From its website, it looks like a standard modernist hotel: a luxury property, it has 200 rooms and is just a 15-minute drive from the international airport. There’s an impressive buffet touted for breakfast, and a geometric outdoor pool—but without any loungers around it. That’s the first tip-off this is no ordinary hotel, but rather the Intercontinental Kabul. Opened by the international hotel chain in 1969, it retains the name despite now being locally operated. The hotel sits on a hill overlooking Kabul, Afghanistan’s mountainous capital, which has been under Taliban rule since 2021.
“The booking site won’t tell you that there’s no music and you won’t be allowed to dance and that the Taliban are running the hotel,” said Lyse Doucet, the BBC correspondent and veteran guest, on a January 2026 episode of the podcast Dan Snow’s History Hit. She dubbed this property as somewhere that “history and hospitality meet.” History there is evident in the building itself. “You’ll see the bullet holes in the marble floor of the restaurant where Taliban suicide bombers attacked,” she added. Still today, the hotel remains open, touting its status as the finest place to stay in that war-ravaged capital.
Doucet made the property, sitting on a hill overlooking Kabul, the central character of her recent nonfiction book: The Finest Hotel in Kabul (Penguin Random House, 2025) recounts the roiling history of Afghanistan, a country she has visited regularly for four decades. “Whoever ruled in Afghanistan set the rules at the Intercon,” Doucet said on the podcast, likening its rows of balconies to 200 eyes watching over the city. It’s a clever, telling conceit, one that uses a hotel as both a symbol and a narrative device. Hotels have a history of playing an outsize role in times of conflict, serving as refuges, instruments of political power, and witnesses to history. And Doucet isn’t the only writer to recognize their storytelling potential.
Opened in 1969, the Intercontinental Kabul has weathered decades of conflict and political upheaval in Afghanistan, remaining in operation long after the international hotel chain relinquished control.
Photo by Collab Media/Shutterstock
Author Jane Rogoyska’s latest nonfiction book, focusing on Paris in World War II, Hotel Exile (W. W. Norton, 2025), uses the Hotel Lutetia (now operated by Mandarin Oriental) in much the same way. In Rogoyska’s narrative, it’s a backdrop to the stories of those living under German occupation from 1940 when the hotel was commandeered by the Abwehr, or Nazi intelligence service.
Elsewhere, hotels have become symbols of conflict and survival. Kigali’s Hôtel des Mille Collines, where people sought shelter during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, inspired the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda. Picture the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, too, and you’ll likely imagine the Continental Palace hotel, that bastion of calm amid the chaos. Meanwhile, in the Balkans, the Sarajevo Holiday Inn weathered shelling to shelter journalists during the four-year Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, becoming a symbol of survival. Today, its distinctive yellow building still welcomes guests, though it now operates as the Hotel Holiday.
How hotels became instruments of political power
Doucet noted that many chain hotels were initially established as expressions of capitalist imperialism: Hilton and other American hoteliers exported their mindset, as well as their people, to far-flung places, extending the country’s soft power. Pan Am’s founder, Juan Trippe, was no different with his chain of Intercontinental hotels, which he started in Brazil in 1949. “He wasn’t just sending travelers on their way. He was also trying to spread American clout and American power in the Cold War,” Doucet said.
Afghanistan was in the cross-hairs of that chilly conflict, so where better to establish another foothold? Ten years after the Intercontinental Kabul opened, the Soviets were readying to take over the country via the assassination of President Hafizullah Amin. How, then, did they distract the rest of his political party during the killing? According to Doucet, with a vodka-fueled bash at the Intercontinental that left his political allies too drunk to come to his aid. The hotel was soon part of the Soviet presence. And when the mujahideen took over the city in spring 1992, they requisitioned the hotel as a demonstration of their newfound strength. By then, the Intercontinental chain had long since relinquished operations, but the hotel still bore that all-American name. Rocket launchers appeared by the pool. “That’s when the hotel itself became drawn into the civil war,” Doucet recalled. “It didn’t shut its doors. It still kept carrying on.”
“There’s a sense of equality and solidarity among people sharing the same liminal threshold—two people who might not cross paths in their everyday life, but share the same stairwell or lobby.”
Now operated by Mandarin Oriental, Paris’s Hôtel Lutetia has undergone extensive renovations while retaining its historic art nouveau and art deco character.
Photos by EQRoy/Shutterstock
Why hotels matter so much in times of conflict
Why, though, do hotels take on such symbolic importance during conflict, whether in Rwanda, France, or Afghanistan? Amanda Belarmino, an associate professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s hospitality school, points out that controlling hotels has long been a prime urge for those consolidating power in such moments—see, for example, Fidel Castro’s seizure of the luxury properties scattered across Cuba when his revolution succeeded. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cuba’s East German–trained Ministry of the Interior designated certain hotels and rooms for American visitors, equipping them with surveillance devices to monitor their private conversations, according to the University of Florida’s Cuban Studies program. It’s what Belarmino called a “soft war of hospitality.”
Regimes want to run hotels because they act as a secondary immigration service: Once someone is admitted to a country, one way to track their movements in situ is to be in charge of wherever they’re sleeping. “It gives a wealth of knowledge they wouldn’t have if they weren’t controlling those properties: who’s in your country, where they’re from, and what they’re there to do,” Belarmino said.
Belarmino also noted that hotels have long been associated with political power. Consider the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., where, according to a popular but disputed story, the term lobbyist originated with men seeking to influence politicians who frequented the property.
Hotels are also places of safety, with the very word hotel derived from the same roots as the word hospital. Come here, they implicitly promise, and you’ll be cared for. “They’re a neutral ground, a safe environment for people from different backgrounds to meet and intermingle, a welcoming space that brings people together.”
At times, that promise of refuge has taken on extraordinary significance. “Hotels are safe spaces, always open, so at 2 a.m., you have a place to go,” Belarmino said. We feel especially vulnerable in hotels, she continues: we’re sleeping, washing, performing intimate rituals. No wonder then, that the damage to two of Dubai’s best known luxury hotels was so shocking, when Iran retaliated across the Gulf for U.S. and Israeli strikes in late February 2026. Debris from an intercepted drone sparked a fire at the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab, while another drone struck outside Fairmont the Palm. “Hotels are neutral ground, so that’s why there was so much outrage about it,” she said.
Why hotels offer comfort in times of crisis
Katie Blake, a social and cultural psychologist who earned a PhD from the University of Houston, agreed that the perception of hotels as spaces apart from the world around them helps explain their symbolic power. Hotels, she continued, are the ultimate liminal spaces, neither entirely here nor there. As a result, they’re places where it’s easier to establish communitas, that term for a fleeting, but deeply cohesive, social unity. “There’s a sense of equality and solidarity among people sharing the same liminal threshold—two people who might not cross paths in their everyday life, but share the same stairwell or lobby,” she said.
Hotels that endure amid conflict and chaos, as so many have done, from Vietnam’s Continental Palace to the Intercontinental in Kabul, offer reassuring routines. Blake pointed to terror management theory, which explores how awareness of our mortality influences human behavior. Put another way, we seek coping mechanisms when life feels fragile. “When everything outside is threatening, the rituals of hospitality—turning down the bed, drinks served by bow-tied waiters—create a sense of normalcy and controlling the narrative.” No wonder the Intercontinental Kabul’s website aims to be as conventional as possible, echoing a hotel in a far less fraught setting. Despite—or perhaps even because of—those bullet holes in the marble, the Intercontinental still lays claim to being the finest hotel in Kabul.
