say anything. Afghan women can’t raise their own voices. Once the West left that country behind, it stopped caring about its people. Now the Taliban has all these new weapons and all these propaganda tricks. The West has a responsibility to find a solution for the women of Afghanistan without another war – because every war only makes things worse.’

Hollywoodgate is streaming now on homecinema.curzon.com and will be on BBC iPlayer early in November 

FROM HOPE TO HELL ON EARTH 

1919 Afghanistan regains independence after a third war against British forces. The modernising Emir Amanullah Khan (far right) gives women the right to vote – a year after the UK. His wife, Queen Soroya Tarzi (right), opens the country’s first girls’ school in 1921. 

1950 The purdah system, which enforced strict gender segregation and veiling practices, is abolished.

1964 A new constitution focusing on women’s rights spells a ‘golden era’ in Kabul: new buildings spring up, women don miniskirts and travellers come from around the world. Late 70s-early 90s Political unrest, Russian invasion and civil wars between Mujahideen and government forces roll back two decades of progress for women.

1996 The Taliban – Sunni Islamic fundamentalists – take control and impose a strict interpretation of Islamic law. Women are denied basic rights such as education and employment. 

2001 In response to 9/11 the US invades Afghanistan and deposes the Taliban. Its troops stay for two decades. In 2005 Afghan’s new parliament passes a law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and in 2013 a strategy to improve the status of women is developed.

2021 US troops leave and the Taliban regain power. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs is scrapped, girls are banned from secondary schools, women can’t travel, go to university or be seen in public. Protesters are lashed with electric cables.

2024 Draconian laws ban women from raising their voices, singing, reading, looking at men other than their husbands or relatives and, as enforced by the morality police, make full-body veils mandatory in public.