The Final MIssion - 9781966302254

Both a moral reckoning and a real-life thriller, The Final Mission is the untold story of three Afghani-American brothers who defied Taliban terror and overcame impossible odds to rescue America’s abandoned wartime allies, reclaiming honor where their nation failed.

When the United States abruptly withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, abandoning more than 220,000 Afghan allies to Taliban reprisals and death squads, it was three unlikely heroes, brothers from Omaha, Nebraska, who took on what their State Department could, or would, not achieve: they set out to retrieve every Afghani wartime ally left behind.

Safi Rauf, a 27-year-old Navy veteran, along with older brothers Anees and Zabih, were Afghani-Americans from Omaha, but also the aristocratic descendants of the Logar province, the largest tribal network in Afghanistan. Horrified at the abandonment of U.S. allies and the certain torture and death awaiting them and their families at the hand of the Taliban, the Rauf brothers launched Human First. Their ingenious rescue campaign organized a complex web of Afghani cousins running clandestine escape missions and reporting insider Taliban intel, risking their lives to secure planes out of Kabul. Through negotiations with top Taliban officials, the bold rescue of Biden’s Afghani interpreter, the 105-day imprisonment and torture of Safi and Anees, and more, the brothers refused to give up.

Kix’s investigative reporting meticulously details the most shocking, thrilling, and intimate moments of the Raufs’ Final Mission. At once a devastating moral reckoning and a tale of epic human triumph, The Final Mission is the ultimate examination America’s failure to atone for its longest war, and the unflappable persistence, genius, and courage of the brothers who, against all odds, were willing to try to make it right.