Animal rescuer Pen Farthing, who has been accused of putting pets before people, has vowed his new film will tell the true story behind the evacuation of Kabul in Afghanistan.
Operation Ark tells Farthing’s account of evacuating rescued cats and dogs from the country during the Taliban capture of Kabul in 2021.
The non-profit charity Nowzad, which Farthing had founded ten years earlier during his deployment in Afghanistan, cared for strays, military dogs and animal victims of war.
During the evacuation, rescuers had just days to save the animals and the charity’s staff, raising £1 million in private donations to put them on one of the final flights.
The mission sparked major controversy after some workers were left behind at the airport amid devastating scenes of despair and stampede.
Pen and Hannah Farthing with two rescued dogs from the charity Nowzad
A photo taken on August 15, 2021 shows the interior of Reach 871, a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III that flew from Kabul to Qatar.
The animal rescuer was accused of putting “pets above people” and leaving them at the mercy of the Taliban.
Among Farthing’s critics was Tom Tugendhat, the Tory MP and Afghanistan veteran who chaired the Foreign Affairs Committee at the time. He said: “We’ve just used a lot of troops to get 200 dogs out, while my interpreter’s family are probably going to be killed.”
After the 2021 evacuation, a whistleblower claimed that soldiers were put at risk by the decision to evacuate the animals
Raphael Marshall told MPs he agreed with the military that it was wrong to give priority to Farthing’s charity while leaving translators to their fate.
Mr Farthing said he had been subjected to abuse and death threats despite using funding to rescue 67 people.
Now he has sold the film rights to his book “Operation Ark” to Clear Pictures Entertainment.
Mr Farthing said the film, which features hundreds of dogs and cats alongside major actors, would tell the truth about what happened.
The animal rescuer told The Telegraph: “This story needs to be told. Pets have never come before people.”
Operation Ark will tell Farthing’s account of evacuating rescued cats and dogs from the country during the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021
“During the evacuation of Kabul in August 2021, I never hesitated to evacuate my Afghan staff and their families when the West abandoned Afghanistan.
“Thanks to the generosity of thousands of Nowzad charity supporters, we were able to raise the funds needed to charter our own plane, where our people could sit in the passenger cabin and our animals could travel in the cargo hold.”
One of the film’s producers, Elizabeth Fowler, said people should make up their own minds about what happened.
The screenplay was co-written by Joshua Michael Stern and Travis Lively.
A year after escaping the horrific chaos of Kabul, Farthing said he was one nudge away from giving up completely. “I was so desperate I didn’t know how to live with it,” he told the Mail.
