Earlier this week, I sat down with Dave Davies, senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, on NPR’s Fresh Air. We spoke about GlobalPost’s special report, “Life, Death and the Taliban” and my recent travels to AfPak for the series.
You can check out the interview here.
Today GlobalPost begins a special report titled Life, Death and the Taliban. It is a series of stories from the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan, a multimedia project that includes video, photography, strong reporting and writing and an interactive historical time line by a team of reporters, photographers, editors, producers and researchers for GlobalPost.
In June, I traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to report on the Taliban at a fateful crossroads as the Afghan election looms, the Taliban continues to exert control and the US military escalates its troop deployments in a major offensive in the South. I wanted to revisit the places and the people I have gotten to know through 15 years of reporting there and share some of their stories and insights.
I was joined by photographer and friend Seamus Murphy of VII along the way, who brought me into the circle of a family from Stonecutter Street in Kabul. He first met them in the worst years of the civil war in 1994 and has documented their lives and their struggles and a new sense of hope. The family’s story is told in the lead video on the project landing page. This project also includes strong reporting from GlobalPost correspondents Shahan Mufti in Islamabad and Jean MacKenzie in Kabul.
The idea of the series was to try to unpack the history of the Taliban in all its complexity and historical context so that visitors to the site might get a deeper understanding of a region that has long been a graveyard for empires.
I hope you will check it out and post a comment.
Our Maggie was a truly international dog, a canine diplomat of sorts who had lived all over the world.
A big, old yellow Labrador who lived to eat, Maggie begged on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide when I was based as a journalist in Jerusalem with my wife and family. In fact, she was well known for sauntering down the ancient, cobbled streets and picking up scraps from the Palestinian shwarma shops and then making her way across the street to the Israeli falafel vendors. In a culture where dogs are feared and often loathed, Maggie had made good friends on both sides of the conflict.
Later when I was assigned to London, Maggie dined on left over Shepherd’s Pie from one of the great old pubs of Hampstead which was right next to my office.
She quaffed buttery croissants in France when she lived briefly with a retired French military officer on the coast of Brittany. He was an in-law who offered to take her for 90 days so she could get her European Union citizenship and avoid the officiousness of the British laws for quarantining pets.
She traveled in and out of many ports of call and across international borders with her own small blue, pet passport in which was recorded her many journeys and the attendant inoculations and paper work required for her passage.
I gave Maggie to my wife as a present for our first wedding anniversary 14 years ago. And she lived with us all over the world since then. She was at our side as we had four boys born in Boston, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and London. They loved her and never knew life without her tail thumping the floor in the early morning and her steady breathing putting us all to sleep at night. My wife showered her with affection and treated her as if she was our only girl, which of course she was.
The constant plane travel and the plastic air crates grew more and more difficult for Maggie as she got older. After so many years of parachuting in and out of stories all over the Middle East, I knew how she felt. We’d both begun to lose our traveling legs a bit.
In the last few years, she was happy to have retired with us to a small New England town West of Boston where she had a pond to swim in and lots of grass to roll around in.
But sometimes she’d sit on the porch and look out on the road and I’d wonder if she, like me, didn’t long to get back to traveling.
In the end, Maggie had one last lesson for us.
We thought for sure she was gone when we took her to the vet last week. She was struggling all summer with her breathing due to laryngeal paralysis, a degenerative condition that restricts the air passage and is quite common in Labs. Her condition worsened dramatically while we were on a lakeside vacation in Maine.
A local vet said there wasn’t much we could do to prevent her from dying, but as a last resort he gave her steroids that reduced some of the swelling of her larynx and she rallied for a few more good days. Our boys joked that the steroids would mean that her life would have an asterisk just like the Red Sox players David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez who had been exposed for using steroids. But the drugs worked just as they did for Big Papi.
Suddenly, Maggie was swimming and doing what our boys called “the happy dance,” which was rolling on her back in the grass with her paws in the air and a wide smile.
She taught us at the very end to just live every day as if it’s your last.
We fed her lamb and hugged her and told her we loved her. We cherished every minute with her and quietly wondered why we didn’t treat every day with her like that, and every day with each other like that. For sure, that was what she was telling us in her own quiet way. And sometimes it takes an old dog to remind you of the simplest truths.
We said “goodbye.” Then after a few days, her breathing got very heavy again. She was lethargic and clearly unable to get air. Her tongue was turning blue. She was rushed to the emergency room at an animal hospital and the vet quietly told us what we already knew, that Maggie was not going to live. But like everyone who has been through the extraordinary ordeal of euthanizing a pet, we denied the obvious until we couldn’t any longer.
When the vet finally put her down on Sunday morning, Maggie heaved her last breath and set out on the final journey.
Listen in to the journey I took through Afghanistan and Pakistan on The World starting tonight. A special four-part series of radio reports titled “Inside the Taliban” will be aired over the next four days on The World, which is a co-production of the BBC-Public Radio International and WGBH, Boston . The project is a partnership between GlobalPost and The World and was funded in part by a Luce Foundation grant for reporting on religion. Check it out on your local public radio station or on-line at theworld.org.
Seamus Murphy/VII, 1996
The radio series is the first phase of an ambitious multimedia project that we are putting together and which will appear on GlobalPost later in the summer. The series focuses in on the Taliban and how the US troops seeking to confront the religious movement fail to understand it. It will feature the powerful photography of my colleague Seamus Murphy of the photo agency VII and video and audio portraits of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The reporting trip was built around revisiting people and places that Seamus and I know through 15 years of reporting there. And in case you have been wondering, the writing and producing of this multimedia project is what I’ve been doing with my summer. We will keep you posted on when it will appear on GlobalPost. Until then, please check out The World.
I know that road just outside of Kabul in the Logar Province. I know the kids who walk to school on it every morning. I know their faces were full of hope and glee when I saw them two years ago at their beautiful new school and I can only imagine the fear that must be etched on their faces now.
On Thursday morning, Taliban terrorists packed a timber truck full of explosives and detonated it at a checkpoint between two schools in the Logar Province, they killed 25 people, including 13 elementary school students.
I was just in Afghanistan reporting on the girls’ school that is right where this bombing went off. On Wednesday I met with Sally and Don Goodrich. They are an amazing couple from Vermont who lost their son, Peter, in the September 11 attacks. They raised the money to build the girls’ school in his honor through the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation. Two years ago, I went on a trip with Sally to document the opening of the school. It was a joyous occasion. And we stayed in touch and have become friends.
We sat together Wednesday night and talked about the school and disturbing news that the village in which it lies is now apparently under control of the Taliban. The son and brother of Haji Malik, the village elder who has helped Don and Sally win community approval for the school, have been detained by US military for allegedly supporting the Taliban. A cache of weapons and explosives was found on their property, the military claims, and they have evidence photos to prove it. Sally and Don talked of wanting to close the school because they feared for the students’ safety.
Only hours later the truck bomb went off. Already Don and Sally have moved into action, raising more money to send to the families to help pay for burial of their children.
The girls school in the Mohammed Agha district of Logar is a microcosm of all that has gone wrong in Afghanistan. It is a sad illustration of the best of intentions and the worst of intentions.
Who, in God’s name, could kill children walking to school?
Iason Athanasiadis was released, as you can read at the top of GlobalPost.
Iason, a freelance journalist who had been writing for GlobalPost in Iran, was detained without charge for nearly three weeks by the Iranian government. He was picked up at the airport amid a crackdown on Western media covering the contested elections and the dramatic street demonstrations that followed.
Yesterday was a waiting-to-exhale afternoon as the first sketchy reports came in from Iran that he was going to be released. And then we got the word from the Committee to Protect Journalists, who have done outstanding work on his behalf, that the good news was confirmed. The Greek government and representatives of the Greek Orthodox Church were pivotal in making direct pleas for his release to the Iranian government. A Greek and British citizen, Iason lives in Istanbul and is on his way to be with his family and loved ones. We hope to speak with him soon. We will give you an update when we do. Check out my last post to read more about Iason and his profound talent as a reporter and photographer.
The CPJ reports that there are still more than 35 journalists, bloggers and commentators who remain under detention in Iran for their coverage of the events that unfolded there last month. We will continue to work with CPJ and other news organizations toward their release. And I am certain Iason will want to play a role in that effort. Welcome home, Iason.
At GlobalPost, the most celebrated work our journalists do is ground truth.
Being there on the ground for the story is what matters. And Iason Athanasiadis, a freelance writer and contributor to GlobalPost who was detained while working in Iran last month, always seeks ground truth. He lives it as a writer and photographer.
Iason has always done extraordinary work around the world for publications including the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor and others. But his greatest work and his greatest passion has been in Iran. His photo essay, “Children of the Revolution,” was one of the most enlightening pieces of journalism I have seen come out of Iran in many years. It chronicles the lives of Iranians with dignity and respect. It is void of cliches. It celebrates the complexity of its culture and it honors the yearnings of its people, particularly its youth, in their search for freedom.
And so I am thinking of Iason today, on America’s “Independence Day,” when big cities and little towns gather for cookouts and parades and forget that July 4th is really about some pretty heavy ideas like “revolution” and “freedom.”
Iason was in Iran reporting on these ideas — “revolution” and “freedom” — for GlobalPost when he was detained by Iranian officials at Tehran International Airport on June 17. Amid a crackdown on press freedoms in the wake of the contested presidential elections and the massive demonstrations that followed, Iason was preparing to leave the country as requested by the government of all Western journalists.
Iason's "Reflections on Leaving Iran"
Iason is a Greek citizen and was traveling with valid journalist credentials and a visa. In the three weeks since his detention, GlobalPost has been working diligently for his release with the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, which provided a grant for him to report from there, and The Washington Times, for which he was also contributing stories, as well as a wide circle of family, friends and colleagues. In an abundance of caution, we kept Iason’s detention quiet at first. (In the post below celebrating the escape of New York Times correspondent David Rohde from his Taliban captors in Afghanistan, you can see a veiled reference to Iason.) At the request of his family, we at first released only a sparse statement on his detention and a plea for his release. We are not trying to make a global drama out of it, just quietly working to encourage the Iranian government to do the right and legal thing. Greek government and Greek Orthodox Church officials have directly intervened with the Iranian government on Iason’s behalf and are also calling for his release. No formal charges against Iason have been presented to date.
Iason is more than a respected colleague. He is a friend. I met him in his native Greece just before the 2004 summer Olympics. I had taken my oldest son, Will, who was then 8, along for the reporting trip and Iason was very warm to him and took some photographs of Will walking through the Parthenon. I met Iason again when he came to Harvard University for the Nieman Fellowship in the Class of 2008 and he remembered my son’s name. That’s a small thing, for sure, but it says a lot about the kind of person he is, one who listens and cares about people. For many months after his Nieman year, he and I looked forward to finding a way for him to contribute to GlobalPost from Iran and finally in June we had the chance to do that. His work for us was fair and balanced and enlightening and, as always, based on “ground truth.”
So on this day with so much talk about freedom, we are left holding our breath that Iason will soon have his.
It didn’t surprise me to hear that New York Times reporter David Rohde plotted a careful escape from his Taliban captors by scaling a wall and running to freedom with his translator, Tahir Ludin. And it didn’t surprise me that David doesn’t want to talk about it.
“He’s old school,” as his brother in Boston described him.
Photography by: Tomas Munita/New York Times
And that is an understatement. David is one of the most talented and humble reporters I have ever met. He is quiet and unassuming and nothing short of heroic. He has taken extraordinary risks as a reporter from his Pulitzer-Prize-winning dispatches from the war in Bosnia, where he was also detained, to his reporting in Afghanistan, where he also won a Pulitzer Prize for excellent work. He was picked up on November 10 by captors while inerviewing a Taliban commander and he was held for the last seven months, just two months after he had been married. He escaped last week and the story of his release was broken on Sunday in the New York Times and a detailed account of the escape appears in today’s editions. David is fearless, but never reckless. He is not a cowboy, just one hell of a great reporter. He’s old school indeed.
I’ve known David from the field for the better part of a decade and I have been worried sick about him for every day of the last seven months. Those of us who knew about his capture were sworn to silence at the request of his family.
One of his signatures as a reporter was a faded, old Boston Red Sox cap and, when we crossed paths, he and I often shared news from Fenway and our shared hometown. I was traveling in Pakistan and Afghanistan for most of this month and thinking of David at every turn. The story of his capture in Logar Province, just outside of Kabul, was very much on my mind when I took the decision not to go there in pursuit of a story. I know he would have approved of the caution. And when I was meeting with former officials in the now deposed Taliban government, I took each step carefully and tried to think the way David would think about the reporting. He holds important lessons for all of us who do this kind of work in the field, lessons about the need to be careful, of course, but also the need to have courage. There are some other colleagues who I work with and admire who are still being held and whose details have to remain secret for now. All I can say is we are being constantly vigilant about their situation and working quietly toward their release. They share David’s courage and sense of importance for geting the story in the field.
The kind of reporting David has done his whole life is the best of foreign reporting. And when you are dropping a row of quarters for a newspaper as great as the New York Times remember the quality and the courage of some of the people behind those bylines.
I was at Fenway yesterday watching the Red Sox win a great game with a walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth. I was there with my boys in field boxes near the Pesky pole in a swirling mist of rain and thinking of David’s father and about fate. I was hoping David was watching the game with his family. What a great father’s day present for David’s Dad to have his son safely returned. Welcome home, David.
The events unfolding in Tehran are straight out of rock n’ roll.
So you gotta check out the piece on the Tehran underground band “Hypernova” by our Deputy Editor Freya Petersen, who has been following the group and what it has to say long before the big media caught on to the ground that is shifting inside Iran. The story rocks and the band is kick ass. It is GroundTruth with a drum solo and power chords.
All of our coverage of Iran has been a rock n’ roll opera with many voices behind it who we can not name because we fear for their safety and the safety of their families. Quiet heroes of the truth have been helping us here in Boston and over in Iran. They’ve made it possible for us to bring you voices from the street calling for change, voices of what Nixon would have called “the silent majority,” and voices from the more remote corners of Iran that you won’t hear in the quick, staccato newscasts of the networks
Our editorial team has been delivering an excellent array of coverage every day which you can follow on “Chatter,” the day-to-day, hour-to-hour offerings of what you “need to know” and more from our GlobalPost News Desk.
Keep on rockin’ in the free world.
BOSTON – Good to be home. I just got back from the trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan late last night. And on the plane ride home I wrote the piece that leads GlobalPost right now. Talking with the Taliban is about ongoing negotiations with moderate elements of the Taliban leadership who have been holding third-party talks with active Taliban insurgents and the Afghan and US government. The talks are an important opening to the way forward in Afghanistan.
To write the piece, I was going through the notes of an extraordinary journey through Islamabad and Peshawar and then Kabul. It came at a pivotal time in the history of Afghanistan, a time when the US is both stepping up its military presence and at the same time reaching out to the moderate elements of the Taliban. Eventually, all of the reporting I did on this trip will be crafted into a multimedia project for GlobalPost and aired in a series of reports for the BBC-PRI radio program The World. l will keep you posted on the timing of both of those projects.
GroundTruth is written by Charles Sennott, the Executive Editor and co-founder of GlobalPost. The blog is a way for GlobalPost to let you know what our correspondents all over the world are covering every day. It is a place where Sennott highlights the best work in the field by a stellar team of correspondents . 