In a single tumultuous month, the futures of #Afghanistan and its nearly 40 million people have undergone a stunning upheaval. Twenty years of international intervention has been overturned and the #Taliban movement ousted in 2001 is firmly back in charge.

In the second week of August, the Telegraph was in the Afghan capital, Kabul, making a documentary on what people expected from a Taliban takeover. We wanted to ask Afghans what they had experienced last time the Taliban were in power and what they thought would happen if they returned.

Even at that time, such questions still seemed speculative. During the filming from August 7 to August 11, the news from much of the country was bleak, but the Taliban had not taken any of the country's large cities. Everyone we spoke to predicted government forces would consolidate and put up a stiff resistance in places like Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Kandahar and Kabul. It was this heavy fighting that most people were worried about. There was little talk of evacuation.

Instead, those cities quickly toppled in a cascade. Herat and Kandahar fell on August 12 and the Taliban walked into Kabul unopposed on the evening of August 15, as the president, Ashraf Ghani, fled.

Overnight the lives of our interview subjects had changed. We had unwittingly captured their thoughts in the last few days of the Western-backed government and at the cusp of the Taliban takeover. The predictions they had made only days earlier would now be put to the test. 

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