Afghanistan: Rare Footage of an Endless War D

I’m a war photographer. My name is David Pratt. I’ve covered conflicts in Iraq and Syria and the fight against Islamic State. I’ve been on the sharp end in Libya, Congo, Haiti, Central America, Somalia, you name it. But there’s one place that means the most to me. Over there, those mountains. That’s Afghanistan.

I cut my teeth here as a reporter in the 1980s. I saw the horror of civil war in the 90s and the Taliban rising out of the ashes. And I came here after 9-11 when the Americans came looking for revenge. This is a dangerous place. Always has been. I’ve had some of the best experiences of my life here. For going on four decades, I’ve tried to explain what’s happening here in words and pictures.

And I want to show you why Afghanistan and its people matter so much to me. Dennis, how are you? We’re not too bad, I’m literally just packing to head off to Afghanistan in about a couple of hours time. Just makes it a little bit less… The Afghan flag is what? Black, green and red. Inside here are prints, huge A1 size black and white prints from places in Kabul.

Areas like Kabul Zoo which was a front line. I want to go back to these precise locations that are in these images to see just how things have changed there. You want to bring attention to parts of the world. You want to see wrongs put right or whatever, but you can’t do that. You can’t set out to do that as a journalist.

You can only rapport. I think there is an element of… Adventurism, of adrenaline, war junkie-ism you hear about. There is a degree of that. You need your fix occasionally. I get itchy feet. I get, you know, sort of difficult if I’ve been away from it for too long. In 1979 the Soviets sent the Red Army to support the communist government here.

The people of Afghanistan didn’t take too kindly to this. They began to fight back via groups of guerrillas that became collectively known as the Mujahideen or Holy Warriors. The most important thing to understand about Afghans is that they don’t like foreigners in their country. They take a dislike to other people telling them what to do.

And that immediately, I think, struck a chord with a kind of rebellious lefty streak in me, in a way. You know, who is this big person wagging their finger, or this nation wagging their finger, in telling me how I should be running my business? It was possible to fly into Kabul, but you would have been going into a Kabul controlled by the Soviets.

I flew to Pakistan to push over the Khyber Pass on the northwest frontier. All the resistance parties, all the Mujahideen leaders and the guerrilla groups were all based in the northwest frontier. That was our headquarters. And from there they would ferry over the border on the jihad trails as they were known.

It was a place of intrigue. Everything was dodgy and it was full of mercenaries, spies, guerrillas, smugglers. There were Afghan intelligence, KHAD, there were KGB people there, there were CIA, there was MI6. I mean, it was just that kind of adventurous place. It was everything. That as a boy growing up and reading my boy’s own comics, Peshawar was it.

This was the place. It took me weeks and weeks. to make that initial contact. I was introduced to a Mujahideen commander, Commander Saeed Anmari, who headed… A party called Harakati Islam, it was a Shia group. And that was the beginning of a very, very long relationship with his party and a friendship with Anne-Marie himself.

And he enabled that initial illegal border crossing. Anne-Marie was an incredible presence, a great leader, a guerrilla commander. And in a way, he took me under his wing, looked after me. Organised for me to accompany himself and his men over the border. And in a way we became quite close during those escapades in the war.

I miss him. I stayed with him a few nights, slept on the roof of their base in Peshawar. Then he moved me to a safe house in the tribal area. You had to go in and out of disguise. I had grown a beard, I was wearing shawar kameez. At one point we had to traverse this minefield. There was a lot of butterfly mines and stuff like that.

And I remember being very nervous. There was watchtowers and looking ahead and thinking, you know, at what point are we physically into Afghanistan? And I stopped and looked at the ground and said to this guy, I pointed at the ground and said, you know, Pakistan? And he just smiled and looked at me and went, no, Afghanistan.

Hello It’s been a long day. And we’re 5,000 miles from home, but I want to stretch my legs before sunset. We’ve headed up to the old citadel. These days it lies empty,

protected by the Afghan army. So right here, the heart of the old fort in Kabul, a very, very famous landmark, and in a way something that represents, I think, you know, much of Afghanistan’s history in a lot of ways, you know, a place of war and conflict that goes back centuries. centuries, obviously when the British were here, this high vantage point looking across these phenomenal vistas across Kabul itself.

It’s a little bit eerie at this time of night with the sun going down and the wind whistling through it, but a strange, strange place and it reverberates. It just oozes the history, I think, of Afghanistan itself. The first trips in Afghanistan were really, I suppose, my first exposure to proper combat. I was fascinated by resistance groups, by guerrilla warfare, by underdogs, whether they be right or wrong politically, taking on bigger forces.

That was part of my intrigue. And the idea of the Afghan resistance taking on the might of the Soviet Union at that time intrigued me. The Soviet outpost at Tamir. Surrounded by the Mujahideen, the Soviet garrison in Tamir has to be supplied by helicopter. The Mujahideen open fire. It was really important to try and understand why they were fighting against the Soviets.

What was the basis of their resistance? It’s so easy with hindsight and today’s… sort of generation looking at that period to see Afghans and those fighters as being Islamists, really an early version of the Taliban. Indeed, some of them went on to join the Taliban, but really they just wanted the Russians out.

They’re not people that are easily subdued, you know, and in a way they’ve never really militarily been defeated. The whole object of the Mujahid was to avoid contact until they were in their operational theatre. where they were looking. …in the village or valley. And then they would engage in direct combat with the Russians.

But it was a guerrilla war. Any operations tended to be carefully planned and mounted, attacking convoys. The direct combat tended to be fierce and brief and ambush-like. The marches could last anywhere between, you know… 10, 14 hours, 16 hour marches through the Hindu Kush. It was exhausting. And even though I regarded myself as incredibly fit, it was so difficult to keep up with these people.

They’re as hard as nails, and many of them are mountain people. So for them it was a jaunt. The bottom line was when you crossed the border into Afghanistan, there was no backup. Most of the time they didn’t even know where you were. You obviously had to travel as lightly as possible. You were dressed the way they were dressed.

You ate what they ate. You drank the water that they drank. If anything happened, you got sick, wounded. You couldn’t make it. You were on your own. It was up to the Mudge to get you out, if indeed they wanted to do so. The whole aspect of sleeping out and living in the mountains and whatever, it came as a real shock to me once when I was pointed to a dunny in this village.

And it wasn’t until I got there and… And did the needy suddenly realize there is no such thing as loo paper? It wasn’t until I spoke to one of the Afghans afterwards and said, what do you do about that? And he said, well, you just use the stones that are lying around. Anybody who wipes their backside with stones, that’s got to be a tough people to defeat.

On very few occasions when I crossed the border did I have a story in mind. In a way I saw it as a kind of, or more as a personal project to be honest. It was almost like a long-term documentary project rather than a more immediate journalistic editorial assignment. And that in itself I think was sufficiently intriguing for most editors because there were so few people doing it and anything coming out of The guerrilla areas in Afghanistan with the Mujahideen was valuable to newspapers so they didn’t really lay down editorial lines in that way which gave you fantastic latitude as a photographer to just document the lives of these fighters and indeed the communities and villages that you maybe occasionally pass through. In terms of the equipment, I didn’t have a mobile phone. It was like something out of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. You know, you might as well have been filing with cleft sticks. You know, runners would literally take your film,

and again, pre-digital. It wasn’t shot in digital, it was for rolls of film. It would be hundreds of rolls of film that you would go in and shoot over weeks, months, and be brought out and processed. It was terrifying towards the end of a two-month stint to have all these exposed rolls of film and the idea that you’d risked your life and you could lose this film.

We’re keeping a low profile, staying in a safe compound. I’m not here for long but there’s lots to do. I want to take fresh pictures. I have some writing to do for the newspapers back home. But there are a lot of memories crowding in too. It’s good to be back. Well, for breakfast this morning, I had some wonderful freshly baked naan bread, which is always wonderful here in Afghanistan.

The first morning back in Kabul, and gorgeous, it is blue sky, and the gardens around us, full bloom, flowers, fruit trees. You would never know you were in the midst of a troubled city like Kabul right now apart from the occasional sound of a Black Hawk or a Chinook helicopter or a military helicopter overhead.

Kabul, particularly the city here, can be very, very tense and has been very tense over the last weeks. There’s a big presidential election looming and the Americans are on the cusp of drawing down troops. Getting beneath the surface of the country and society here is vital. It’s important to meet ordinary Afghans, but you’ve got to watch your step.

This is a dangerous place for Westerners. The danger just lurks around. If you’re out and about on the street, you don’t know who’s an ordinary Afghan and who might be Taliban. So you’re always conscious of that. Security here is incredibly tight. There are blast walls and checkpoints everywhere. There’s a continual sense of menace and frequent deadly bombings and shootings.

The Taliban remain undefeated. In fact, they control over half the country. 40 years of war here now, and as always, it’s the ordinary people who suffer. Step by step, more territory is coming under the control of the Taliban. Only in the last few hours there’s been yet another bomb attack in Kabul. They have captured the hospital.

A war where no one feels safe. The Afghan government wants to show it’s in control, but I want to get a perspective from the other side. The Taliban do offer interviews from time to time, mostly by phone, and there are ways of reaching them. We’ve put out a request and we’ll see if they want to talk. The dead soldiers’ identity papers.

Three of them are young men from the Islamic part of the Soviet Union. 20-year-olds sent to fight their fellow Muslims in Afghanistan. The young men lie silent. Only the photographs they carry now show that they were once members of the Soviet Army of Occupation. This is the Russian Centre for Science and Culture.

This man runs it. His name is Vyacheslav Nekrasov and he was here in the 1980s as an intelligence officer for the Red Army. Welcome to the Russian Culture Centre. The Russian cultural center that I don’t recognize. Why? Well, the last time I saw it, it was a war room. Yes, it was destroyed completely. When I was here in the 90s, during the fighting between the rival factions here, this was a front line right through the middle of this area.

Yeah. And this is Jamiat. Exactly here. Exactly here. Jamiat is one. Hizb ut-Wahtat. Yes. Shooting, bombing each other. Don’t forget about Hekmatyar. And Hekpatiar of course, there were many, many groups here, absolutely. Given this tortured history, 40 years now or more of war, what do you make of the situation now? 40 years of war and more and more problems.

One of the main problems is how to have peace conversation with each other. So I’m so curious to see the museum. Yes, let’s go. So next building is here. Yes, let’s go to our museum. Please let me. A lot of memorabilia here. You can put it on there. Goodness me. Is it comfortable? Not especially, it seems a bit wobbly.

It’s like some sort of British First World War helmet. It would keep your hair from stung. Well, given that I don’t have any hair, it would have protected me from the sun at least. It’s me. It’s me. You haven’t changed a bit. It’s the moustache that’s the giveaway, you know? Have you always had it? Just look at you.

It’s almost 40 years ago. It’s amazing to be here, considering Vyacheslav was an intelligence officer during the conflict. And if we’d met back then, he’d have had me arrested as a spy. I brought back with me to Kaval on this trip some photographs that I took here in the city. And… Oh, Soviet home of science and culture.

Precisely where we’re sitting right now, but in the 1990s, and completely unrecognizable. It’s Soviet machine gun. I know, I know, I know. This, when you watch this picture, of course you remember. Make me more peaceful. Me too. Okay, good. With regards to the Russians at the end, there are two schools of thought. One is that they were never really defeated and that they left in relatively good order.

But the Mujahideen regard it as a victory. Some historians call it Russia’s Vietnam. And indeed there are parallels with the Americans and the Taliban today. I was never away from Afghanistan for any substantial period of time. I was going back and forth constantly. The newsworthiness obviously shifted somewhat after the Soviet withdrawal.

And as we entered obviously into the 90s and other Middle Eastern wars that were going on, the Balkans and former Yugoslavia was brewing up quite badly and my attention was drawn there. But there was always that… Sustained return to Afghanistan, which took us into the most horrendous period that I spent in Afghanistan, which was really the 1990s. It’s often referred to as the Civil War period in Afghanistan.

We’re talking about urban warfare here, between factions and militias within the city, which was really destructive. More destruction in Kabul then than there was during the Soviet era. And you were being shelled constantly. I mean, you would be sleeping there and, you know, parts of the roof would be coming in and, you know, mortar rounds would be landing.

I still had a relationship with Anne-Marie’s men at the time, but I didn’t see much of Anne-Marie himself. And I lived with them in the bus station. When I say bus station, it was really just a heap of rubble with holes in the wall. We were fighting virtually room to room. I remember, you know, parts of the city, dogs roaming the streets, feeding on corpses and cadavers.

I mean, there was fears of rabies. There were, you know, demonstrations and riots when UN food convoys got through. I photographed them many times with people crowding and fighting for food, flour and supplies. And to some extent, that’s how the Taliban came to power. Because people got sick and tired of these, the struggle for power by these, what they now deemed to be warlords, as opposed to the great heroes that had fought against the Soviets.

And the terrible thing about it was the fact that the West’s attention had moved on. They weren’t interested in the fact that there was a humanitarian catastrophe. And civil war going on in Afghanistan. The Afghans had served their purpose. They’d helped them give the communists a bloody nose. They’d helped them defeat the Soviets.

Fine. Game over. Let them get on with it. And that’s why we are where we are today in Afghanistan. This is the Mahmoud Khan district and in the 1990s this was really a very dangerous place. Not far from here is the central bus station which effectively was a front line between the factional forces, those belonging to General Dostam and those belonging to Jamiat Islami and Harakat Islami.

It was extremely dangerous moving around here and you know there are still traces of the buildings and the rubble, most of it’s been redeveloped now but this was a supremely dangerous place in the 1980s. Relax, relax, no problem. Mickey goes, okay. Let’s go. One quarter quarter. It’s tricky to film here because this is regarded as a sort of sensitive area.

There’s a lot of checkpoints and a lot of military around here so we have to be very careful. So in a way there’s still a little bit of a threat here right now but nothing like what it was back in the 1990s. I remember in the Puli Mahmud Khan bus station and we were, it was really fierce fighting and we came under this very sustained mortar bombardment and the guys I was with, the Afghan group that I was with It was with broke ranks and we started to retreat.

It wasn’t so much a retreat as just fleeing, you know, because they were going to be overrun. Then the bombardment was so heavy. And I too joined them in running backwards. And, you know, the rounds were landing all around us. People were going into the air, pieces of them coming off, body parts everywhere. And I remember at one point…

Kind of getting behind a wall and there was a guy, an Afghan, who’d been wounded there lying against the wall. And his leg had been blown off below the knee. And there was like a kind of string of tendon, he was bleeding out a string of tendon. And he put his hand out, he actually reached his hand out to me, you know, obviously in a gesture of, help me here.

And I didn’t, I didn’t. Because the shells started landing in again and I got to my feet along with the others and we ran and we left them there. And you know, there is a kind of guilt about that. These moments in war are like, this is it, you know, it’s… You’re going to die here if you don’t do something. And you know, these are decisions you have to make at that time.

They’re kind of indelible images, you know. The pictures you take through the viewfinder are one thing. The pictures that log themselves in the frame here are something else entirely, really, you know. I see everything in geometrical terms and compositional terms. Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer.

Not just the greatest photographer I think that’s ever lived, he’s probably one of the greatest visual artists that’s ever lived. I mean, geometry was everything to Cartier-Bresson, and the aesthetic of Cartier-Bresson was something that very much chimed with my own visual aesthetic, both when I was a painter and sculptor and when I became more and more involved in photography.

There was a kind of peeling down, a minimalism, a tight geometry, but it was also very human. The best way of relaying the human or the emotive aspect of what you’re seeing, whether it be someone on the ground wounded, someone dead, violence, is to stop, pause that nanosecond and get the composition right. Maybe the best way for me to illustrate it is by giving the example of another photographer, the great magnum photographer George Roger.

A man made hell upon earth. A city of the living dead. When he entered the Nazi concentration camp and encountered the horrors of these places and these heaps of corpses, he looked through the viewfinder and composed it the best he could to work as a visual image. In a way, the horrors of what was in front of him were secondary to getting the composition right.

And I think it was very telling that he said if he didn’t get the composition right, it wouldn’t give the full impact to the actual subject matter and what he was witnessing. Some of the worst fighting in the 1990s took place in and around Canada. This place was pulverised. Some of the animals went mad from the shelling.

Now it’s like a zoo anywhere. I haven’t been here since the mid-1990s and my goodness what a transformation. I walk through the door and a young man comes up to me and says, welcome, 17 years old, he wasn’t even born when the last time I was here and this place was completely destroyed. I remember coming through this bombed out entrance here in 1995 and the building here just ahead of it was completely destroyed.

There was a tank to the right hand side which had been destroyed in the fighting. There was a lot of gunfire going on. These areas were just decimated. They became like kind of mini Stalingrads if you see what I mean. People were fighting in the rubble. But it’s this particular scene here that really strikes me because…

I remember walking through the door distinctly and it was very very scary. Despite that there were still the animals in the cages here and people wandering around so a remarkable, remarkable entrance. The country was torn apart by the warlords and their factions. During that period in the late 90s, I travelled widely in the country.

There was a huge refugee problem. Ordinary people fled as best they could. The lucky ones were able to reach camps in Pakistan, but some of the most vulnerable were left to their own devices. We think we’ve located what was once and may still be Marastun, which is an asylum. It was a place in the 1990s which, at the height of the fighting, the staff were forced to abandon it.

The patients were here left alone because the fighting was all around this area. There was shelling, there was shooting, and I visited this place to cover a story. It looks as though there’s both an orphanage and a women’s asylum here. In some ways that’s not dissimilar to the way it was in the 1990s because it wasn’t just Maristoon or mental asylum then but also a place where people with disabilities, blinds, deaf people would be brought here.

I mean many, many people were brought here with disabilities so it wasn’t just for those with mentally disabled. There were many different kinds of patients here. Hey, what’s up? What’s up? What’s up? I covered the second phase of the Civil War in the late 90s. The country seemed hopelessly mired in fighting.

It was a real deadlock. And just when it seemed things couldn’t possibly get any worse, a new enemy arrived on the scene, calling themselves the Taliban. It’s quite surprising given that they attacked yesterday to attack two days in a row is pretty brazen on behalf of the Taliban. Obviously they’re getting a reception committee, that sounds like a bomb.

These are pretty close at the moment, there’s no question about it. Given we’re outside the team we must be a cloud of dust at least from the evening. OK, ready? Yep. Talk to many Afghans here in the capital, Kabul, and they will tell you that in shaping Afghanistan’s political future, the Taliban simply cannot be ignored.

But while the Islamist group continue their battlefield campaign, they are also engaged in high-level talks with the Americans in the Gulf state of Qatar, and appear to be positioning themselves as a credible force for future governance. But is this simply the old Taliban dressed up as new? I’ve come here to Kabul to find out.

Taliban, you know, comes to the word talib, which means student. There’s an obvious reason for that, because the Taliban’s ranks largely comprised of young Afghans who were mainly refugees that had fled those wars in Afghanistan and been brought up in Pakistan and went to the madrasas and the Islamic schools there.

People were sick and tired of the violence and corruption. The Taliban could come in and say, we’re the new kids in the block, you’re going to clean up here, we’re going to make things better for you. Unfortunately, what they didn’t realise is that, you know, be careful what you wish for. Incoming was a Frankenstein monster in the shape of the Taliban that had its own vision of how they were going to run things.

They were a barbaric, barbaric group. Any art form was completely opposed by the Taliban. painting, anything visual, it was idolatry in that way. They lashed out across the country in the beautiful Bamiyan Valley where those historic cliffside, gigantic, 100-foot-odd Buddhas carved in there for centuries into the mountainside.

And I have to say I had the privilege during the Soviet war of sleeping in the caves. where the Buddhas were when we were with the Mujahideen at that time. But of course the Taliban blew these Buddhas up. It was a kind of iconic message. It was them laying their stamp on the country. And I think proved it took the blowing up of a couple of statues for the world to turn around and go, is this what these guys are really about? When in actual fact they were doing this to human beings and to people every day. In 2001, the Twin Towers fell. Those responsible, Osama bin Laden’s terror group, al-Qaeda, were hiding out in Afghanistan with permission from the Taliban. After 9-11,

an American-led coalition came looking for them. And so the next long, bloody chapter of violence began. and continues to play out. When I was embedded with 4-5 Command, a Zulu company up in a FOB, which is a forward operating base, called Inkerman. Inkerman became… One of the most notorious forward operating bases was a tiny, comparatively tiny compound, which was constantly being hit by the Taliban.

It was always the toughest of the tough that were given the increment to hold. And we made foot patrols out into the surrounding countryside. I was able to see Afghanistan and reflect even on the Soviet war. I can imagine what it was like then to be… A Russian soldier during that period. You’re out in foot patrol with constant threat of ambush, with IEDs and landmines and explosives and booby traps, and listening often, as we did, to the chatter.

We could actually, through our interpreter, we could listen in to the Taliban talking about where they were going to hit us, when they were going to hit us. I mean it was some remarkable moments. I remember being in a hut compound with part of the unit and we came under fire from the Taliban started shooting through the walls at us.

The Talibs are close because the rounds are coming in close. The mortar’s landing close there. That was a long compound then, that was that whole tree line up there. At one point, there was a Royal Marine sniper on a rooftop and he was relaying messages of what he could see back to the CO. He was from East Kilbride.

Bride actually. I don’t know if there was a big demand for snipers in East Kilbride after the war, but he was an East Kilbride boy. And he was talking about, he could see what they called the dicker. It’s an old term from Northern Ireland, which means a lookout in British Army. On the radio, you could see him clearly through the scope and he was directing the fire.

It was necessary to take out this dicker. But it wasn’t easy because he had rather cleverly surrounded himself with local children. There was this constant back and forward, have you got him in sight? Can you get the shot? Should I take the shot? There are children there. And eventually he was given instructions to take the shot when he could.

But the children were so close that I dare say when this Taliban was killed that They would probably have been covered in his blood. I mean, these are really high-powered sniper rifles. But instantaneously, the fire began to drift off. It was the correct military decision to be made at the time. But that’s the kinds of stuff that, you know, British and American troops face day in, day out.

In the same way that probably Russian troops faced during the war, you know, when they were there. Well, at very short notice, we’ve just received… word from the Taliban that they’re prepared to talk to us by telephone. So we’re about to embark on that process right now, which takes a little bit of organizing for obvious reasons.

Can I begin by asking, has the Taliban position changed politically? And are they in favor of further negotiations with the Afghan government? But the Americans are not the only force the Taliban faces in Afghanistan. The so-called Islamic State group is regrouping here too after suffering defeats in Syria and Iraq.

The group known as IS are Islamists, but to the Taliban, they too are unwelcome guests. If ISIS grow in strength here in Afghanistan, if their presence becomes more dominant and they become a problem to the peace process, what would the reaction of the Taliban be to that? Is it okay? Yeah. And action.

Countless Afghans feel caught between the Taliban on one hand and what they perceive as a government of elites and warlords on the other. The Taliban meanwhile insist that they become part of the formula for future governance here in Afghanistan. David Pratt, BBC News, Kabul. I hope that they will take pictures of everything, the radio, the television.

They will do it themselves, they don’t have the money. They will take pictures. If they don’t have money, they will take pictures of us, and that’s it. What’s his name? What’s his name? He has a good voice. He has a good voice. He has a good voice. He has a good voice. He has a good voice. He has a good voice. Were we a major in the army? The army, yeah.

Well, we’re just passing over this bridge over the Cabo River here and spotted some heroin and drug users which really openly using drugs on… on the street. When I was here a few years ago, not far from here, what used to be the Russian, still is the Russian cultural centre, became a bit of a den for drug users.

But they’re now openly using these drugs on the street. Heroin and other drugs is an enormous problem here in Kabul. This is one of countless poppy fields across Afghanistan which are in harvest at the moment. It’s said that Afghanistan produces something like 80% of the world’s opium for heroin production.

Wars need money, and drugs are big money. The farmer slices the bulk to release the opium, and then sells the milk for a few dollars. He’s dirt poor, but the product accumulates quickly in value as it crosses the world. The illegal drugs trade here has only been made worse by the last two decades of war. In 2006, I embedded with the NIU, Afghan commandos, who worked with the American DEA to disrupt the heroin trade.

But the Taliban and others still profit enormously from it. That same year, I journeyed into the subterranean hell that is Kabul’s drug world. I imagine most of the people you are now looking at are dead. Some images really stick in your mind. Addicts let needles linger in their veins in the mistaken belief that the hit will last longer.

It was in 2016 when I got word that my old friend, Syed Anwari, had died. He had been receiving treatment for cancer in India. Our fixer here in Kabul has managed to track down one of his sons. His name is Mahdi and he’s invited us for dinner. Mahdi was a young child when I knew his father. But he has invited these two veteran Mujahideen for dinner, men he knew his father in the 1980s.

This is a real honour. I’ve never met Marty, but the ties of friendship in Afghanistan are strong and transmitted from one generation to the next. I first met your father in the 1980s. He was always coming up with very imaginative ways to get me in and out of Pakistan and into Afghanistan and back again. But this photograph was taken that first night when we crossed the border, on the very first trip from Pakistan.

One of the things that I remember most too about walking the jihad trails into Afghanistan, those long days, those long weeks, was sitting around like this in the evening, you know, and just talking. There was so much curiosity from so many of his men about where I’d come from, was I married? He was always, he was charismatic.

What would be the words they would use to The Mujahideen were different. Some of them were against the principle of Jihad. Amaei was a Mujahideen. He didn’t want Taliban Islam, nor did he want Islam that would make the world laugh. He’s saying if you are Anwil’s friend, you are our friend. I mean, I’m not sure if this would happen.

Whose place is this? I don’t know. Yeah. Oh. Oh. Oh. OK. I’ll get this one. I’ll get this. Oh, sorry. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Fantastic. Hey,

you guys It’s my job in a way as a journalist, as a reporter and photographer to try and really some of these hardships and that level of suffering you know but not to expect people to just automatically get it. We present those horrors as powerful as you can. To have people confronted,

you know, not ramming it down their throats, but having them confronted. Vital.