Lashkargah had been under pressure long before July 2021. The Taliban had attacked the city in October 2020, and although the provincial governor declared that assault repulsed, clashes persisted around the outskirts through the spring of 2021. By early June, nearly 700 attacks had been launched against Afghan positions in and around the city in just three weeks. Districts 10 and 3 briefly fell before being recaptured. But the deeper rot was invisible from the outside. In the weeks before the final assault, local police forces had largely deserted their posts across Helmand. The defense of the province's capital fell to ill-equipped border soldiers whose loyalty ran not to the central government in Kabul but to their commanding officer, Captain Ezzatullah Tofan. They fought because he asked them to -- a fragile basis for defending a city.

On July 29, the Taliban attacked Lashkargah from multiple directions simultaneously. Fighting erupted in the first and seventh districts while government forces clung to the ninth. Reinforcements arrived on July 31, but the battle had already become a siege of key government buildings -- the governor's residence, police headquarters, the National Directorate of Security headquarters, and the city prison. On August 2, the Taliban captured the government television station. By then, only a single district of Lashkargah remained under government control, and across all of Helmand Province, only remote Kajaki District held out. The government deployed commandos and launched clearance operations on August 4, supported by American airstrikes that pounded Taliban positions. But the Taliban kept pressing toward the police headquarters, the chokepoint that controlled the center of the city.

A suicide car bomb on August 11 tore into the police headquarters compound, and by August 12 the building had fallen. Government forces retreated the short distance to the governor's residence, their last foothold. That night, the remaining defenders faced a choice that had become familiar across Afghanistan that summer: flee or surrender. Some were evacuated by helicopter to Camp Shorabak, the former Camp Bastion that British and American forces had once used as their main operating base in Helmand. Others laid down their weapons. By the morning of August 13, the Taliban controlled all of Lashkargah. The city fell just one day before Kandahar and Herat -- Afghanistan's second and third largest cities -- and only two days before Kabul itself.

Between July 9 and August 10, the United Nations documented 183 civilians killed and 1,181 injured across the simultaneous battles raging in Lashkargah, Kandahar, Herat, and Kunduz. In Lashkargah alone, 40 civilians died on a single day -- August 3 -- as airstrikes and ground fighting turned residential neighborhoods into battlefields. Bodies lay in streets where residents were too afraid to retrieve them, according to the BBC. The Afghan government had ordered civilians to evacuate, but for many there was nowhere to go and no safe way to get there. The fall of Helmand's capital gave the Taliban control of the province's lucrative poppy cultivation, a source of revenue that had sustained the insurgency for two decades. For the people of Lashkargah, the end of the fighting brought a different kind of silence -- the uncertain quiet of a city that had changed hands, with no clear sense of what would come next.