A year ago, 13 service members and more than 100 Afghans died when a bomb exploded at the Kabul Airport. New details have emerged about how the Marines took it on themselves to rescue as many people as possible, including a group of young Afghan skateboard instructors.
In the days leading up to the explosion, hundreds of Afghans crowded the Abbey Gate at the airport
in Kabul. It was the last route into the airport that remained open for Afghans desperate for a way out as the Taliban took over the city. The Afghans were forced into a canal as they pressed to get inside.
“It smells of desperation. It's dirty sewage runoff and it's just filthy and they're just trying to get out,” said Capt. Andres Rodriguez, who was part of security at the gate.
Scores of Marines — including the Second Battalion 1 Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton — had been rushed in from Jordan, just days before the Americans were scheduled to leave Afghanistan after 20 years. As the crowds continued to build, several units decided to help Afghans through the process that would get them on board the last flights leaving Kabul.
A year later, Rodriquez was packing up his home in San Clemente as he transitioned out of the Marine Corps, leaving for a job in Arizona.
“It just devolved quickly where it's like, well, if no one else is going to do it, the Marines of two one are going to do it,” Rodriquez said. “They're just going to screen. They're going to help people, they're going to provide aid. They're going to do everything that they're being asked of.”
Back in the U.S. in August 2021, Marine veteran Jeff Phaneuf was getting calls and texts from Rodriquez and other Marines he knew at Abbey Gate. They asked his help locating paperwork for people outside the airport. On August 23, 2021, Phaneuf tweeted out some advice for people trying to get into the airport. After that, his phone started ringing.
“I found myself having to ask again and again those Marines,” he said. “Hey you can go out into the crowd and try and find so-and-so, I was fielding requests from everyone from — you know —local Afghans, whose husband or wife was trying to get through the crowd. To colonels at the Pentagon who somehow got my phone number.”
A year later, Phaneuf worked full time for No One Left Behind Foundation, which helps former Afghan translators and others who qualify for Special Immigration Visas. One of the first calls he received last year was from Cori Shepherd Stern, a film producer from San Diego.
“I was like crying, texting, you know, begging the girls to stay at the gate that I would — we would figure it out. We would get them through,” Shepherd Stern said.
In the days before the Abbey Gate bombing, Shepherd Stern began searching how to get a group of Afghans out, who had been educating young girls there, using skateboarding.
The group, which is known throughout the world, is called Skateistan and was founded by Australian skateboarder Oliver Percovich in Afghanistan. Though the program began with teaching skateboarding to the youth in Kabul, it evolved into a way to help with their education. This was especially important for young girls.
The women gained global fame after being featured in an Oscar winning short film “Learning To Skateboard In A Warzone (If you’re a girl)” about the program in Afghanistan. Shepherd Stern wasn’t involved in that film but she had developed a relationship with the organizers after she helped one of their group get into a US college program.
After Kabul fell to the Taliban in mid August, many of the Afghan organizers felt it was time for their own families to leave, including Zainab Hussaini, who is now living in the US.
“When I was at work I heard the Taliban had entered the city, and everything just changed, and me and my husband decided to leave the country,” Hussaini said.
Zainab is speaking publicly for the first time about the group’s experience then. She made it through the airport gate once, but was turned back, when there was no room on an Australian flight. The next day, she took a red umbrella — a signal for the Marines to spot her in the crowd.
“Whoever entered the airport was safe. It was under control of the US government. And it was like guaranteeing your life,” Hussaini said.
Back in the U.S., Shepherd Stern and Phaneuf were each celebrating getting one last group into the airport, when news broke on the carnage at the Abbey Gate. In the end, 164 people involved in Skateistan were able to get out of Afghanistan, according to the group.
“And then, when the bomb went off at Abbey Gate,” Shepherd Stern said. “And just this terrible — you could feel this like empty, echoing canyon of void, just of, everyone terrified about what it meant for the people that had just helped us do this incredible thing.”
That evening, Alicia Lopez, the mother of Cpl. Hunter Lopez, was coming back to their home in Indio, Calif., when she saw two Marines in a white truck.
“I pulled into my driveway and they asked if I was Hunter’s mom,” she said.
Herman and Alicia Lopez both work for the Riverside County Sheriff's Police. In the last year, their home has become a shrine to their 22-year-old son, who was one of the Marines killed in the bombing. Alicia runs a small foundation setup in Hunter's name. They’re still trying to understand what happened to their son that day.
"Hunter and some of his brothers and sisters were able to do great acts in their last few minutes on this Earth, so it provides some sense of comfort and solace,” Herman Lopez said. “But you, of course, wish that they were here with you.”
Strangers sent artwork, including a painting of Hunter carrying a child, made from pictures they found on Hunter's social media. Hunter told his parents some of what he saw.
“I know he understood the seriousness of what was going on, the despair and the hearts and the minds of a lot of the people that were trying to get out and get their families out,” Herman Lopez said.
