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Inside the Taliban’s Takeover of Afghanistan

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Kandahar falls, and the cameras keep rolling as the Taliban close in on the rest of Afghanistan.

VICE News correspondent Ben C. Solomon and his team spent the final days of the Afghan government’s collapse embedded on the front lines of Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city and the place where the Taliban movement was born in the early 1990s. The resulting special report, “Inside the Taliban’s Takeover of Afghanistan,” puts viewers inside the street fighting, sniper exchanges and airstrikes that marked the city’s fall — and the panic spreading through Afghan neighborhoods as government control evaporated.

• Solomon’s crew filmed from inside Kandahar as Taliban fighters encircled the city, one of the last major urban strongholds to fall before Kabul.
• Afghan government commandos are shown trying to hold defensive lines with crumbling logistics and collapsing morale following the rapid withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces.
• The report documents civilians, particularly women and those tied to the outgoing government, bracing for the return of Taliban rule just days before Kabul fell on August 15, 2021.

The Fight for Kandahar

Kandahar carries symbolic weight beyond its size — it’s the city where Mullah Omar founded the Taliban movement, and its fall effectively signaled that the insurgency’s momentum had become unstoppable. Solomon’s footage shows commandos moving block to block through neighborhoods under sniper fire, calling in airstrikes against Taliban positions dug into residential streets, and watching supply lines thin out as reinforcements failed to arrive. The urban combat captured in the report looks nothing like a negotiated handover; it’s street-level war, fought house by house in a city the Taliban had every intention of reclaiming as their own.

A Military in Collapse

What the report captures isn’t just gunfire — it’s the visible unraveling of a fighting force. Afghan security units in and around Kandahar are shown running low on ammunition, cut off from resupply, and increasingly aware that no reinforcement was coming. That collapse mirrored what was happening nationwide in the weeks after the U.S. and its allies accelerated their troop withdrawal, stripping Afghan forces of the air support, contractor maintenance and logistics chains they had leaned on for two decades.

Kandahar — the city where the Taliban was born — fell just days before Kabul did on August 15, 2021.

Fear on the Streets

Alongside the firefights, Solomon’s cameras find residents weighing what a Taliban return means for their daily lives. Women in particular are shown grappling with the prospect of losing freedoms gained over the previous two decades, while government employees and their families face the immediate danger of being associated with the collapsing administration. That dread, more than the gunfire itself, is what gives the report its lasting punch — it’s not abstract policy, it’s people deciding in real time whether to run.

The Countdown to Kabul

By the time Solomon’s report aired, the trajectory was already clear: after Kandahar and a string of provincial capitals fell in rapid succession, Taliban fighters entered Kabul on August 15, 2021, with the Afghan government offering virtually no organized resistance in the capital itself. The speed of that final collapse — a fight for the country’s second city giving way to an essentially uncontested march into the capital within days — is the throughline the report leaves viewers holding onto.

Solomon’s dispatch from Kandahar is the kind of ground-level document that outlasts the news cycle that produced it — a record of the exact week Afghanistan’s twenty-year war ended, not with a negotiated transition, but with commandos running out of ammunition on streets the Taliban already knew by heart.