Continuing our series looking behind the headlines of 2021, the former Royal Marine on his perilous evacuation of hundreds of dogs and cats during the fall of Kabul – and how he answers the sceptics

• See the Observer’s faces of 2021 in full

From his home in Exeter, Paul “Pen” Farthing reruns the events of late summer through his mind. The former Royal Marine, who 15 years ago established the Nowzad charity in Kabul to care for animals suffering the fallout of war, still cannot believe that America “would just throw Afghanistan to the wolves”. When the retreat began in August, he realised “things were going south very, very quickly. We’d got young female staff who had trained as vets, who feared they would be married off to Taliban fighters. Their faces were just horrible to see…”

At the time, the Nowzad animal refuge employed 24 Afghan staff. Since Farthing first adopted his own street dog in 2006 while stationed in Helmand, Nowzad had reunited 1,600 soldiers back home with animals they cared for on active service, while establishing a pioneering veterinarian practice and neutering programme. Farthing had been living at the compound since the beginning of the pandemic. Given the charity’s symbolic and practical mission, with Kabul about to fall, it was clear that he had to get both his team and the animals out of harm’s way.