Reporting from the frontlines: From Kashmir to Afghanistan

On the morning of August 15, 2021, I sat inside the now-defunct Ministry of Women’s Affairs in Kabul, Afghanistan. I was interviewing the executive director, Latifa Majidi, about a $100 million World Bank project meant to expand its ongoing work in empowering women to become self-sustaining by teaching them skills like sewing and handicrafts. 

Latifa spoke about her decades-long work with women at the grassroots level and her efforts to challenge cultural norms that forbade them from working outside their homes. They were, at that point, expanding into different provinces across Afghanistan.

By that day, the Taliban had already secured control of 26 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, and rumours were thick that they were inching dangerously close to the capital. Kabul, usually vibrant at midday, was unusually quiet. The streets were empty, and the shops across from Latifa’s office were shuttered.

Inside an aircraft.

I interviewed the women on her team and they spoke with conviction about their plans to take the project to every village and district in Afghanistan, even as they admitted to praying every night that the Taliban would not take over their country. They showed remarkable faith in their government to protect them and preserve the gains of the past two decades. Some had personally experienced the Taliban’s brutal and regressive rule during their first regime between 1995 and 2001. 

As they discussed their plans for the days ahead, the corridor outside began to reverberate with panic. People were running and shouting when someone burst into the room and told Latifa: the Taliban were in the capital. I sat there, stunned, as the women hugged each other and cried. Within hours, news broke that president Ashraf Ghani had fled and that the country had officially fallen to the Taliban.

From Kashmir to Afghanistan

I travelled to Kashmir in the spring of 2017 when it was only just beginning to emerge from months of shutdowns and restrictions following the killing of Burhan Wani the previous year. Staying with a local host, I encountered a version of Kashmir that did not match what I heard back home in Delhi. I wrote about that gap in my blogs and was approached by a local travel publication to write for them. That subtle pivot made me realise I could do more of it and I decided to break into journalism after working a corporate job unsatisfactorily for many years.

An Afghanistani neighbourhood. 

By 2019, my travel community had stretched across countries, and I had friends in places I had never imagined going to. One of them was based in Kabul. He encouraged me and helped me navigate the visa process.

The night before my flight, in August 2019, stretched endlessly. I couldn’t sleep; my stomach turned at the thought of getting on that plane. The next morning, I put on a brave face as I booked a cab to the airport, my father’s warnings hanging over me. The flight from Delhi to Kabul took just over two hours, but it felt longer. As we began our descent, the women in the cabin started covering their heads, and I followed suit.

From above Kabul, I could see military aircraft lining the tarmac. Immigration was quick. I spotted my friend waiting across the parking lot and instinctively moved to hug him. He stopped me midway. “We can’t do this here,” he said. I stepped back, suddenly aware of where I was.

I spent 10 days in Afghanistan. It was not a place without risk or violence, but it was also a lot more than that.

I was especially intrigued to find that as an Indian, I received a warm welcome from Afghans, many of whom were well versed in Indian cinema and music. Markets often played ’90s Bollywood songs.

Afghans viewed India through the prism of their fraught relationship with Pakistan. Decades of tension along the Durand Line, a 2,600 km border drawn by the British in 1893 that split Pashtun communities across both sides, continues to be contested by Afghanistan which has never formally recognised it as an international boundary. This, coupled with allegations of Pakistani support for the Taliban, had shaped public perception.

The 2019 election year in Afghanistan was exceptionally bloody, shaped by an organised campaign of violence by the Taliban, aimed at disrupting the democratic process. It unfolded against the backdrop of collapsing peace talks between the Taliban and the United States. Mounting civilian casualties was daily news, and the political climate was growing fragile.

I began to understand the contours of the country and knew I would have to return, to look more closely.

Return of the Taliban

In March 2021, I was back in Kabul, this time with a very different purpose. 

I shared an apartment with a Polish journalist who helped me navigate the country’s dense bureaucracy and secure the permits I needed to work full-time. Through her, I also connected with organisations that supported freelancers, which meant I could access flak jackets and helmets and move beyond tentative reporting into the frontlines. I began travelling across provinces, trying to keep pace with how quickly the situation was changing, and learning on the go. It was after all my first active war zone. 

In his first term, Donald Trump signed what was described as a “peace deal” with the Taliban in Doha in February 2020. By the time I arrived, Joe Biden had taken office and, in April, announced that the United States would withdraw all remaining troops, bringing an end to its 20-year war. The impact was immediate. The Taliban advanced rapidly, taking province after province.

Around this time, I visited Bagram Airbase, once the largest US military installation in the country, which American forces had vacated overnight. Walking through it, it felt as though the war had ended almost abruptly, and this place had simply been left behind. 

The scale of conflict across the country was so enormous that internal displacement surged. I travelled to Kandahar, where families from neighbouring provinces had taken shelter in makeshift camps inside schools and public buildings. It had been just a month since Reuters’ Danish Siddiqui, a Pulitzer-winning photojournalist from India, was killed near Spin Boldak. I decided to keep a low profile and used my personal contacts to stay with a local family.

They welcomed me with a warmth that felt dissonant against the tension outside. We spent the evening in the courtyard as power cuts and signal blackouts set in after dusk. To beat the summer heat and power cuts, the family slept on the terrace and laid out a bed for me as well.

That night, the sound of shelling began. It was distant at first, then close enough to make sleep impossible. I lay awake as the family slept through it, as though it were routine — for them, it was. Listening closely and unable to sleep, I tried to measure distance through sound, wondering if there might be an air strike. I barely slept that night, and by morning, I decided to leave Kandahar.

At the airport, I learned that all flights had been cancelled. Taliban’s rockets had targeted the runway and no one could say when flights would resume. I sat in the waiting area for hours, stranded and increasingly aware of how exposed I was. I had chosen not to carry my passport as I wanted to avoid drawing attention to my identity. Without documentation and with no clear reason to remain at the airport, I began to draw suspicion.

The airport director who had studied in India noticed the commotion and stepped in to reassure me of my safety and arranged for me to leave the next day. I spent another night there before boarding a flight back to Kabul. Two days later, Kandahar fell. Soon after, Kabul fell too.

During this time, through the stress and ambiguity, the newsrooms were churning reports by the hour. I had one deadline after another. Feeding that manic news cycle from the ground became almost mechanical. Report by day, file at night. I could feel the emotional and physical toll of those days in my loss of appetite and the way I jolted awake at night with every loud bang. 

I left Afghanistan on a military aircraft on August 17, 2021, two days after Kabul fell, the tarmac still scattered with the belongings of those who had tried to leave. A few months later, I returned.

By January 2022, Afghanistan had become the Islamic Emirate. I could recognise the sound of the streets, the smell of local food, and the regular bustling of the markets, but its social fabric was visibly changed — there were no women. In March that year, they shut down schools for older girls, which remain closed to this day, and over time, women disappeared almost entirely from all workplaces. 

I often thought back to a conversation in Kandahar, when my host Laila Jan had described what life under the Taliban had once been like. These restrictions no longer felt like a distant reality, but a lived reality of millions of women who felt trapped inside the world’s largest open-air prison.

I reported extensively on the systematic erosion of women’s rights and the decrees that pushed them out of public life and into near invisibility in their own country. Between 2021 and 2026, the Taliban issued more than 70 such directives, restricting women’s rights and civil liberties, in what many Afghans in exile and human rights defenders have described as gender apartheid. This reporting did not sit well with the Taliban, and since 2022, they have denied me permission to return and continue my work.

Four years on, I continue to report on Afghanistan from outside, and on other conflicts, including Lebanon. Today, Afghanistan remains in the grip of a deep humanitarian crisis, with more than half its population dependent on aid. Tensions along its borders continue to add to the strain. The wider regional fallout from US-
Israel tensions with Iran has further tightened the pressure.

Working in conflict zones

Working as a freelance journalist in such environments brings its own challenges. When risk became greater, safety became more expensive. Protective gear, local fixers, transport, and secure accommodation all come at a cost that rises with risk. I often relied on my editors to help me navigate the complexities. 

There is also the question of independence. Accepting logistical support from state or non-state actors can compromise how and what you report, but refusing it can limit access or increase vulnerability. It is a balance that one has to constantly work with, often in real time.

Sonia Sarkar, a Delhi-based journalist, was reporting from a conflict zone in Chhattisgarh in 2009. She was in Maoist-dominated Bastar and was set to travel from Sukma to Dantewada to meet a cop. Maoists had called a bandh and the cop insisted on sending a car to pick her up. “My father advised me not to travel in any official vehicle as there was always a risk of collateral damage if Maoists targeted the police vehicle. That advice didn’t come from any newsroom. It came from my father and I have followed it ever since,” she recalls, adding that in Indian newsrooms, journalists are often left to negotiate on the field using their own understanding of the situation with little to no structured training on conflict reporting.

Working in a conflict zone is also about constantly negotiating access, trust and truth. Information can be contradictory or deliberately withheld, and verifying even basic facts can become a challenge when movement is restricted and communication networks are unreliable or shut down entirely. For freelance journalists without institutional backing, these challenges are further compounded.

Mehk Chakraborty, an independent journalist and researcher who writes on migration, conflict and human rights, highlights these challenges as she works amid the ongoing conflict in Lebanon. “There’s no guarantee that stories reported under the constant threat of bombs are even going to find a home, and when they do, it is often for a compensation well under a decent wage,” says Mehk, who is based between Beirut and the EU. Anagha Subhash Nair, a journalist based in Damascus, Syria, points out the emotional challenges of covering war. “It’s an intense environment where you’re in very close proximity to death and destruction. Furthermore, you sometimes have interviewees asking you ‘who’s going to read this?’ or
placing high expectations that your article is going to directly impact
their life for the better,” says Anagha, who has been covering life in post-conflict Syria.

When people trust you with their stories, you listen to accounts of loss, violence, and survival, often from those who take personal risks to speak. That responsibility is enormous, and it brings with it the pressure to do justice to those stories without becoming an advocate for one side or losing sight of the larger context.