The messengers left behind

The U.S. has left journalists to die in Afghanistan — until now. But can help come fast enough?

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made. 

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CNN journalist Brett Saddler in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in 2001. He didn’t get where he was alone. At least one, and probably more than one, Afghan media worker helped him. (Alain BUU/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

In 2018, a video journalist named Abadullah Hananzai, 26, who worked for the U.S.-funded RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi, was murdered in a double suicide bomb attack in Kabul. The second bomber had disguised himself as a media worker, and purposefully blew himself up in a group of reporters who’d rushed to cover the scene of the first blast. Hananzai was one of 25 people killed — including at least nine journalists. 

Hananzai’s last public Facebook post “was a tribute to his former colleague Abdul Manan Arghand, a journalist who had been shot dead by unknown gunmen the previous week,” the Committee to Protect Journalists reported.

“Arghand is now a martyr for freedom of speech,” Hananzai wrote, just five days before he would become one himself.

In 2020, Afghanistan was tied for the deadliest country in the world for journalists, according to CPJ’s data. Since the United States. invaded the country in 2001, 64 journalists and media workers have been killed because of their work. Yet until Monday, those who worked for U.S. media outlets had no way to gain a visa to resettle in the United States.