The Times Magazine 39find these creatures? “They’ll be on patrol,
come across a little puppy, pick it up, take
it back to barracks, start looking after it.
Happens all the time. Dogs, cats, they provide
that brief moment of positiveness, especially
in the height of conflict in Afghanistan
when soldiers are dying or seriously injured
every other day. They’ve done something
they shouldn’t have done, really. They’ve
humanised the dog. And then it’s dependent
on the soldier, can’t be put back onto the
streets, so they needed an avenue out.”
The first dog spirited out was Farthing’s
own from his six-month tour in Helmand in- It was a stray whose ears had been cut
off that he found in an unused room in their
forward operating base. Farthing used military
biscuits to coax him out. “They taste like
cardboard but he loved them. After a couple
of days, me and him fell for each other.”
He says the bond between the military
and strays has history. He’s had emails from
Vietnam vets who remember the dogs they
had, “and wish they could’ve got them out”. A
lady sent him photos of Russian soldiers with
strays during their last Afghan occupation. “If
you’ve got even a tiny bit of compassion, then
you want to look after these dogs,” he says.
“It’s not like you can go grab one of the
Afghan kids off the street and say, ‘Right, I’m
going to look after them.’ Many people would
want to show compassion for the kids – give
them a decent meal, let him sleep somewhere
warm – but you can’t do that, obviously.”
As the charity grew, it expanded its
purpose. It opened a clinic to train local
vets, it vaccinated local dogs against rabies
and introduced a neutering programme.
He’s proud that a number of their vets were
women. “They decided their own career
path, went through school, went to university,
and now they’re veterinarians. Progress was
being made. You had female MPs, female
judges...” He shakes his head, still taking in
the enormity of it. “I sit here absolutely
shocked that we just abandoned Afghanistan.”
For years, Farthing slipped in an out
of Kabul with his charity work. When the
pandemic hit, he stayed put full-time, living
alongside staff, dogs, cats, donkeys and goats:
“one big family”. They had a gym; they ate
with staff, drank beer with expat friends. By
August, he had around 220 animals at the
compound. That number increased as the
Taliban encircled Kabul and frantic expats
began dropping off pets as they fled.
Farthing and Markhus were in no hurry
to leave. They thought things would change
under the Taliban, yes. They thought security
might have to be tightened. But after August 17
they realised they were being unrealistic.
Markhus was told by her embassy to get on
a flight, but when she arrived at Abbey Gate
she was crushed against a wall. She watched
a western man in a suit try to scale the fence
before falling back. Eventually, she took “a
secret opportunity” to get out with military
assistance – an exit that involved dressing as a
local, car changes, and a helicopter flight from
a military base into the airport terminal.
Meanwhile, Farthing was working on how
to evacuate the dogs. The first plan was to
take them to India, but then he received news
that the UK would accept them “with the
right paperwork”. Two days before evacuation,
he realised he didn’t have enough crates to
transport them all, so took the “horrendous”
decision to put 32 “older” dogs to sleep by
lethal injection. It was done in one afternoon,
the dead animals then buried in the back
garden. A further 16 that were part of his
vaccinate and neuter programme he returned
to the street. Some Nowzad donors were
enraged. “But there was no other way,” he
argues. If he’d left them to the Taliban, they’d
have been shot.
His first attempt to leave was on August 26.
Farthing drove in convoy with two trucks
stacked with animals and two busloads of his
staff and their families. At the first checkpoint,
their vehicle was surrounded by the Taliban
pointing weapons. “Farid, my office manager,
was driving. I was sitting in the middle with
Mustafa, the senior vet there. The three
of us were like, ‘Oh shit.’ I reverted to being
a Marine. Just: OK, assess what’s going on,
what can we do. I said to them, ‘Right, start
counting the Taliban.’ We ended up with
48 surrounding our vehicles.” The fighters
held up photos on their phone screens
of Guantanamo Bay prisoners in orange
jumpsuits being attacked by military dogs
and asked, “You’ve got these dogs?”“I was like, ‘No. Look, they’re street dogs.’
We had some with three legs that we put on
the outside rows. The [military] working dogs
we hid in the middle.” The Taliban waved
them through. He reverts to the tabletop
airport layout. “We were about here in the
airport run-up. Abbey Gate is here. So, this is
the big roundabout coming to the airport. So,
we’re literally like 500 metres away.” It was
5.50pm. Suddenly. he heard a blast. “We knew
it was a bomb. I didn’t realise it was a suicide
bomb.” Within seconds, the area erupted into
chaos. “Everybody’s running from the suicide
bombers. So that’s chaos. And then the
Taliban decide to get everybody out quicker
by tear-gassing them.” Farthing knew from
training to close his eyes, but Farid wasn’t
quick enough and was now driving blind.
Farthing “pushed him out of the way” and
took over. “It stings your eyes. Your face is
on fire. You want to throw up.”
He says the babies of staff were tear-gassed,
the pregnant women, “everybody. And then
the Taliban is shooting AKs right next to
our buses, telling us to move faster, yet people
can’t see to drive. Sadly, we lost six of our
cats because they were up in front of the
truck. Tear gas went straight in and caused
respiratory problems.”
At the airport, he says, the Taliban told
him, he could take his dogs, but not the
Afghans. He told them he wouldn’t go without
them. They turned him away. “So, we got back
to the house and all had a cry. Because we
knew that was it. My staff weren’t getting out
via the airport.”
Back in the UK, the government were
taking serious flak. Not least Dominic Raab,
foreign secretary at the time, who stayed on
holiday in a £1,000-a-night Crete resort while
the situation in Kabul unravelled like a rerun
of Saigon in 1975. It was around this time that
Peter Quentin, a Ministry of Defence official,
released an expletive-studded recording of a
message Farthing had left on his phone. Here
is a taster: “Get me out of Afghanistan with
my staff and animals. I served for 22 years
in the Royal Marines commandos. I am not
taking this bollocks from people like you...
You get me permission to get onto that f***ing
airfield, or tomorrow morning I am going to
turn on you, and the whole f***ing country
and everybody else who’s invested in this
rescue is going to know it’s you – you- blocking this f***ing move. All right?”
Farthing says he’s listened to that recording
several times, “but I honestly can’t remember
making that call. I guess [it was] the tiredness,
the stress.” He says by then he was sleeping
only two to three hours a night, and hadn’t
slept at all for the preceding 48 hours. When
we talk about Wallace and Quentin, he says,
“Ha!” or, “Mr Wallace. Happy days!” But
also, he’s seething. He lists the times that
‘IF THE ARMY COULDN’T
GET PEOPLE OUT,’
HE ARGUES, ‘HOW
THE HELL COULD I?’
Pen Farthing and RagnarJUDE EDGINTON