The Pickett Lens

Egypt on the brink of change, 2010

2011-09-12T12:37:00.001+02:00

Cairo, May 8, 2008

Oh, Egypt. Where do I even begin?

I have been struggling for a long time to put the experience of observing and documenting the Egyptian uprising into words. I saw things that I never imagined I'd see--sometimes I still can't believe it.

First, the background:
(Take notes, there will be a quiz later.)

For most Americans, at least before the uprising, they heard "Egypt" and thought "pyramids." The Egyptian government has been very successful in exporting Egypt's heritage and drawing in foreigners, and their money. Millions of tourists have come to see Egypt's antiquities and experience a bit of the flavor of modern Arab culture.

The Egypt tourist track belies the discontent that has been simmering just under the surface for years, even decades. When Hosni Mubarak first stepped into the presidency, after Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981, many Egyptians saw him as a savior. He instated the Emergency Law, a set of security measures for a nation in crisis. He brought stability and ushered Egypt into modernity.

But Mubarak, not unlike a long list of dictators throughout the world, and his regime were corrupt. Bribery and conflicts of interest were not just common in the government, they were systemic. Political opposition was crushed by the political machine built by Mubarak and his friends in the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). Mubarak and his friends used the Emergency Law to cling to power, a law which allowed police to imprison and torture unknown numbers of dissidents and opponents without bringing formal charges against them.

When I arrived in Cairo in 2008, I quickly learned that Egypt's stability, the crowning achievement of the Mubarak regime, was an illusion. A fury brewed just beneath the surface. Egypt was in the middle of a bread shortage and extreme inflation, with nearly half the population living on $2/day or less. In April, workers in the industrial Nile Delta town of Mahalla el-Kobra held a demonstration that devolved into a riot. In following days, I watched a planned protest in Cairo's Tahrir Square crushed by thousands of riot police deployed to break it up. Activists and journalists were detained and harassed.

In the years preceding the revolution of 2011, journalist acquaintances and Egyptian and expat friends of mine speculated on change in Egypt. Mubarak was 80 and ailing. The outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and other opposition parties were gaining strength as a political entities. Unemployment and poverty were high. Underpaid workers were striking on a regular basis. The emerging generation was more educated, tech-savvy and outspoken than the one before.

The question was not whether change would come about, but when. And how.

Egypt was changing, but imperceptibly. Life continued day-to-day as before. Many Egyptians were discontent with Mubarak and with the status quo, but had been living with the same system for so long.

As the November 2010 parliamentary elections approached, I had the great privilege to work with Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson from National Public Radio on a series of stories about Egypt, essentially on the cusp of some great change, although we had no idea then what that change would look like. The series looked at the stark class divide, the economy, tense relations with Christian and Bedouin minorities and the future of the Mubarak regime. Soraya jokingly called it the "Whither Egypt" series. (Scroll to the end of this post for links to the stories on npr.org.)

Here are some photographs of Mubarak's Egypt on the eve of revolution:

The Egyptian stock market, said to be the oldest in the Middle East.

The bustling Egyptian black market.

Black market vendors carry a table-top full of merchandise. They keep the goods mobile in case they are chased off by police. But they always come back.

The black market is surrounded by shops, where merchandise is more expensive because the store owners have higher overhead--rent and taxes, for instance.

The upscale City Stars shopping mall.

To say that Egypt is a poor country is inaccurate. It is a wealthy place full of oil and tourists, among other industries, but the wealth is unevenly distributed.

Diners at Sequoia, one of Cairo's top-end restaurants in the upscale neighborhood of Zamalek.
Sequoia asks a hefty minimum charge of 150 L.E. per person. $25--a lot of money to most Egyptians. Heck it's a lot of money to me, a lowly freelancer, for one meal. (Full disclosure: I live in Zamalek and have eaten at Sequoia on numerous occasions.)

Cairo Jazz Club in Mohandiseen, where foreigners and, for lack of a better term, "liberal" Egyptians dance the night away.

Students at the American University in Cairo's new campus.

A home in the rich Cairo suburb of Katameya Heights.

A woman displaced by a rock slide peels potatoes outside of her plywood shack in the Duweiqa suburb of Cairo.

Impoverished people built their homes on the sides of cliffs in Duweiqa, essentially squatting on the land. Hundreds of people were killed in 2008 when boulders and dirt buried scores of such homes.

Children play among the houses built into the cliff.

Side note: it was around this time that I was approached by two police informants. They extorted money from me by threatening to tell the police that I was there taking photographs "without authorization." Ah. The joys of working in Cairo. I wasn't doing anything wrong, but I could easily have spent the rest of the day at the police station pleading my case, instead of shooting pictures.

Rasha Hashim in her living room. Many homes in Duweiqa, built on shifting and unsteady ground, show signs of distress--huge cracks in the walls, crumbling bricks.

A bedroom in Rasha Hashim's house.

Attyat Ali, 55, lives with her family and three other families in a tiny, crumbling house on the cliff.

Sameah Gamal Bakri hangs laundry on the ruins of a demolished house in Duweiqa.

Aida Abdel-Fattah, 50, lives with her family in a shanty right next to the area buried by the rock slide. The government told her she would be relocated. But she's still in the same place.

One of Abdel-Fattah's grandchildren on top of a mound of dirt and rock next to their home.

The area of the rock slide, where part of a cliff collapsed, was smoothed over with a bulldozer.

Abdel-Fattah's grandchildren play at home.

Another source of tension is the Egyptian government's treatment of minorities, especially Christians. Christians and Muslims have clashed numerous times over land, family and women in the past several years. While many Muslim Egyptians will openly profess their love for their Christian brothers and vice versa, some trouble is inevitable when religion is bound up in the state.

In the Coptic Christian church, divorce is rare. Couples who want to divorce must get special permission. Divorce is usually only granted in two extreme cases: adultery or conversion. This contributes to all sorts of troubling situations, such as the following:

Camillia Lufti's husband converted to Islam so that he could divorce her. Despite their protests, the couple's 16-year-old twins Andrew and Mario Ramses automatically became Muslim when their father converted from Christianity to Islam, under a tenant of Egyptian law. Islam is the "dominant" religion in Egyptian law, so in a religiously-mixed family, the Muslim has the power.

Left to right, Andrew and Mario sit down to supper with their older brother George and their mother Camilla.

George Ramses, the older brother of Mario and Andrew Ramses.

And then, there is the sticky situation with the Bedouin of the Sinai Peninsula.

The Bedouin are fiercely independent, sometimes armed and a few are involved in smuggling across the border with Gaza. Consequently, Bedouins are treated like outlaws by the Egyptian government. However, Bedouins also take the blame whenever anything goes wrong in Sinai--they make a convenient scapegoat. Barred from military or police service, and discriminated against for other types of civil service jobs, many eke out a living on tourism and can easily run into trouble with the authorities, even if their businesses are legitimate.

Sheikh Ashish Aniz, owner of Kum Kum beach camp near Nuweiba.

The modest home of Faraq Suleiman, a tour company manager, in Nuweiba.

Faraq's wife Maliha, mother of four.

Faraq Suleiman and his wife Maliha inside their home.

Faraq Suleiman's daughter Amal, 6, plays with a homemade white flag.

Awad Mubarak raises camels, sheep and chickens in the village of Bir Sgher.

(Gratuitous camel picture.)

Despite the fact that the Mubarak regime outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, support for the organization continued to flourish. The Islamist movement created social programs throughout Egypt, benefiting young people, families and the poor, and they spoke openly in favor of political reform, despite the very real threat of arrest by Egyptian authorities. They soon became one of the few viable alternatives to Mubarak's National Democratic Party machine.

In 2005, Egyptians voted in a new parliament. Members of the Brotherhood ran as independents and, shockingly, won a quarter of the assembly's 454 seats. This despite election fraud, intimidation, massive arrests of Brotherhood members and vote rigging by Mubarak's henchmen. (Click here to read an informative take on the Brotherhood's parliamentary gains in this Council on Foreign Relations report by Sharon Otterman, Dec. 1, 2005.)

Fast forward to 2010. It is the eve of another parliamentary election. Sobhy Saleh, a popular independent PM affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood campaigns in the streets of Alexandria, ducking Egyptian State Security in a game of cat-and-mouse.

With the election just a couple weeks away, Saleh sticks to the areas thick with Brotherhood supporters, quickly surrounded by crowds of well-wishers.

Saleh makes a barbershop stop.

A crowd following behind, Saleh moves quickly, hoping to out-race the possibility of a confrontation with State Security.

Enter Muhammad El Baradei. The former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency returned to his native Egypt as a reformer and presidential hopeful. He founded the National Association for Change movement. Among the organization's chief activities was a petition drive seeking seven reforms that would change three articles of the constitution, for a more democratic and open political system.

Volunteers listen to an activist during a petition drive training session in Cairo. At that point, the group had gathered nearly a million signatures.

They had planned a petition drive in early November after Friday prayers in Nasr City, a suburb to the east of downtown Cairo. What could be more harmless than a secular, peaceful, quiet, request for signatures in a middle-class neighborhood on the weekend?

Judging by the response of the Egyptian government, you'd think the National Association for Change was planning a full-scale insurgency.

Well before Friday prayers ended, trucks of riot police lined the streets. Hundreds of black-clad grunts stood in formation, blocking all side streets from the main drag. The most menacing and everyone's least favorite, plain-clothed State Security officers stood on the corners, eyeing pedestrians and motorists warily. Participants of the petition drive were adamantly prohibited from gathering for this peaceful activity. "Please," security agents warned, "don't make us angry."

The petition drive was canceled in the face of the overwhelming police presence.

Were it not so depressing, it would have been comical. And a measure of the absolute denial Mubarak and his regime had surrounded themselves with.

It made me angry. I wanted document this--to show what life is like for Egyptians, not allowed to seek change through any means in their own government. I cautiously took a few photos from a nearby building. When I knew I had at least a couple of photos documenting the event, I pushed it just enough to get caught.

It was this picture. I was exposed and State Security could easily see me. I pretended not to see them until they were in front of me, with their most intimidating, you-are-in-serious-shit looks on their faces. (God I hate those guys.)

I identified myself as a journalist and followed them outside to talk to their superior. With help from an Egyptian friend and colleague I managed to talk my way out of it after a few minutes. I'm sorry, I'm an accredited journalist, what exactly did I do wrong? I was prohibited from working in the area or else...

I returned to the restaurant where I had ordered some food and shakily drank some water. The photos aren't that great and probably not worth getting arrested over, but sometimes I feel the need to do it anyway. Otherwise why am I here?

Not fun though. For anyone who thinks what I do is glamorous, you can forget it!

So, finally the unanswered question of succession to Mubarak. Although he hadn't officially announced yet, Hosni's son Gamal seemed a likely candidate to take over the reigns. Posters advocating a Gamal Mubarak presidency were already plastered all over downtown Alexandria. So at least they could keep it all in the family, you know, like the best dictators do.

National Democratic Party spokesman Ali El Dean Hillal in his office at NDP headquarters. After agreeing to talk to us, he refused to talk about the 2011 presidential election and whether or not Hosni Mubarak would run again.

Two months later, in January, his office and the NDP headquarters building would be burned to a crisp by rioters at the beginning of the Egyptian uprising.

To listen to and read Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson's Novemeber 2010 Egypt series for NPR, click on these links:
"Life in Egypt Today" Egypt Series table of contents

"Discontent Swells in Hosni Mubarak's Egypt" Nov. 22, 2010

"As It Shifts, Egypt's Economy Retains Some Oddities" Nov. 23, 2010

"In Cairo Slum, Little Hope for Change" Nov. 24, 2010

"Egypt's State Security Gets Very Interested When Reporters Talk to Bedouins" Nov. 25, 2010

"Will He? Won't He? Egypt's Voters Focus on Mubarak" Nov. 26, 2010

Postscript: Tunisia

2011-07-10T09:14:00.000+02:00

Tunisians are still grappling with their revolution. The prime minister Mohamed Ghannouchi, who took office after Ben Ali fled, resigned at the end of February. Ben Ali and his wife Leila Trabelsi were convicted in absentia of embezzlement and misuse of state funds. A planned election in July for forming a commission to write a new constitution was put off until October. Dozens of political parties have sprung up. Jobs for young graduates have not materialized. Protests continue.

The Jasmine Revolution

2011-07-06T11:02:00.004+02:00

Day of Mourning, Tunis, January 21, 2011

Who names a revolution? Is it the pundits, the journalists or the revolutionaries themselves? Ukraine's Orange Revolution. The Green Revolution in Iran.

Jasmine is Tunisia's national flower. I don't know who first started calling the uprising in Tunisia the Jasmine Revolution, but it must have gained the nickname after the violence in Tunis finally subsided on Wednesday. Someone at the top decided something needed to change. The police maintained a line blocking the Ministry of Interior building, but allowed the protesters to protest. The mood lifted, like a flower suddenly blossoming.

Above, a woman watched an impromptu speech. The demonstration took on the qualities of a street fair. People came to Bourguiba Avenue with their families, carrying toddlers on their shoulders.

It was a victory. It was perhaps the first completely peaceful protest in Tunisia.

The guy in the middle is holding a sign in his teeth that says, "We want a new system."

Several colleagues by this point had had their cell phones stolen during the crowded demos. I was taking this photo when I felt someone reach inside my jacket pocket. I turned around and gave an evil stare to the young guy behind me. He was looking over my head, but not yelling like all of the people around him. Luckily my phone wasn't in my pocket. Ha! Foiled you, Pickpocket!

Old and young sang songs and chanted slogans together.

People carried an effigy of the RCD ruling party members, in the form of a coffin, through the crowd.

On Thursday, protesters tried to storm the party headquarters of the RCD, located in a skyscraper not far from Bourguiba. This time, the Tunisian army protected the building, but they didn't disperse the protest.

Demonstrators put flowers in the barrels of the soldiers' guns.

The energy was cheerful and at times reminded me of a college basketball game.

The protesters tried to move toward the building's iron fence, but were pushed back.

A woman was overcome by emotion in front of the RCD headquarters.

Then an amazing thing happened: the police protested! The police, who had been tear-gassing and chasing peaceful demonstrators just days earlier, decided they too wanted something to change.

Hundreds of police took over Bourguiba Avenue. Most of them were not wearing uniforms.

They called for higher pay. They also wanted their fellow Tunisians to know they're not the bad guy. We swear we're not the bad guy! I have to admit, I would not have wanted to be a member of the police force during the uprising.

A young man wearing a Tunisian flag as a cape displayed his police ID card.

Revolution really is contagious, apparently!

Of course, the police have since gone back to clashing with protesters in the streets of Tunis. Still, incredible to witness that day.

My assignment with the New York Times ended Friday and I was on a flight Saturday home to Cairo. By then I was exhausted and ill, and looking forward to a city absent of tear gas.

It's strange to look back on it now and realize Tunisia was just a warm-up for what was to come.

Power

2011-06-20T21:22:00.000+02:00

Every day was a new experience. I never really knew what to expect.

On Monday, January 17, residents and protesters returned to Bourguiba Avenue. It was amazing to see how the uprising had empowered people. They were no longer afraid. Men and women of all ages were stopping me and other members of the press on the street and speaking their minds out loud for the first time in perhaps two decades. One man exclaimed that he felt like a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

A revolution doesn't happen overnight, even if the head of state resigns and flees the country. Tunisians wanted the whole system to change. Their first demand that first Monday after Ben Ali resigned was for government ministers and officials associated with Ben Ali's all-powerful political party, RCD, to resign as well.

The Tunisian Army was in charge of securing Bourguiba, after the previous day's sniper shootout. The avenue was closed at either end to motorists, and to demonstrations. Protesters amassed at the end of the avenue, farthest from the heavily-guarded Ministry of Interior, but were kept at bay by the Army.

Public opinion toward the armed forces was different than it was toward the police/internal security structure. To put it simply, Ben Ali built up a powerful police force and used it to enforce repressive policies on his own people. The military, small, underfunded and politically weak by contrast, was handling the demonstration with restraint and had stepped into the role of mediator between the protesters and police.

The army shot a water canon at the protesters, trying for several hours to contain the growing demonstration.

People kept expressing gratitude for the military's restraint toward the protesters.

Finally the crowd overwhelmed the soldiers and surged forward, facing off with police near the Ministry of Interior. The confrontation was inevitable: the police responded the only way they knew how, with force.

I only remember trying to stay out of the direct line of the tear gas launcher. I was wary of tear gas canisters pointed at my head.

When a tear gas canister falls in a crowd, people usually panic and run blindly in any direction to get away from it. A couple of times I was swept away by the sheer force of a desperate, stampeding mob.

But protesters didn't disperse. Carrying bags of lemons needed in case of tear gas, they marched away from Bourguiba and the Ministry of Interior into a shopping district.

Men stood ready to protect a shop from trouble.

Police argued with protesters.

More tear gas. I was barely able to compose this photo before I was overcome. I was again working alongside other photographers, and we took a minute to recover. Protesters came up to us and passed out lemons and sodas.

The following day was even more violent. A demonstration formed at the far end of Bourguiba Avenue again and pressed forward toward the Ministry of Interior.

A friend of Lucas Dolega, the photographer who died, had stopped working when Lucas was injured and lent me a helmet and goggles. At least I didn't feel so unprotected.

This time the police charged the protesters, whacking people with truncheons. I noticed the police made a sort of line in front of the protesters, but I didn't realize what was happening until they surged forward, batons raised.

This policeman took a swing at me and I screamed. He narrowly missed.

This time the dispersion techniques worked: protesters were separated into groups throughout the downtown area. However, they stood their ground and continued peacefully demonstrating...

...and also running when necessary.

But they always came back.

The tear gas launcher.

Snipers

2011-06-16T16:07:00.000+02:00

When I was finally able to, I went with a couple other photographers to Kram, a suburb where violence and looting had been reported. Kram is next to the suburb of Carthage, where some of the president and his family's mansions were located. The trains were operating again, so we took one to Carthage on Sunday, two days after Ben Ali left office. One of the other photographers had gotten to know some young Tunisians from the area who said they would meet us at the station and help guide us.

A note about working with other photographers: it's not easy, especially if you don't know the people you're working with well. It's creatively frustrating. Everyone has a different style and a different idea of how much time to spend in one place and how far to push. It's not ideal from an editor's standpoint, as sometimes competing photographers have similar photos. And it can be especially bad when there are too many in a group. Four is usually too many. Three is alright. Two is about perfect. (We were four.) On the positive side, it's great to be able to share resources, ideas and camaraderie.

The biggest reason people work as a group is for safety, so that you can look out for each other, especially in volatile situations. If one of the team members disappears from the group and nobody can reach him on his mobile phone for 20 minutes, everyone has to stop what they are doing and try to figure out what happened and where the person could be. The idea is to stay within sight of one another.

I'd also like to mention here that, while writers can do some of their work by telephone, photographers must be out, on the ground, documenting the situation in person. There is no substitute for being there. It is another reason photographers sometimes team up in these situations--we need compelling photographs, even if we can't always agree on how to get them.

So, back to Kram. Rioters had stolen cars from local dealerships and set them on fire. Burned-out cars were scattered all over--in parking lots, along the side of the street, and in otherwise empty fields like the one above.

People were stocking up on food and water, as all the shops would close for the day at 4 p.m., well before curfew time. Uncertainty was in the air. People seemed to be buying in bulk.

Bread lines were long.

It's always a little strange seeing regular folks out tending to their business alongside the refuse of chaos.

Tunisian guys shot mobile phone videos in the looted and vandalized home of Jelila Trabelsi, sister of President Ben Ali's wife, in Carthage. The Trabelsi family was blamed by many of the protesters in Tunis for massive corruption and plundering of the national coffers.

After January 14, people in the community weren't sure they could trust the police to keep them safe anymore. In hopes of preventing retribution, looting, intimidation, and random acts of violence, the curfew was strictly enforced in Kram by self-appointed neighborhood watch committees. They built roadblocks, like the one above, with anything they could find, and policed them after curfew started in the late afternoon.

RCD (ruling party) headquarters in Kram. This office was burned and looted too.

Posters and placards supporting Ben Ali covered the floor.

Inside the burned-out headquarters.

We made our way back to downtown Tunis, where there were quite a few police and men on the street.

When I arrived in Tunis on the 13th, my suitcase did not. I had all of my camera equipment with me and the clothes on my back, but nothing else. Because of all the upheaval, no stores were open. I found myself in the middle of a revolution with no toothbrush. (The hotel didn't have one--I asked.) A friend had offered to bring me a few toiletries on her way in from Cairo, so David and I arranged to go get the stuff, and wanted to go out to have a late-afternoon look around another neighborhood, but only had time to get back to the hotel before curfew started.

We were dropped off in the vicinity of Hotel Africa around 4 p.m. Bourguiba Avenue was blocked by tanks and soldiers, so we would need to walk the last few blocks. As the driver sped away from us, we heard the crack of gunfire echo through the now-empty streets. We looked at each other. We walked down the side street closest to us and heard more gunfire. Great. Apparently snipers were firing from the rooftops.

We saw tense police with their weapons raised so I raised both my hands. They told us to stay close to the buildings as we walked. We turned down a lane leading to Bourguiba and the air around us erupted in gunfire. We took cover among tables and chairs at a sidewalk cafe. I grabbed the camera at my side, but a large, armed policeman shouted at me, "No photos!"

A man motioned to us from a small hotel across the lane. "Come inside, quickly!" We ran across and found ourselves in the company of state security officers who were hiding in the tiny hotel lobby. It's the same old story really: you're stuck for some reason in an enclosed space with state security and they proceed to interrogate you. Sigh. After again being hounded by the agents not to take photographs, the shooting finally let up, so David and I got out of there.

A few meters further and we had to take cover again, in the entryway to a store with a bunch of policemen. One of them asked me if I had heard about the armed European spies they had caught? (Turns out some Swedes were in fact on the world's worst poorly-timed hunting trip. I am not making this up! Read here.)

We finally made it to Bourguiba. It was completely silent. We made a run for it across the wide avenue and managed to get inside Hotel Africa without incident.

The sound of gunfire continued to echo long into the night. At around 10 p.m., I learned that the friends of Lucas Dolega, the injured photographer, had been on their way back from the hospital around 4:30 and had been caught in the crossfire. They were pinned down by heavy shooting and had to take cover beneath an armored personnel carrier. By the time I heard about it, they had been stuck outside in the gun battle between police, snipers and the army, for six hours. They finally made it back in to the hotel around midnight.

Silence

2011-06-11T00:38:00.003+02:00

Bourgiba Avenue, Tunis, Jan. 15, 2011

Faced with logistical and safety challenges, my New York Times colleague David Kirkpatrick and I decided to switch hotels on the morning of January 15. We went first to Hotel Africa, where we had both taken refuge the day before, to see if it would be a good option.

I knew many other journalists were staying there, some of whom were scattered throughout the lobby when we arrived. I introduced myself to a group of photographers sitting close to the front desk and asked how they felt about the hotel and if it seemed relatively secure.

The mood of this group was somber. They spoke quietly to one another in French, while one guy paced back and forth, looking extremely worried. When I asked what was wrong, one of them said, "Our friend, a photographer, was shot in the head with a tear gas canister yesterday."

On January 14, when the first volleys of tear gas fell on Bourguiba Avenue and protesters ran from the police, a group of six photographers--four French, one Swiss and one Belgian--ran with them. Working as a team in order to keep each other safe, the photographers followed the demonstrators into the smaller streets near the city center, documenting the clashes as they went.

Here is the photographers' account of what happened, in a statement they released a couple of days later:

"...At 4:23PM, Tunisian police force shot a teargas canister in our direction. The projectile, an aluminum cylinder around 20cm long and 5cm diameter, shot horizontally at head level from a distance of less than 20 meters, hit our colleague Lucas Mebrouk Dolega to the head. We gave him first help on the spot, and within a few moments evacuated him in a colleague's car first to 'Le Secours' clinic where Lucas' condition was stabilized before being transported in a neighbor's car to Tunis Rabta Neurologic Hospital. Lucas was immediately operated upon by Professor Djmal. The operation was successful and Lucas was maintained in an artificial coma.

The diagnostic was: extradural left frontal hematoma, meningeal hemorrhage, fractured left sinuses, fractured left orbit, lesion to the left eye.

His condition after the operation was considered stable but critical. Hope was that Lucas would survive notwithstanding the loss of his left eye.

His condition worsened overnight, his coma deepened. His family arrived in Tunis on January 16.

Loucas Von Zabiensky-Mebrouk, a.k.a. Lucas Dolega, died this morning, January 17 at Rabta hospital in Tunis, surrounded by his family, spouse, and friends."

January 15, the day after President Ben Ali resigned and fled to Saudi Arabia, was difficult in ways I had never before experienced. I tried to shake off the news that a colleague, a photographer like me, had been gravely injured. I was advised by my new French friends not to go out shooting--it was simply too unstable and unpredictable, they said. They were visibly shaken by all that had happened in the past 24 hours.

But I felt like I had to try. Finding a driver on that day was impossible, so after we checked in to Hotel Africa, I asked David if he would take a short walk with me in the area, just to test the water. At around noon, we walked to the end of the avenue. I don't remember seeing a single civilian on the street--it was almost completely silent. I went to the roof of a building and took the photograph at the top of this blog post. It is my single image from that day, a deserted, ghost-like Bourguiba Avenue, the street still graced by posters of Ben Ali and guarded by Tunisian Army tanks. (Hotel Africa is the tallest building on the right side of the photograph.)

We decided to walk back toward the hotel on a parallel street just one block west of the main avenue. Within minutes, we were stopped by police, young men wearing white vests over their civilian clothes and carrying truncheons. We showed them our press IDs and started to walk away. One of them said, "I want your camera. Give it to me." He took a few steps toward us, but I said, "No," and kept walking. He called after me again, but I didn't turn around and started walking faster.

I was getting a bad feeling. It was time to head back to the hotel. My day was over and we had only been outside for 30 minutes. When we returned, I learned that a photographer had been chased by a mob of young men and had to hide in someone's home until he was safely able to exit the area. Late in the afternoon we spotted snipers on the tops of the buildings along the avenue. The hotel staff went from room to room telling guests to close their windows and draw the shades.

Besides the concern for our injured colleague's welfare, I myself felt truly vulnerable. I know I am not the only person who miscalculated what would happen in Tunisia and the effect it would have on the whole region, but I was unprepared for the violence. It had never occurred to me that tear gas could be lethal, and there I was without so much as a bike helmet. And now it appeared that we had even bigger problems to worry about. I had left my body armor at home, as had numerous colleagues who arrived in Tunis before January 14.

I wish I could say that this combination of events had no effect on the quality of my work, but I would be lying. I also don't write about it here to make excuses. I only want to acknowledge that it affected me. It is important to remember that some things are more important than work.

We are not machines. These things matter.

Collapse

2011-06-07T12:37:00.005+02:00

Tunisia under President Ben Ali was a police state, where freedom of speech existed as long as you weren't criticizing the government, and direct opposition was punished. I had been in Tunis less than a day, and the security apparatus already had me looking over my shoulder. When I returned to my hotel to file photographs from the pro-government rally and eat dinner, I noticed two men sit, one casually reading a newspaper, at the table next to mine. I thought it was odd that they would pick that table in the gigantic and nearly empty dining room and it seemed a tad late in the day to be reading the paper. (10 p.m.?) The man reading tried to strike up a conversation, but it sounded too much like a mild interrogation--who was I, where was I from? What was my occupation, and for whom was I working? What was my opinion of Tunisia? And would I like to share a bottle of wine with them?

Uh, no. I evaded the questions, then pretended to be engrossed in my mobile phone. Maybe I am paranoid, but something was making me uneasy. When I moved to join colleagues at another table, I felt the questioner's eyes follow me. State security already knew where I was staying, and already knew who I was working for: I was required to provide that information upon my arrival at the airport. Perhaps they were just reminding me that I was being watched?

Protesters organized a general strike and demonstration for the following day, Friday, January 14. Tens of thousands of people gathered in the heart of Tunis on Bourguiba Avenue in front of the Ministry of Interior (in above picture, MOI is on the right), the focal point of so many grievances. The building was protected by perhaps 100-200 policemen, who formed a cordon around the outside.

I have learned a lot since this, the beginning of the Arab Spring. Revolutionary Lesson #1: It does not pay to be short at a ginormous protest. Even my Hail Mary was too short. (For you non-photo people, a Hail Mary is where you raise your camera above your head as high as it will go and press the shutter, praying that the photo you took blindly was magically in-focus and well-composed.) Luckily, I like to climb. First I stood in a planter (sorry, Tunisian civil servant outdoor gardener guy...), but I was STILL too short. So then I scrambled up a light post and balanced on a rounded edge while protesters braced my legs so I wouldn't fall.

I spent several hours at the demonstration. People chanted "Dégage!" which means, "Get out!" in French. (Because of Tunisia's decades as a French protectorate and the two countries' continuing close relationship, nearly everyone in Tunis seemed to speak French, in addition to Arabic of course.)

An attorney wore his courtroom attire to the protest.

Not much had changed at the protest after a few hours, so I decided to file some photos to the Times. (Non-journalist folk: to file=to send pictures, notes, reporting to the publication via the Internet. In this day of the 24-hour news cycle, journalists typically file several times a day on a big story.) It was mid-afternoon and David was filing notes at a nearby hotel. I just had to pick up my laptop from our hired driver, a guy we'll call Hamid. (Hamid was the same guy the day before who refused to drive into Hammamet to pick us up.) When I left the protest, the police appeared to be firmly in control and weren't allowing the protesters to get too close to the MOI.

Hamid and I had set up a meeting point several blocks away from the demonstration, as he had refused to get any closer. I picked up everything I had left in his car, which consisted of a huge backpack full of my laptop, a lens I wasn't using, battery chargers and all sorts of other things I didn't need while I was shooting. It was pretty heavy, but I could manage it until I got to the hotel, which was on the same street as the demonstration.

Revolutionary Lesson #2: Revolutions are unpredictable. No matter how normal things seem, the situation can change in a heartbeat.

As I walked back up to the protest, I saw immediately that things had changed. People were climbing the outside walls of the Ministry of the Interior. The air was tense--it felt like something dramatic was about to happen.

I knew that I had to keep shooting. No time to file now.

I fought my way through the thick crowd to the front of the building and climbed a small guardhouse next to the front door. I have never seen so many people in the same place before. To this day I marvel that I was there. I saw this with my own eyes. Tens of thousands of people raising their voices for change.

Wow. Unbelievable! My respect to the Tunisian people for their incredible courage.

Protesters began climbing onto the guardhouse. One tried to climb to the roof of the ministry building by using my huge backpack as a stepping stone, nearly sending me off the edge. The crowd was pushing toward the building more and more, until...

...there was a loud BOOM.

Several more booms followed and the air filled with smoke. I never discovered the precise reason the police began firing tear gas at the crowd, but I guess the shit, as they say, was finally hitting the fan in Tunis.

People in the crowd waved their arms, pleading for calm.

A couple of demonstrators helped me and the ginormous backpack down from the guardhouse and I ran toward the smoke. After all, if the photos aren't good enough, I'm not close enough, right? (I think it was famous war photographer Robert Capa who said that.)

Which leads me to Revolutionary Lesson #3: Always carry lemons, onions or vinegar to a protest to counteract the effects of tear gas. Or better still, a gas mask!

This was my first experience with tear gas: I was woefully unprepared. No lemons, no nothing. I made just a few frames in the melee before a tear gas canister--I believe it is the plume of smoke seen in the upper left of this photograph--landed right next to me. I inhaled. (It was an accident!) I was completely overcome, choking, crying. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move.

Two young Tunisian men noticed my distress and came to my aid. "Hey are you okay?" Nope, not okay. They lifted my backpack and cameras onto their shoulders and took me by the elbows, dragging me away from the gas. They stayed with me until I was breathing again and could talk. The staff of a nearby hotel, I would later learn it was Hotel Africa located fifty meters from the Ministry of the Interior, had erected a barrier in front of the hotel's glass exterior doors. My good samaritans deposited me on the other side of the barrier and, noticing the approach of the riot police, ran down the street. I yelled after them to come inside, but they said no, only foreigners were allowed. And then they were gone.

I took a minute to catch my breath. Dozens of people had taken refuge inside the hotel's lobby. I stayed between the barrier and the glass doors. Suddenly a tear gas canister rolled beneath the barrier, filling the small space and the lobby with gas. Everyone ran through the lobby's back door to the maintenance area of the hotel, where fresh air wafted in through the loading dock. The staff handed everyone a lemon and passed out cokes as we all recovered from the effects of the tear gas.

After a few minutes' rest, I decided to step outside. I was alone, and what I saw made me afraid. I decided to stay within ten meters of the hotel's entrance so that I could duck back inside, and, more importantly, so that others hiding behind the barrier could see if the police came for me.

Across the street, protesters who had taken refuge in the small side streets were forced onto the wide avenue, screaming and running with their arms raised as the police chased and hit them with their truncheons.

And I was alone on the street. Journalists who were guests in the hotel were filming from their rooms on floors above me.

Then I noticed that police were forcefully clearing the protesters from my side of the street. Demonstrators were terrified.

The police noticed me, but allowed me to continue shooting. A plain clothes policeman yelled, "Sahafa!"--"press" in Arabic--and the police stopped hitting the demonstrators with their truncheons.

A couple of cameramen joined me on the street, having been prohibited from filming from their hotel rooms. The guy chasing this protester was the one who yelled to the other police that members of the press were nearby.

I hope that our presence spared at least a few people from being beaten by the police. However, after just a few minutes of shooting, I was forced back inside the hotel by a more senior-looking plainclothes policeman.

So I decided it was finally time to file some pictures. It was a lucky accident that I had everything I needed to file with me. (A primary rule of a photographer friend, Chris Hondros, comes to mind: "Always bring everything with you!")

Another lucky accident, I ran into David Kirkpatrick, whom I had been unable to reach by telephone, in the hotel lobby. We sat together while we each filed our work to New York. While we were sitting there, the news reached us that President Ben Ali had resigned.

It is difficult to describe that moment. I can only tell you that I knew the world had changed. An Arab people had overthrown one of their own dictators for the first time ever. The power of that moment still gives me goosebumps when I think about it.

After filing our work, David and I stepped back outside. By then it was late in the afternoon, perhaps 4 p.m. We saw a man on the ground surrounded by police in the distance and tried to approach, but the police became very aggressive toward us.

I worry about what happened to that man.

A couple of other journalists came to us and recommended that we get off the street immediately, that things were getting really dangerous, that absolutely anything was possible at that moment. "They could murder a couple of foreign journalists without thinking twice." The army had stepped in and was enforcing an early curfew, and we needed to get back to our hotel, which was too far to walk to, as soon as possible.

David and I walked to the appointed meeting place and called our driver Hamid. No answer. We called him again. He didn't pick up his phone. He never picked up, and he never came to get us.

Outside the heart of downtown Tunis, not a soul darkened the street on this revolutionary evening.

Please read David Kirkpatrick's account of Jan. 14, 2011, in Tunis here.

The Spark

2011-05-30T08:09:00.000+02:00

Tunis, Tunisia, Jan. 14, 2011

Every revolution requires a catalyst, a tipping point. A spark to start the flame. For the Arab World, Tunisia was the instrument giving millions of people hope that change was possible.

When the foreign photo editor of the New York Times called me late in the afternoon on Jan. 12, 2011, I was aware that demonstrations had reached Tunisia's capital, Tunis. I was instructed to get to Tunis immediately. I packed my bags in ten minutes and raced to the airport.

I had no idea, no concept, that this trip would change my life, and that what would happen in Tunisia would change the course of history in the Arab World.

The tipping point for Tunisians was a young man by the name of Mohamed Bouazizi. A 26-year-old college graduate, Boazizi, like many young Tunisians, was scraping by, barely earning enough to support his family. He was a fruit vendor on the streets of his home village Sidi Bouzid. One day in mid-December 2010, police confiscated his merchandise and his scale. Then they beat him. Refused the chance to even plead his case, he went to the middle of the street in front of the governor's office and set himself on fire.

The spark.

This act struck a chord with the people of Sidi Bouzid. In most Arab countries, corruption, injustice and oppression had been the norm for decades. Residents of Sidi Bouzid began protesting on the streets, raising their voices for dignity and justice. Despite a crackdown by the Tunisian government on the demonstrations, other Tunisians in other cities heard the call. The movement spread like wildfire via Facebook and Twitter. By the time Bouazizi died on Jan. 4, 2011, the demonstrations had nearly reached Tunis.

I arrived in Tunis on January 13. Americans can enter Tunisia without a visa, but the passport officials took about two seconds to figure out that I was a journalist. They searched my luggage and confiscated my equipment, insisting that I needed permission from the press office to retrieve my gear. I refused to leave the airport without my cameras and spent the next several hours pushing, pleading, making phone calls and basically making a nuisance of myself.

Finally at about 3 p.m., they relented and I was on my way. The Times' correspondent David Kirkpatrick was reporting riots in a town 70 km outside Tunis called Hammamet. I hopped in a taxi to meet him there.

When I arrived this is what I saw:

Residents of Hammamet were gathered at the mansion of a relative of the president, Zine al Abidine Ben Ali. Throughout his presidency, Ben Ali had filtered money and privilege into the hands of his small circle of relatives and friends. This made the extravagant living quarters of this small group of people very visible targets for Tunisian anger.

Rioters had already torched the home and others set to looting the goods inside. I had never seen anything like this. Many of my colleagues had watched Baghdad fall, had seen the chaos of other urban conflicts. In my relatively short time in the Middle East, I had only seen protests crushed by riot police, and demonstrators afraid to drop over the precipice.

I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting the police to arrive and smash my cameras. But nobody came.

It was bizarre and unsettling to watch. I was the only photographer there. For awhile, nobody took much notice of me. I guess they were too caught up in the moment. In Afghanistan and other conflict areas where I have worked, I have learned from my colleagues how to gauge how long I should stay in risky areas. In this case, I had no barometer, no one to ask, just my own intuition to go on.

The outside walls of the kitchen were made of glass. I had never seen what happens when people go out of their minds with rage.

Although they were stealing right before my eyes, some people made a point of reminding me that they were simply taking what they felt was theirs. The spoils of their hard work, stolen by the powerful.

It makes sense in a twisted way. A swimming pool? A gleaming white mansion and spacious garden right on the sea? And just outside the walled compound, people working their tails off to barely keep a roof over their heads.

The graffiti reads, "Death to Ben Ali."

At some point people began to get more aggressive toward me and my cameras. Time to leave.

I found David and we walked to his waiting taxi at the edge of town--the driver was too afraid to come closer--and we rode back in to Tunis together.
Click here to read my colleague David Kirkpatrick's account of this day.

In what must have been a last-ditch effort, the president and ruling party organized a pro-government rally that evening in the capital. A small group (but large enough to be noticed) hit the streets with flags, placards and beautifully-printed banners.

At the time, I thought it was a decent show of support, perhaps because I didn't have anything to compare it to. But, in hindsight, it was like they were standing in the ocean trying to prevent a tsunami from hitting the shore.

Perhaps the rally had been in the works for awhile--or perhaps the government kept a stock of pro-government, pro-Ben Ali material at hand for just such a moment. I wondered who these people were: civil servants? Police? Rising ruling party members?

Maybe Ben Ali already knew what would happen the next day. Maybe he had already packed his bags. But did Mubarak know? Did Qaddafi?

Arab Spring

2011-05-21T08:06:00.001+02:00

Cairo, Egypt, Jan. 26, 2011.

2011 has brought unprecedented change to the Middle East and North Africa. People in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, West Bank/Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain and Iran have demonstrated for governmental and economic reform, regime change, civil rights and human rights. They've protested police torture, corruption and other abuses of power. They have broken the barrier of fear that has kept the unjust status quo for so long. They have taken their future into their own hands, and, for once, their leaders and the world are starting to listen.

It has been intense and incredible to observe. Sometimes I still can't believe what I have seen and heard. I have covered just three of the Arab World's uprisings--it has felt like three lifetimes. I will try to deconstruct what I've seen and experienced here.

My only question: Where to begin?

Emergency

2010-12-15T13:20:00.000+02:00

I've been busy! I'll spend the next couple of weeks posting recent stories and projects, starting with this story about Emergency Hospital that I worked on while I was in Afghanistan for a month this fall. The doctors and nurses at Emergency were kind enough to let me spend a few days with them, observing and listening to the patients inside:

After shrapnel from a mortar shell penetrated the skull of 1-year-old Bashir Ahmed, pictured above in his mother’s arms, the boy ended up in an intensive care unit in one of Afghanistan’s most medically advanced hospitals.

Emergency Surgical Center for War Victims is Kabul’s newest war hospital. The hospital, run and funded by the Italian Emergency non-governmental organization since 2001, changed its admission criteria to treat only “war wounds”—shell injuries, bullet wounds and stabbings—just three months ago.

The change, according to current medical coordinator Dr. Antonio Rainone, happened because the hospital has seen a dramatic increase in shell injuries and bullet wounds in the past year. A whole ward of the hospital lies empty, ready to use in case of a mass casualty incident.

“It is Afghanistan that has gone back to being a war country,” said Dr. Rainone.

Emergency Hospital is proof of the growing violence and complexity of conflict happening around the capital. Patients come to the 100-bed medical facility from Logar, Wardak, Ghazni, Kapisa, Parwan and Kabul provinces, sometimes even from as far away as Baghlan or Kunduz in the North and Paktika province in the Southeast.

Their injuries, almost without exception, are severe and complicated. Thirty percent of patients are children.

The following photographs provide a look inside Emergency Hospital.

Thirteen months ago, Apzal was shot in the chest by an AK-47-wielding tribal rival in his home district of Urgun, Paktika province. The 18-year-old’s spinal cord was shattered by the bullet and he is now paraplegic. In Afghanistan, treatment and care of people with serious spinal cord injuries is sparse. Apzal has spent the last several months at Emergency being treated for pressure sores, deep and potentially-fatal tissue wounds that sometimes develop in bed-ridden patients.

Dr. Antonio Rainone examines the chest x-ray of a patient with bullet wounds.

Ruhillah, a mother of four, lives in Ghazni province in the village of Khuschi, where she said Taliban and pro-government residents live side-by-side. She was asleep at home with her family when a rocket exploded nearby. Ruhillah’s arm and jaw were fractured, and now her mouth is wired shut to help her heal. Her 2-year-old son and her husband were also injured.

Italian nurses, from left, Georgia Novello and Andrea Freda and anesthesiologist Federico Cafagna wheel a patient with two bullet wounds to the chest back to the operating theater. The patient had arrived earlier in the day and immediately underwent surgery to repair the damage. However, steady blood loss indicated a problem, so surgeons prepared to open him back up.

Surgeons look for damaged tissue in a patient with bullet wounds to the chest.

Gul Bashara, 11, cries out in pain while her mother and aunt move her to a wheelchair in the children’s ward. She was outside at home in Logar province with her brothers and sisters when a shell landed in the family’s garden. Seven children were injured and two were killed in the explosion. Gul Bashara’s spine was injured and she was paralyzed from the waist down. She also has severe flesh wounds to her arms, legs, back and chest.

Gul Bashara’s 4-year-old sister Sidiqa received two badly broken legs in the explosion.

Norullah was at a relative’s wedding in Wardak province when a grenade was thrown into the wedding party. He had injuries to his arms and abdomen, and lost vision in his right eye.

Minadar, a mother of nine, said she and her family huddled in their home in Sar e Pol province while fighting raged one night. A mortar detonated nearby, killing one of her sons and injuring two others. Minadar’s right hand was amputated and she suffered a severe fracture and open wound to her left arm. She said she thought the situation in Afghanistan was getting worse. “I wish the war was finished,” she said.

Anesthesiologists prepare 8-year-old Waris from Logar province for emergency surgery. The boy had shrapnel wounds to the chest, abdomen and skull.

Mohammad Agha, 20, was shot in the chest outside of a polling station in his home district of Archi, Kunduz province, on September 18, the day of Afghanistan’s parliamentary election. The bullet damaged his spinal cord: he is now paraplegic. He got engaged shortly before his injury, and now can’t summon the courage to tell his fiancée that he’ll likely spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

Khan Agha, right, 28, talks with a relative outside his hospital ward. Agha is an Afghan policeman in Takhar province, is married, and has two young sons. He said he was in a firefight with Taliban insurgents and stepped on a mine while running. His left leg was amputated as a result of his injury. When asked how he would be able to earn a living, he said, “I don’t know, but God will provide.”

A child sleeps at Emergency Hospital. He had shell injuries including a broken leg and shrapnel in his abdomen.

Pause

2010-09-12T17:11:00.000+03:00

I've been hiding out in the U.S. for the past few weeks. I decided it was time for a little R&R.

I got to see lots of family and friends, survived a mild concussion and an inner tube wipeout and attended two weddings.

Above, a campfire before my brother's wedding near Polson, Montana. (I love campfires.)

My sister-in-law's wedding dress on the big day. I was in the wedding, so I didn't shoot very much.

My friend Bridget's wedding in Seattle.

Iraqi stowaway in my car to the airport, Columbus, Ohio.

Sept. 11, Fire Island, NY, ferry.

New York City, from a train window.

Cairo, here I come...

Endurance

2010-07-09T13:44:00.004+03:00

Above, women lift their hands during Friday prayers at Moqtada al-Sadr headquarters, Sadr City.

I witnessed Sadr's female devotees as they prayed, tucked away behind the walls of his office compound. To see more photographs from this unique experience, visit the post I wrote for The New York Times' At War blog by clicking here.

In Iraq, no one is untouched by the chaos of war. Women have lost husbands, fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, to violence and prison. They've been threatened for not wearing the scarf and the abaya. They've been attacked for being Christian, Sunni or Shia. They have been displaced from their homes and have had to find a way to work, study and take care of their families under the most difficult of circumstances.

Although their daily lives have changed dramatically since the 2003 invasion, women don't seem to have much of a voice in politics or the media. They have been largely sidelined by mainstream Iraqi politics and only seem to make an appearance in a story if they were involved in a bombing or other bloodshed.

Because I am a woman, I was able to get inside the world of Iraqi women and come away with something from their lives. It is an incomplete picture, at best, but I was amazed at the stories these women told me. They keep going despite their grief, despite their fear, despite everything they have seen and experienced.

Another photograph inside Sadr's office headquarters.

I went to Baghdad University to photograph students on the first day of Spring exams. Read the blog post for At War by clicking here.

With the help of Zaid, an Iraqi employee of The New York Times, I started photographing students in the co-ed department of physics as they crammed before their first test. Although we had written permission from the Ministry of Education, within minutes an instructor was demanding that we get additional permission from the dean of the department, who was unavailable. Next we tried the political science department, also a co-ed program.

Nope. Denied.

Discouraged and worried that this seemingly innocuous photo idea would turn into something impossible, we finally tried the Women's College of Education. Bingo. We talked to the assistant dean and he sent someone with us to help inform people what we were doing.

I was surprised that we were granted access to a women's school. My experience in the Middle East has often been the opposite--women's places are harder to access.

Zaid's theory was that co-ed university departments could become targets for Islamists hoping to make a statement. Men and women mixing together, attending the same classes, sitting side-by-side to study--none of this would fly with any number of extremist groups. And indeed, universities in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities have come under attack, so perhaps the co-ed departments were being extremely protective. But who knows.

People in Iraq are afraid.

Above, women crammed minutes before their psychology exam. It was great to see so many women attending classes at Iraq's largest University. The Women's College of Education alone has 4,000 students. If they pass the course of study, these women will go on to become teachers in public schools across Iraq.

Students in Iraq have amazing dedication. Residents of Baghdad can expect 4-6 hours of electricity per day, unless they can afford a private generator. IED's explode on Baghdad streets on a daily basis. Yet the students return to class day after day.

Students check for their names on the classroom door before the start of their history exam.

Women gather every Sunday at Sayyed Idris shrine to pray, talk to each other and lie in the shrine's cool interior. To see more, check out the At War blog post here.

The shrine is a place where women bring their grief and troubles, and their hopes. It's something many of us can relate to: when the world goes crazy, we too often turn to religion, each other or both. They focus on personal issues--family, work, happiness.

A woman quietly reads the Quran inside.

The shrine itself has been a target from rockets, gunfire and numerous nearby bombings. But the women still come every Sunday.

A woman carries a sleeping baby inside the shrine.

At Noon's salon in Karrada neighborhood, owner Nahla George Daniel added extensions to a customer's hair.

In 2007, Daniel, a Christian, fled to the Dohuk in Kurdistan. She was terrified by the many attacks on Christians. She came back to Baghdad last year to pick up life where it left off. And so far, business has been good. Women have flocked back to her tiny two-story shop for manicures, pedicures, hair cuts and color.

Doesn't the desire for that which is "normal" overwhelm all of us at one time or another? Baghdad must surely be the extreme opposite of "normal". How long can one endure it?

It took a lot of courage for Daniel to return to Baghdad, and also to let me photograph her and her salon.

Hanin Ghanim gets purple hair color at the salon while her sister Shams, 17, watches. The stylist is Daniel's daughter Nagwa Amir, 18.

Samaa Al-Sarraf, 24, got her hair colored at the salon.

Electricity wires above a portrait of the Imam Hussein, Sadr City.

The biggest complaint I heard while I was in Iraq was about the lack of basic services, especially electricity. Private generators provide the bulk of power for those who can afford it. When there is no power, it affects everyone's lives--especially in summer when the temperatures can reach 125 degrees Fahrenheit.

Customers negotiate for the price of meat in the women's market in Sadr City, where many of the stalls are run by women, and nearly all of the customers are as well.

"Everything we earn here we spend on our stomachs," Naima Abd Al-Saada, a spice seller, told me. She said the Iraqi people are tired. I believe her.

Fabric store owner Makiya Hemeli, left, watches a customer sort through used fabric in Sadr City.

Hanin Thaer, 5, kisses her 5-month-old sister Yasamine Thaer in the tent where they live in Sadr City. Hanin's mother, Iqbal Achoup Shuker, is on the right. The family, led by Shuker's widowed mother-in-law, has no home and has been squatting on a piece of land for the past four years. They survive by collecting cans and other goods to recycle.

The most difficult place

2010-07-05T13:45:00.006+03:00

(At the end of my New York Times rotation, I wrote an essay for the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship newsletter about working in Iraq.)

For the past seven weeks, I have been the bureau photographer for the New York Times in Baghdad. This was my first visit to Iraq, and although I have worked in Afghanistan, Gaza and Yemen, I have found Iraq to be the most difficult place to do my job.

For now, much of the violence seems to have subsided and life is slowly improving. Markets, commercial areas and nightlife are blossoming. Occasional explosions and gunfire briefly shatter the calm, but people maneuver around the roadblocks and continue on their way to work or university.

But fear lingers. Seven years of brutal violence have left their mark here. Iraqis are haunted by bombings, kidnappings, murders and gun battles. They don't trust the government, the media or each other.

It's the fear that makes working here difficult. When I talk to people, they often deny my request to use their names. Iraqis of all stripes are extremely wary of cameras and nearly always request proof of formal permission, usually from a ministry or other government entity. Even then, people are not eager to put themselves out in the public eye.

It is nearly impossible to photograph the aftermath of a car bomb or street battle. In most cases, the scene is blocked by police, and cameras are simply not allowed. The government has decided that published photographs of deadly bombings aid the cause of insurgents.

In any conflict zone, personal safety must come first. Finding the balance between being able to work and being secure in Iraq has proven a challenge. When I work, I try to be as unobtrusive as possible. I try to make myself small and quiet. I try to blend in. For the first time in my career, armed bodyguards and two cars follow me wherever I go, a fact that has changed the dynamic of my work dramatically. Moving from place to place is complicated by checkpoints, IED's and blast walls. I often work wearing the abaya and a scarf to cover my hair. It took nearly a month for me to figure out how to work under all of the security measures.

Despite all of this, Iraq has grown on me. My rotation here is at an end and I am sad to leave. Iraq's story remains compelling and most Iraqis are warm and hospitable. Iraqis have witnessed unimaginable horrors, but they keep going.

(Photos: An Iraqi National Army soldier guards a neighborhood in Mosul, Iraq; a death announcement hangs outside the bombed former home of poet, painter, translator and novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra in Baghdad; a sandstorm colors Baghdad's blast walls yellow.)

Night's rebirth?

2010-06-30T08:02:00.005+03:00

Going out to dinner, a club or a movie are things I take for granted, and I don't have to worry about a militarily-enforced curfew.

Baghdad is another story. Years of violence have meant people stay home at night, away from car bombings targeting restaurants and theaters. Clubs are few and far between, and the streets must be completely clear by the midnight curfew.

A recent lag in violence has coincided with a rise in evening social activities. Nightlife may be making a comeback in Iraq's weary capital.

I worked with Anthony Shadid on a story about a new, enormous, spectacularly-decorated restaurant called the Lebanese Club. If you'd enjoy reading Anthony's story about this Baghdad destination, click here. He really captured the flavor of nightlife in Baghdad.

The main dining room of the Lebanese Club. The manager, chef and much of the wait staff are actually from Lebanon.

Outdoor seating affords a view of the Tigris and a distant oil refinery.

The main dining room. (The air conditioning bills for this place must be outrageous!)

A V.I.P. room, "ala Scarface," as Anthony put it. The best quote was from the Lebanese manager of the club, Antoine al-Hage: "Where there's war, there's lots of money."

The guard room outside the Lebanese Club. Because, V.I.P.'s of course have lots of bodyguards.

In comparison, one of Baghdad's more typical eating establishments--bright, colorful and full of glass.

This family restaurant also had a bit of a unique style, complete with live parakeets, mannequins and a saxophone-playing Santa .

Chile restaurant had a shisha cafe attached. Wish I could have smoked one there, but glassy restaurants are still pretty much off-limits to foreigners.

Some young guys smoking shisha in the cafe.

Anthony and I also attended the premiere of an Iraqi-made feature-length movie, the first to come out in a long time.

The movie was called "Son of Babylon," was directed by young Iraqi Mohamed Al-Diradji and was filmed entirely in Iraq. It screened at the Sundance Film Festival. The film was all in Kurdish with Arabic subtitles, so I couldn't understand much of the plot. Basically it's about a boy and his grandmother who go in search of the boy's father, sometime around the American invasion in 2003.

Another great story by Mr. Shadid can be found here.

The street where the theater was located was closed off to traffic and guarded by Iraqi National Army soldiers and tanks.

Everyone got the friendly pat-down at the door. It was a pleasure to see so many people at the film's red-carpet premiere. A very special evening for Iraqis.

No popcorn at this theater, just hamburgers. And tea.

Then the audience found their seats and waited for the movie to start...

Baghdad's blast walls

2010-06-27T10:54:00.001+03:00

(A version of this post appeared on the New York Times AT WAR blog on June 11, 2010.)

Baghdad's blast walls are a blank canvas. They reflect Iraqis' shared history--both proud and painful facts of life here in the capital. The walls document how life is, as well as how people would like it to be.

Most of the blast walls, free-standing grey concrete structures lining main streets and the Green Zone, are ugly, bare and foreboding--daily reminders of war. Last August, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ordered the walls removed from Baghdad's streets. Days later, a double truck-bomb at the Finance and Foreign Ministries killed at least 95 people, and the plan to remove the walls was scrapped.

It is impossible not to notice the walls, and the paintings and markings on them become like landmarks.

Artists have painted some of the walls with reminders of things Iraqis have in common--ancient Mesopotamian history, religious symbols, portraits and patriotic slogans. Pedestrian, spray-painted graffiti occasionally adorns the walls. Faded and peeling campaign posters from Iraq's 2009 election are still glued in place.

The walls also record bomb blasts. Pockmarked with shrapnel holes or blackened with soot, these sections remind us why the walls exist in the first place.

Graffiti, Qadisiya neighborhood.

A boy squeezes through a crack in Sadr City's blast walls.

An artist painted some of Iraq's ancient artifacts, like this Sumerian statue, on the outside of the French Cultural Center blast walls in Abu Nawass.

Painting of an Iraqi soldier with an RPG outside a military camp. The walls were put together backwards, causing the eagle to miss part of his tail.

A veiled woman, outside an Iraqi politician's residence on Zeitoun Street.

A map of Iraq with the words "Paradise, our homeland" stands on a blast wall outside the destroyed Ministry of Justice building on Haifa Street. A van packed with explosives was detonated outside the ministry on Oct. 25, 2009, in one of the worst days of bombings in the capital in the past year. As many as 30 children were killed in the blast, which destroyed the ministry's two day care centers.

Workers pick up trash in front of a painting of a man fishing along the banks of a river, Sadr City.

A blast wall is splattered with blood where a bomb detonated outside the Ishtar Sheraton Hotel on Jan. 25, 2010. At least 36 people were killed in a string of suicide bombings at the Sheraton, Babylon and Hamra Hotels.

Road Trip Yemen

2010-06-20T19:39:00.009+03:00

I teamed up with Abigail Hauslohner on a road trip from Sana'a, Yemen's capital, to Aden and back last November. She shot and produced this lovely video report for TIME.com: Road Tripping in Yemen.

I wouldn't say that a road trip through a failed state is ever something that would have occurred to me, but I am glad it occurred to Abby. I feel fortunate to have been part of such an eye-opening experience.

Yemen is without doubt a troubled place. As Abby reported, lawlessness, a water shortage, a conflict with Houthi rebels in the north and clashes with separatists in the South continue to destabilize the Arabian Peninsula's poorest state, making it fertile ground for extreme Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups. Yemen is an intensely tribal place, and the central government doesn't seem to control much outside the capital.

Not many independent reports come out of Yemen, and this was a chance to see a deeper, more human side to a place at the heart of so much turmoil.

We started out traveling by bus from the Old City in Sana'a.

Because of attacks on buses carrying Western tourists, we had to get special permission from the tourist police to travel by public transport outside the capital.

A village seen from the window. Nearly every woman I saw in Yemen was completely covered in public.

A young bus passenger peeks over her seat at me and Abby, the two foreigners, the only women not covering their faces with niqab, the face veil.

A qat market, seen from the bus window. One of the first things I learned about Yemen is that everyone chews qat (pronounced "gaht" in the Yemeni dialect), a leafy plant that contains a mild narcotic. Afternoons are for sitting, chewing qat, and discussing life. Business shuts down by 2 p.m. and men and women are chewing by 4, if not earlier.

The bulging cheek, filled with qat, is a common sight all over Yemen. The narcotic in the leaves gives one a mild buzz.

Men chew qat in public, sometimes in stalls lining the streets like this one in Sana'a, or in the mafrage of the house. A mafrage is a room with cushions lining the walls, often on the top floor of the house, where everybody sits and hangs out. Women chew qat too, but men and women don't generally hang out together.

Moving on...

I was stunned by the scenery as we traveled south toward the city of Taizz. We stopped overnight in these mountains in a village called Al Qaeda. (Really! But not that Al Qaeda. "Al Qaeda" means "the base" in Arabic.) We were invited to a wedding by a fellow bus passenger, but because of Yemen's intensely conservative culture toward women, it was unfortunately impossible for me to photograph it. Read Abby's story about the experience here: A Wedding in the Town of Al Qaeda. Totally other-worldly experience, and we were the honored guests.

A relative of the bride, Bandar, drove us from Al Qaeda to Taizz, where he often does business in the qat trade. Notice the casette tapes stacked under the console and to the right of the steering wheel, fantastic Yemeni music.

Bandar takes a cigarette break in Taizz, a city sprawling beneath the mountains.

The ultimate host, Bandar wanted us to see a bit of Taizz before we departed for Aden. He started our tour by taking us to a huge hotel on the side of the mountain, where families sat outside and took in the view of the city. I tried (and semi-succeeded) to make friends with the women with my minimal Arabic.

From there, we visited Cairo castle, a refurbished fort on the side of the mountain in Taizz.

A view of Taizz from the castle.

Finally, Bandar wanted us to experience camels in a whole new way...

...by drinking milk fresh from the beast! That's Yussef, 13, taking a swig. I didn't try it, but Abby did, brave soul that she is. She declared it "salty and warm."

Ew.

From Taizz we covered our faces and hopped in a shared taxi that would take us to Aden. Road trips are an excellent time to chew qat.

To chew, just tear up the leaves and stick them in your cheek, where they will stay for the next several hours.

The shared taxi stand in Taizz.

And we're off to Aden!

An improvised shelter and a girl, seemingly in the middle of nowhere along the road. According to UNICEF, around 50 percent of Yemeni children suffer from malnutrition.

A mosque and rugged mountains.

Guys sitting, chewing qat and watching traffic pass.

Abby and I shared the front seat with the driver.

The shared taxi driver, on the outskirts of Aden.

This is Aden, a city built on a giant crater.

A fisherman at dusk near the Fish Market. Yemen's fishing industry is suffering from piracy and overfishing.

Fishermen fixing a boat. The fishermen sometimes stay out on their boats for days at a time, fixing their meals and sleeping at sea.

Aden Harbor visitors' center, near where the U.S.S. Cole was bombed a decade ago. Aden was once a thriving center of trade and therefore more open to different social and cultural attitudes. It seemed slightly less conservative than the rest of Yemen.

Families board boats for a tour of the harbor.

Baskin Robbin's, Aden.

Men kicked a soccer ball around on a beach just outside the city.

Unlike some of the beaches I'd been to in Aden, women actually went into the water here, abaya and all.

We asked our friendly driver if he knew where we could find a henna artist. And that's how we ended up in the home of one of his relatives' being hennaed by three teenaged girls.

The girls decided to take us to Aden's amusement park, Seera Fun World. It was just one example of the generosity and hospitality we experienced in Yemen.

Most of the people at the park seemed to be women. University and secondary school students were out for the Eid al-Adha holiday, so the park was especially packed.

It was fun to watch everyone having a good time.

I got motion sick on this ride.

Taking these last images and our new friendships with us, we returned to Sana'a.

Bedouin gun runners

2010-04-26T17:12:00.000+02:00

Sometimes not identifying people is a precondition for me being allowed to photograph them.

Such was the case with a group of Bedouin arms smugglers in the Sinai peninsula.

I actually was tagging along with Abigail Hauslohner, TIME's stringer in Cairo. She wrote about Bedouins who smuggle goods and humans across Egypt's borders with Gaza and Israel. To read her two stories, click here ("Egypt's New Challenge: Sinai's Restive Bedouins") and here ("North Sinai: Security Challenges and Ethnic Tensions").

It's always pretty challenging to photograph people who can't actually be photographed.

One of the smugglers cleans his Glock pistol. The Glock was overwhelmingly the chosen sidearm for the smugglers we hung out with.

One of the smugglers' wives.

Me trying to be creative with the whole I-have-photograph-you-but-can't-photograph-you thing.

The Egyptian National soccer team pulled out a win over Algeria, and, in a show of their power, the smugglers rode through the village of Sheikh Ziyad, leading the parade of honking vehicles.

One of the smugglers got a bit carried away and fired his weapon into the air.

We did a lot of driving around the desert aimlessly. We kept hoping they'd show us an arms shipment or take us to a group of Somalis in a safe house, waiting to be smuggled across the border.

But, they didn't. Instead we saw an Israeli border post in the middle of the Sinai desert.

Then the smugglers took us to see one of the poor Bedouin families living in the middle of nowhere. This woman's father was lying behind her and too ill to stand.

Here we are again, whisked away to the desert to visit more Bedouin families.

Quite beautiful out in the desert.

Sabeha. She doesn't know how old she is, but thinks she's 50 or 60.

A sandstorm colored the air the next day.

It really does feel like the end of the earth.

Survivors

2010-04-14T11:55:00.001+02:00

The following photographs are of Somali refugees in Yemen. I worked with Abigail Hauslohner on a story about the refugees in Yemen's port city Aden. TIME.com published a video, Yemen a Dead End for Somali Refugees, and a print story. Check it out!

Although Somali refugee camps are scattered throughout the South, the only place we could easily access was just outside Aden in the slum of Bassatine, which has become a permanent settlement of African migrants over the past decade or two.

We visited one of the community leaders who had taken in 22 refugees, mostly widows, who had no place else to go. Above, one of the shacks shared by 8 women in Jilani Ali Maalim's compound. The women must beg to earn money.

Roughly 16,000 Somalis live in Bassatine, and 150,000 Somali refugees in Yemen are registered with the UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR). In Yemen, the Arab Peninsula's poorest nation, where half the population lives in abject poverty, the government is ill-equipped to deal with the recent increase in Somali refugees.

How terrible must life be to flee to Yemen, where there is no safety net, no work prospects and virtually no government?

Desperation incarnate: Baby Layla's mom swam several kilometers, eight months pregnant, to reach the shore of Yemen. Her smugglers tossed her from the boat within sight of the coast.

Drownings are common in the passage. Sofia Abdel Samat's 6-year-old sister died during the journey from their homeland a month ago.

One of the lovely things about working on this story is that the women didn't mind having their photographs taken. I guess I have gotten pretty used to places where photographing women is haram (a sin). Yemen is probably one of the most conservative places on earth and no exception to this. So this story, despite the difficult subject matter, was a breath of fresh air for me.

Jamila, 13.

Abdullah and his 6-month-old daughter Kamer. He said his wife abandoned them recently for Saudi Arabia. "She was crying everyday," Abdullah said of his wife's unhappiness in Yemen, a gateway to richer Arab nations.

Sofia makes lunch for the refugees in Maalim's compound.

The last one from the Maalim compound.

Bassatine's main street.

A refugee, with the image of a boat behind him.

The tailor.

Hassan, the butcher.

A remembrance of home in a cafe.

Hospital on the edge

2010-02-05T22:15:00.004+02:00

This post contains graphic images.

Above, toddlers slept two or three to a bed in the children's intensive care unit at Mirwais Hospital, Kandahar.

I spent some time at southern Afghanistan's biggest public hospital working on another development story for National Public Radio. Read and listen to Soraya Nelson's NPR report here. The story was part of an end-of-the-year, in-depth series on the direction Afghanistan is going as a whole.

As security has deteriorated in Kandahar, many international NGO's have pulled their staff from the area or shut down their regional offices, cutting off the flow of money and people in a region where they are badly needed.

Despite the worsening security situation, development continues at Mirwais Hosptial, where the International Committe of the Red Cross (ICRC) conducts training and assists the local staff. ICRC is one of the few humanitarian NGOs with a foreign staff living and working in Kandahar.

Mirwais is a vital health treatment center, the only public hospital serving five southern provinces. If they are able, wounded and sick people travel from Helmand, Zabul, Uruzgan, Paktyka and throughout Kandahar province to reach this group of buildings near the edge of town.

Above, children's ICU.

The hospital has six departments: surgical, infectious diseases, pediatric, ophthalmology, obstetrics/gynecology, and emergency/intensive care. Two-thirds of patients come to the emergency department and around 50 percent of all clients are trauma patients. (That's a lot.)

By documenting daily life inside, I wanted to give an idea of what life is like outside the hospital walls--why development is both difficult and so very needed. Mirwais Hospital is in the middle of a war zone where Afghans are kidnapped and injured by bombs, and the violence makes development work dangerous. But poverty and under-development create a desperate need for clean water, health care, roads, electricity and sanitation.

Mirwais has a tiny neo-natal intensive care unit, with three or four incubators. Above, ICRC nurse Kristina Alho of Jyvaskyla, Finland, prepared an underweight baby girl to see her mother.

Infant mortality and maternal mortality rates are among the highest in the world. In rural Afghanistan, women sometimes start having children at a very young age, don't have access to birth control and are often the last to receive health care. It's a lethal combination for mothers and babies.

Accompanied by two female hospital staff members, Nurse Alho carried the baby girl through hallways to see her mother in the women's intensive care unit. Alho was on a six-month ICRC contract to work at Mirwais.

The preemie baby was delivered by Caesarian section and had been unable to breast feed, and the family had no money for milk. Convinced that the baby's weight and overall health would improve dramatically if the mother, Jana, could just get her milk to come, Nurse Alho tried to help.

But the milk wouldn't come.

Jana looked despondently at her baby girl, shortly before offering the child to NPR correspondent Soraya Nelson, my colleague.

A dimly-lit hallway on a women's floor.

Shakofa, 2, recovered from burns to her chest and feet in a children's burn unit. Many Afghans use open fires, propane or oil for cooking and heating.

The fires sometimes cause severe burns, especially over the winter. Above, 18-year-old Abdul Rahim, of Shawali Kot District, Kandahar Province, tried to rest in the men's burn unit. Two months earlier, Rahim was standing too close to a fire in his home when his clothing caught fire.

A toddler played on the floor next to Abdul Rahim.

A man was wheeled into the emergency department.

Regular people, civilians, get caught in the crossfire of Afghanistan's conflict and end up at Mirwais after being wounded in kidnappings, roadside bombs, by landmines and air attacks.

Above, Mohammad Nassim, 35, lay bruised and groaning in bed. Nassim and another man, 28-year-old Sher Mohammad, were kidnapped by Taliban from a municipal water wheel construction site where they were working, in Takhtapoul District. They said they were blindfolded and tortured for four days, before being released to warn others against working with the government.

Sher Mohammad's bruised back.

I was standing near the entrance to the hospital one morning when something unexpected happened. A truck carrying the dead bodies of two Afghan border policemen arrived.

And that's how I found myself in the hospital morgue.

The day before, Ahmad Shei, 25, and Hamidullah, 22, were in an unarmored truck carrying material to a checkpoint in Zabul Province. A roadside bomb detonated near their vehicle. Ahmad Shei and Hamidullah were killed; four other border policemen were injured and taken to Kandahar Air Field to receive medical treatment at the foreign military hospital. The two dead were taken to the morgue at Mirwais Hospital before being transported to their home provinces in the North for burial.

The second man from the left facing the camera, helping to lift the body of Ahmad Shei, is Atullah, 20. His brother was Hamidullah, the other dead policeman. Atullah told me he and his brother were from northern Baghlan province, and their parents had died much earlier. Their other siblings were working in Iran, and for quite some time, it had been just the two of them.

Minutes later Atullah wept outside the morgue while his brother's body was washed and prepared for burial. He had just lost his best friend, brother, parent and comrade. I shot a couple of frames and then sat quietly next to him for a few minutes. I told him that I have a big brother too.

I couldn't help wondering how these two guys from way up north had found themselves in Zabul of all places. Had they been serving their country? Earning a paycheck? Keeping each other safe?

Imam Gul, 25, stood next to the body of Hamidullah, while the body was washed inside the morgue.

I don't know why they let me in. Maybe they wanted their sacrifice to be recorded. Maybe they didn't know what to do with the random foreign woman with a camera. Maybe they were too tired and shocked to care.

Imam Gul and Amanadin watched while a white shroud was pulled over their fellow policeman Hamidullah's body.

This picture is still hard for me to look at. The look on Amanadin's face mirrors my own shock.

I feel like most editors would think a photograph of a dead man with his legs blown off was unnecessarily graphic and would turn people off in a bad way. I guess this is the only place I feel like I can share this image and how it felt to be there, taking it.

Because this is the cold, hard truth.

Village by village

2010-01-20T06:23:00.009+02:00

I know I haven't posted anything in a long time. Maintaining a blog is tough! Trying to get back on track, and taking you back to Afghanistan...

Above, a seventh-grade class in the girls' high school in Farghamanch, Jurm district, Badakhshan province.

This photograph was part of a story about the moderately successful National Solidarity Program in the impoverished but peaceful province. I had the pleasure of working with Sabrina Tavernise and our Afghan colleague Sangar Rahimi on this one.

(Please read Sabrina's New York Times story here. She did a great job. Also a slideshow by me.)

Through this program, villagers can apply directly for small development grants for whatever it is they feel their community needs most. Over the past five years, the people of Jurm have implemented a large drinking water project, come together during a flood disaster and built schools for girls, like the one above.

The keys to these small successes stem from the community-based approach and patience--change happened incrementally over a period of years. Local staff from the Aga Khan Development Network worked carefully with the villagers in Jurm set up councils, or shuras, who then acted as a group to apply for and implement the grants. This took the power out of the hands of the local commander and spread it out among the people.

It took a long time for the people of Jurm to accept help from the outside. Years of war and isolation made them initially hostile to the program, but the local development NGO worked patiently to build trust and credibility.

This story started as a report on the effects of illiteracy and evolved, as stories often do, into something much bigger. Illiteracy is a huge factor, because it's so much easier for a powerful commander or corrupt government officials to take advantage of people who can't read. However, one of the beautiful things we learned is that within this structure, even illiterate community leaders were able to come together and take charge.

We spent three bone-jolting days traveling the dirt roads of Jurm, visiting villages and projects.

Our journey into Jurm started with these guys: local shura leaders from all over the district. Jurm now has 68 shuras (or in the lingo of Aga Khan, community development councils, CDC's).

Notice the guy on the far right. His name is Shamsullah and he is the mullah, or religious leader, from Farghamanch, the village with the new school. Very powerful guy.

Sabrina wrote about him for At War, New York Times' blog about Post-9/11 conflict zones. To see just one example of what the Aga Khan Development Network was up against, read her post here. It's disturbing.

When I say isolated and remote, I mean this: Badakhshan has one paved road less than a mile long in Faizabad, the provincial capital. In Badakhshan's rugged mountainous terrain, winter storms routinely cut off entire districts from the outside world. Very few people own their own cars, traveling instead for miles by foot or donkey on paths cut into the sides of cliffs. It is under-development incarnate.

Traditional farming techniques in practice. Going into rural Afghanistan can feel like going back in time.

Actually, places with lots of arable land for agriculture, like the area above, are considered relatively affluent in Badakhshan. The people are more able to provide for themselves and less likely to depend on the commander with the most guns for their livelihood. Thus, areas with lots arable land were more open to Aga Khan, the shura idea and the National Solidarity Program. More impoverished communities, i.e., villages without arable land, like Farghamanch, were less open.

An interesting side-note: just a couple years before, the entire area was covered with poppy fields. A combination of falling poppy prices and an Afghan government crackdown led the farmers to plant wheat instead. And maybe a little nudging from Aga Khan helped too.

I managed not to get run over by the oxen.

Yes, that is a 9-year-old (who looks 5), preparing his family's fields for wheat planting, in the light of sunrise. BUT, he attends school in the afternoon. His name is Aziz, and he will hopefully grow up to be a literate farmer.

A market in nearby Baharak. Cell phone towers and the phones that come with them arrived in Baharak and Jurm just two years ago. They've revolutionized life in a place where nonexistent infrastructure, poverty and winter weather make travel extremely difficult. Cell phones have allowed shura members to talk to one another in emergencies and when they are unable to meet in person.

Like most places outside of Kabul, Jurm district is still very conservative, especially with regard to women and family. Above, women depart a teacher training course.

I chased goat herder Abdullah, 18, and his posse up the side of a mountain. It was a hike! I realized you can't run after goats if you want to get closer to them, you have to sneak up on them. (Sigh. The things one learns in the field.)

Girls stopped collecting dung (used for fuel in these parts) to confront my camera. The girl wearing the red scarf was so confident she made me smile. In my haste I actually forgot to ask if they attend school. I hope they do.

Elected shura members listen intently during a leadership training workshop, Jurm district Aga Khan headquarters.

The workshop instructor talked about the qualities of a leader.

What is a workshop without a team-building activity? Actually, since most of the people in the workshop couldn't read or write, hands-on activities took on new importance--they were more likely to learn through doing.

The shura members were split into two groups and had to work as a team to hang a handful of nails from one big nail stuck into a wooden block. Different styles of leadership emerged as the group worked through the problem. It was something out of the NGO community development handbook, plopped down into the middle of rural Afghanistan. Not something I expected to see, but...

...they were really engaged in the task. They didn't find it silly or pointless. It was fun to watch them try to figure it out.

Success!

In Dashtak village, communal water taps are spaced every ten houses to ensure that everyone can get enough drinking water. Seven village councils banded together to facilitate drinking water for the residents. Such teamwork was unheard of before 2004.

Masura's eyes well up with tears while she talks about her husband who died of illness just days before in Farghamanch village. Many remote areas in Afghanistan, especially in poorer provinces like Badakhshan, still lack water, electricity, schools and health clinics.

In addition to seeing successful projects in villages where people were more receptive to change, we wanted to see a place where the Aga Khan and National Solidarity Program faced a real challenge.

This was Farghamanch.

One of the poorer villages, it was essentially ruled by the young radical mullah pictured near the beginning of this blog post. Shamsullah was one of the most resistant community leaders, according to local Aga Khan staffers. But, over time, the staff gained his trust and surprisingly, the community's top priority was a new school--for girls.

Actually pretty amazing.

Our first visit to the village was on a Friday afternoon, the day off, so we decided to just talk to some of the people living there.

As Shamsullah was away in another village, we met some very warm and receptive people. Sabrina conducted interviews while one of the women brought me into her home. Nagmi, right, a wife and mother in Farghamanch, looked through a practice notebook next to 14-year-old Madida, who attends the village's new girls' school. Nagmi attends a women's literacy class once a week, also held at the new school, another little victory in this outpost in the middle of nowhere.

Literacy in Afghanistan hovers around 28 percent, and is even lower for women.

Nagmi writes her name.

The following day started bright and early as we watched girls and boys walk to a school located between two villages in Baharak district, just west of Jurm. The school has 300 students and 13 teachers, some of whom walk two hours each way to school every day. Ninth-grade girls occupy two of the school's classrooms, a high grade for girls in this province. Ninth grade is marrying age.

It so happens that Shamsullah, the powerful mullah from Farghamanch, was a teacher at this school. So, let's see: he was the religious leader and shura leader of his own village, teacher at a school outside his district, and we found out that morning he was somehow involved in voter registration during the recent elections. And the other teachers at this Baharak school were afraid of him.

We decided it was finally time to visit the new girls school in Farghamanch, the one that the community had built with National Solidarity Program money.

Photographically, it was essential to shoot girls inside or outside of the school--a task much harder than it looks. This village was a place seen by few outsiders, and the school administrators and teachers were actually somewhat hostile toward us. Judging by the prevailing attitude of the mullah ("We not only hate Americans, we hate all foreigners."), let's just say we were not welcomed with open arms at the school.

One of the administrators took me into a ninth-grade classroom and the girls recoiled at the suggestion of being photographed. (I don't know why he started with the oldest girls. Some of them are already young women.) I went outside and in my desperation made some photos of the exterior.

I saw a pupil looking out the window of her classroom. She didn't seem horrified at my presence, so I went back inside and made a few photographs inside the seventh-grade classroom, including the one at the top of this post.

Ameenah, 13.

When I asked her what she wanted to be when she got older, she said in a wavering voice that she wanted to become a doctor. The other girls laughed when she said this and her face crumpled. I ignored the laughter and tried to encourage her, telling her she can achieve whatever she wants, if she works hard.

And I can only hope this is true.

Tribute to Sangar

2009-11-20T09:16:00.004+02:00

A bright, witty fixer and colleague, Sangar Rahimi, provided comic relief throughout a week-long journey in remote Badakhshan province. So this is for him and for me, so I don't forget how much we laughed.

(Imagine a dry delivery with an Afghan accent.)

During a meeting with a group of 12 shura leaders, Sangar overheard a whispered remark from one of the men after New York Times staffer Sabrina Tavernise told them her age: "Look at your wife and then look at her."

While shooing away a crowd of gawking Afghan men from a market where I was shooting: "Come on guys. They are human beings just like you."

He told us later about the same group of staring men: "I heard one excited guy say to another guy, 'There is a show here.' "

"I worked with Adam B. Ellick [a New York Times colleague]. He is such a good guy. Adam B. Ellick was not happy with the internet, it was too slow. Have you ever worked with Adam B. Ellick?"

After a night in a terrible hotel with dirty sheets and tiny smelly bathrooms in Faizabad: "My bathroom, it was like a grave."

"I feel your pain."

At 6 a.m. one day, Sangar waited 45 minutes outside the only bathroom for a fellow guest house patron to finish. "When the man finally came out," Sangar later told us at breakfast, "he advised me, 'Go ahead, the water is very hot.' "

Uruzgan germs

2009-11-18T20:58:00.003+02:00

The next few posts will bounce back to Afghanistan, although I am now back in Cairo for a break.

The one and only embed I did in the entire three months was with the Dutch troops down in Tarin Kot, Uruzgan province, and I will forever remember it as the embed that gave me pneumonia. I started to feel under the weather the day Mark Magnier, of the Los Angeles Times, and I traveled to Uruzgan. It took a whole day (starting at around 6 a.m.) to get there via military transport flights.

The story was about how the Dutch are using development to improve security. We spent the following day with the Police Mentoring Team, as they conducted a traffic stop and training with local police. Take a look at Mark's story here: "Dutch troops' method in Afghanistan gains new prominence."

I admit I am a little divided on embeds. Some journalists spend the bulk of their time in Afghanistan embedded. While I think the military is a vital aspect of the story, it is nearly impossible to get to know regular Afghans while embedded. Some places are extremely difficult and dangerous to visit so hooking up with the military is sometimes the only way, and I admit I would not have been able to get to Uruzgan without embedding. I just try to take it as part, but not the whole, story.

I woke up with my throat on fire and feeling like my head was four times too large. Always a bummer when there's work to be done.

We left the base and convoyed through the provincial capital of Tarin Kot in these giant armored vehicles with little slits for windows. I guess they were similar to the U.S. Army's M-RAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle). From a safety standpoint, these are supposed to be more protected than a Humvee if an road-side bomb explodes nearby, which is great, but I couldn't see anything from inside. I asked one of the rear gunners if I could poke my head up for a few shots, but I also didn't particularly want to get in his way or obstruct his vision. Tricky.

The other downside is the vehicle doesn't take bumps well. At all. I could barely hang on to my camera.

Downtown Tarin Kot. Lots of men, kids, even some women out, all good to see. We were just passing through though to the other end of town. No time to stop and chat.

The soldiers parked in formation and got out at an intersection next to a gas station and across from an Afghan National Police station called Sar Sheykhil. Then the soldiers set up an impromptu traffic checkpoint so that the Afghan National Police could practice searching cars and people for weapons and explosives.

The idea was for the soldiers to mentor and supervise the police while they conducted searches, which is good since most of the police seemed to be unarmed.

It was a just another September day in Uruzgan: dusty and hot.

The foreign presence attracted lots of curious onlookers.

I like the eyes on the headlight. Classy.

Some people seemed to find the whole experience entertaining.

The police went inside the station to take part in a training on handcuffing and searching, so the Dutch soldiers continued searching the motorists and pedestrians outside.

These kids and their donkey walked by at least five times. (I have other photos of them.)

Inside Sar Sheykhil police station, Sgt. 1st Class Radjen Rampersad taught procedures for searching and handcuffing suspects. He also asked them basic civics questions, like "Why is it permitted for police to search and handcuff someone?" Most couldn't answer. They attempted the exercises with enthusiasm though.

The police don't have the tools they need to conduct their work, and they don't earn much money. This 40-officer station shares one pair of handcuffs. Most of the officers don't have their own weapons. Some don't even have proper shoes. Because of the complicated politics back home, the Dutch must get special permission to hand out arms. But, it's hard to figure out what part the Afghan government has in equipping and training them.

For their part, the police officers expressed frustration. They are starting from zero and they are putting themselves at risk for what seems like very little in return. Afghanistan is one of those places that needs so much it's hard to know where to begin.

That's the police station behind the HESCOs--the brown bunker-type things in the background. (Pretty sad I talk Army now.)

Almost time to cut out. By now all I can think about is my pounding head, clogged sinuses and the bed in the container back at the base. And I am coated in sweat and dirt.

Go inside, little guy. It's too hot.

Much of Uruzgan is desert, by the way. Mountains, valleys, very harsh terrain. Very little infrastructure. Did I mention it's like an oven?

Yes that is a windmill. It's actually a coffee bar inside of a container at the base in Tarin Kot, FOB Ripley.

And, with that full day's work, I crashed in my bunk. It took three days to get back to Kabul, and by that time all I could do was lie miserably in bed.

Ah yes Uruzgan. I won't forget you, or your dust.

Decompression

2009-11-15T12:29:00.000+02:00

I left Afghanistan on Monday, November 9. To help ease my transition back to Cairo, I decided to stay for a bit in Dubai, crashing at a friend's 17th-floor apartment.

Honestly, my main activities were sleeping and eating massive amounts of fresh salad for three days, until my body violently protested the drastic change in diet. I bought a humorous novel, watched T.V. and tried to forget everything. I had thought about visiting a spa for a massage, pedicure or haircut, but nope, nope and nope. Couldn't seem to muster the will power.

I did make it out to Jumeirah Beach Residence one afternoon, where all I could do was gape at the gigantic buildings and half-naked sun bathers. Culture shock, anyone?

The view of the pool, which I did not once visit, from my friend's apartment. I tried to go to the gym once, but the only shoes I had with me were hiking boots and flip flops. (I try to travel light for Afghanistan.)

It was a nice break. I am thankful to have understanding friends.

Vote, schmote

2009-11-05T14:39:00.004+02:00

Just a small portion of fraudulent ballots at the Independent Election Commission in Kabul...

For anyone who hasn't been following this crazy thing called an election: we finally have a winner--Hamid Karzai. This is not a surprise, but a painfully slow conclusion.

In a nutshell, the presidential election was held August 20, yadda yadda yadda, Karzai wins.

The slightly longer version is the presidential election was held August 20, and widespread fraud was reported and investigated by the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission, resulting in 1 million of Karzai's votes being tossed out. As this brought Karzai's total to under the 50% required majority, a runoff was mandated by the Afghan constitution. The date was set for a November 7 runoff, but Karzai's challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, pulled out of the race. The Independent Election Commission declared Karzai the winner the next day and canceled the runoff, to the relief of, well, just about everyone.

(The extremely long version that we have all been living and breathing includes an hour-by-hour account of all of the arm-twisting by foreign countries, the backstage deal-making between Karzai, Abdullah, the UN and the "Independent" Election Commission and well-founded fears of an even more fraudulent election the second time around. And don't forget the attacks on each person's credibility and integrity.)

Whew!

These ballots? Fageddabout it!

Anyway. Afghanistan's election is finally over, and so is my time here. At least for now.

I have been here in Afghanistan for three months--a record I may never repeat. Although, hmmm...never say never. I had some good luck, some bad luck and times when I didn't know what the hell I was doing here. (Good luck: awesome friends, some truly awesome assignments, amazing experiences, a constant supply of free alcohol. Bad luck: lost wallet/debit card/ISAF ID, a Ramadan dry spell, 3 weeks of pneumonia, dropping my camera and damaging a brand-spanking-new lens, a constant supply of free alcohol. I won't go into the "what the hell am I doing here?" category.)

I have at least four stories to post, but I have to wait for all of them to be published before releasing them on the ole blog.

Until then, I leave you with a wistful, April 2009 Abdullah at the site of Ahmed Shah Massoud's tomb in Panjshir, when he was but a young presidential-maybe-possibly-I-might-run-but-it-depends-on-what-the-polls-say Pashtun...

Backcountry ballots

2009-11-01T18:35:00.009+02:00

I recently returned from working in Afghanistan's northern Badakhshan province with New York Times staffer Sabrina Tavernise and Afghan colleague Sangar Rahimi. We worked on several pieces together, the first focusing on preparations for the upcoming Afghan presidential runoff election between Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah. Please read Sabrina's entertaining story here.

Badakhshan is one of the most remote, unreachable provinces in the country--large, mountainous and rural. There is one paved road in the entire province, in the capital Faizabad. When Afghan election officials talk of winter weather possibly impeding the runoff in some places, they are likely talking about Badakhshan.

Few people have cars: most people travel on foot or by donkey. And it is donkeys that are employed to bring ballots to some of the most tucked-away communities, places deep in the wilderness with no roads at all. Helicopters are used to transport ballot boxes to the district centers, then election workers use donkeys to transport the boxes further in to the backcountry.

We met Ezatullah while working on another story in his district of Baharak. He is a caretaker of a school we visited several times. On one of our visits, he was listening to an election program on the radio. He came out to meet our car, then brought us back to the room where he lives next to the school.

The father of eight children said he planned to vote for Abdullah in the runoff election. In our unscientific poll, Abdullah had a commanding lead in the province. He perhaps owes some of his popularity in the region to his time working with famed Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah Massoud--Badakhshan was after all a front-line province during the mujahideen's battle against the Soviets.

A dated election advertisement in Faizabad encourages women to register to vote.

"The Daily Show" of Kabul

2009-10-31T17:37:00.008+02:00

I don't think I've ever seen a more lovely blond mullet wig on a man.

Afghans don't celebrate Halloween, but in the spirit of my favorite dress-up holiday, I decided to post some photos from a political satire television show here in Kabul that I visited with Laura King from the Los Angeles Times. (Read the LA Times story here.)

The show is called "Zang-e Khatar," or "Alarm Bell," and is styled after shows like Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" and nighttime talk shows like Letterman and Leno. Kabul's Tolo Television airs the show. Afghanistan's election fraud scandal has provided ample material for the lead comics on the program, Hanif Hangam and Ghulam Nabi Sakhri.

The cast gets ready to tape the wildly-popular weekly show. Sakhri, second from left, and Hangam, second from right, write almost all their own material.

Hangam, the show's director, jots down a script just before taping.

Sakhri dons sunglasses during the opening monologue. Like Ed McMahon did for Johnny Carson, the main role of each person on the end of the table is to laugh at the jokes.

The taping studio's equipment is not the worst, nor the best available.

Instead of a New York skyline, the digital image of a Kabul slum at night provides a backdrop for Hangam's satire and commentary.

During the Taliban, television was banned, as were most forms of entertainment. And, of course, dissent was out of the question.

Sakhri watches as crew members arrange props for the next segment. The props are rudimentary, consisting of battered furniture, cardboard and understated costumes.

Sakhri and Hangam prepare to tape a skit spoofing Kabul's waste disposal department. In the skit, the actors made fun of people going to the bathroom in the streets--surprisingly frank for Afghanistan's more conservative culture. Like satire shows in the U.S., almost nothing is sacred.

I am glad that Afghans still have a great sense of humor and can laugh at themselves. I wish I could understand the language so I could laugh along with the jokes, some of which certainly make fun of foreigners like me.

Medic! (Cough, cough)

2009-10-11T13:28:00.004+02:00

My bedside table is full of drugs. Antibiotics, steroids (not THOSE kind of steroids) decongestants and expectorants. Yes, that is an inhaler. (Gasp.)

Almost three weeks ago, I went on a short embed in Uruzgan province for an assignment. The day I traveled to Uruzgan, I came down with a cold. No big deal. I wasn't at my best, but just carried on as well as I could, shooting the assignment, then hopping military and commercial planes over the following three days back to Kabul. I was exhausted and sick, but tried to get lots of rest and drink fluids. A cold is not normally something I worry about and I just thought I'd get over it in a couple days. Plus I was hoping to avoid seeking medical treatment in Kabul.

Afghanistan had other plans. It's not a good place to get sick. Dust, air pollution, stress and lack of sleep would be enough to make one ill anywhere, let alone here. I finally went to the nearby German Clinic and learned that I had pneumonia. Awesome.

Two doctor visits and two weeks later, my health is steadily improving. The illness has brought work to a standstill, but I hope to be well enough in a week or two to get back at it. Until then, I'll be sleeping, drinking tea and taking all my drugs.

(More on Uruzgan coming up soon...)

Dushanbe-distracted

2009-10-06T21:19:00.001+02:00

Sometimes it's necessary to get out of this place, even if it's just for a couple of days. A couple of friends invited me to come with them to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, shortly after the Afghan presidential election. It was a nice break. We could walk around or ride local taxis freely, the city was clean and orderly and I didn't have to wear a scarf. We spent the time exploring, eating good food and taking pictures just for fun.

Above, a boy tries to stay warm while drip-drying after a swim in the Varzob River.

My friend Jon sits in the Soviet-esque apartment the three of us rented next to Secret Police headquarters, after one of our long jaunts around town.

At night the streets of the city are nearly empty, except for impromptu police checkpoints, where officers try to shake-down passing motorists for bribes.

The language is Tajik, very similar to Farsi, but they use the Cyrillic alphabet to write. Dushanbe feels like a capital still in transition: a strong Soviet presence and infrastructure with a developing Tajik identity.

A fruit vendor rubs her eyes at the Green Market.

In a park near the Dushanbe Opera.

The Soviet seal at a monument for those who died during World War II.

People know how to drive in Dushanbe. They even stop at red lights.

Tajikistan, a former Soviet Republic, has maintained close ties to Russia culturally, economically and politically, and I sensed a bit of nostalgia for the days of the great empire. Now Tajikistan is just a small under-developed fish in an ocean.

This is the back of the apartment block where we stayed.

I like this picture best. She has an interesting face.

A group of dudes hanging out by the river after a swim.

The saddest bear I have ever seen at the Dushanbe Zoo.

I'm not sure if the billboard photograph of tulips is to help prevent road rage or just to beautify the city, but I like it!

Quick bits

2009-09-20T17:18:00.007+02:00

Men's waiting area at Farah airport, western Afghanistan.

The young son of the Farah provincial governor Rahoul Amin hangs out with Asmatullah--security chief, house manager and part-time nanny.

The tin can they tried to pass off as a plane at Farah Airport. Yes, that is a dirt runway.

Above, men unload a truck full of goods in Jalrez Bazaar, Wardak province. The community began to thrive once again after large influx of American soldiers arrived and began patrolling.

See the New York Times story here.

Jalrez Bazaar. I was literally chasing the light on this assignment. Although this village is doing better, one must pass through areas occupied by Taliban to get to it. So I had to rely on a military convoy that almost didn't come to get me. Thankfully they did, but it was late in the day by the time we arrived at Jalrez Bazaar, and the sun was sinking fast.

Sgt. First Class Donald Coleman consults with some of Jalrez's Afghan Public Protection Force guradians.

Squeezing the last light out of Jalrez Bazaar.

A girl peeks at me from a broken window in Kabul.

Women wait tensely for their names to be called during a World Food Program food distribution on International Peace Day, in Charikar, Parwan province.

Shamsuddin, 10, and Mujahid, 12, shine shoes while a customer waits his turn at Barbur's Gardens, a huge park in Kabul.

A boy flies a makeshift kite, a plastic grocery sack, near his home on Television Mountain, Kabul. Kite-flying is a popular activity for children in Kabul, but some families can't afford kites. So kids improvise.

Kandahar votes

2009-09-10T07:16:00.002+02:00

(I wrote this essay for the Sept. 10, 2009 issue of the Pacific Northwest Inlander.)

BOOM.

The explosion startled me awake, sending my pulse racing. Dark grey light filtered into the room. I turned my head to look at my travel alarm clock next to the guesthouse bed: 4:42 a.m.

It was an ominous beginning to Afghanistan’s presidential election day. For the first time in five years, Afghans were being asked to choose their president. Of 31 candidates, three stood out: Would it be American favorite Ashraf Ghani, former Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdullah Abdullah or incumbent Hamid Karzai?

BOOM.

4:51 a.m. This one was louder and closer. I felt the room tremble.

My National Public Radio colleague in the next bed, Soraya Nelson, sat bolt upright. There was no going back to sleep now. Soraya powered up her computer, and I headed for the shower down the hall.

If there are foreign journalists in Kandahar, they are likely staying at the Continental Guesthouse: the small, guarded hotel has so far been spared attacks from insurgents or criminals. On this visit to the birthplace of the Taliban, we shared the guesthouse with a news crew from Al-Jazeera English and British and German newspaper journalists, as well as a group of Western election observers and their bodyguards.

In the bathroom that morning, I stepped under the stream of water. BOOM. The power went out and I was washing in near darkness.

BOOM.

***

In an effort to prevent car bombs at polling places, driving on Election Day was prohibited, except for those with a special permit issued by police to government officials, election observers and a handful of journalists.

The ban emptied Kandahar’s dusty streets. Except for the occasional pedestrian, the normally bustling market places and main avenues were quiet. Shops were shuttered, their corrugated metal garage doors padlocked. Contingents of Afghan National Army soldiers occupied checkpoints at the main squares.

The city felt like it was holding its breath.

***

At Ahmed Shah Baba High School, Afghan police searched male voters for weapons as they trickled in to the polling center. President Hamid Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, voted and spoke to the small press corps, before his bodyguards whisked him away in a shiny black SUV with tinted windows.

BOOM: 10:36 a.m.

People on the street outside briefly recoiled at the sound of the rocket before continuing on their way.

BOOM: 10:54 a.m.

After the explosion near Zaher Shahi High School, a Canadian military convoy raced past on the empty street.

A woman in a rose-colored burqa, her two young sons in tow, paced outside the main gate of the school, looking lost. Sapnah, 21, had been walking in the roasting sun for 20 minutes trying to find a women’s polling station. Because of the danger, her husband had forbidden her from leaving the house, but she defied him. She was determined to cast her vote for Kandahar native Hamid Karzai.

“I have this,” she said, indicating the voter registration card clutched in one hand, “and I want to use it.”

Zarghouna High School was one of a handful of women’s polling places. At midday, the center, big enough to accommodate hundreds of voters, was devoid of all but three. Officials walked back and forth down the expansive halls, past classroom doors painted bright green. Election workers waited dutifully at their stations next to empty voting booths.

I asked a poll worker named Maryam where all the voters were.

“They are afraid,” she said. “They had to stay in the house.”

***

The rocket that killed Jamila came at 12:30.

The 10-year-old was helping her mother prepare lunch in their mud hut, when a rocket hit a tall building next door. The rocket exploded, sending shrapnel through the cardboard roof of the family's small dwelling below.

Jamila died instantly.

In Kandahar, rockets killed another person and wounded three more. It’s not even safe for people to stay home. There is no security, period. Not for Afghans, not for anyone.

***

According to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), nearly 30,000 foreign troops are stationed throughout the South. The NATO military conducts operations in five provinces from the main headquarters at Kandahar Air Field just outside the city.

Yet, international forces have not been able to make Kandahar safe. Politically-motivated kidnappings, assassinations and rocket attacks are common. Some areas of the city, to the west, north and south, are no-go zones for Kandaharis—places controlled by insurgents and criminals. Sometimes a neighbor or friend simply disappears, never to be heard from again. Violence against women has increased across the board. Female politicians, teachers, rights activists, schoolgirls—none are safe. In the weeks before the election, the Taliban circulated threatening leaflets and radio broadcasts, promising punishment for anyone who voted, thickening the air with fear.

Just ask anyone: the Taliban are back, they are operating in Kandahar city and Afghans are rightfully terrified.

***

The outcome of Afghanistan’s presidential election is murky at best.

If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the Afghan Constitution mandates a runoff election. Although Hamid Karzai currently has 54% of the vote, the Electoral Complaints Commission is investigating hundreds of “priority A” allegations of election fraud--those complaints considered serious enough to affect the results. On September 8, the Commission announced that it had "found clear and convincing evidence of fraud in a number of polling stations" and demanded a partial recount. Thousands of votes have been thrown out.

Nobody seems to know how long it will take to sort out, but it could take months.

In Kandahar, the violence has grown worse. I was already back in Kabul when, five days after the election, a massive truck bomb exploded outside of a Japanese reconstruction company, killing at least 40 people and wounding 80. The explosion reduced an entire city block to rubble.

And at the Continental Guesthouse, where just a few days before I had slept, ate and worked, the force of the blast blew out all the windows.

Colorful Tora

2009-08-14T17:00:00.013+03:00

Back in Cairo in July, I worked with correspondent Jeffrey Fleishman on a slice-of-life feature for the Los Angeles Times about Cairo's Tora neighborhood. Read the story and see more photos here. (I did not shoot the video.) It was nice to work on a relatively relaxing story. Even though shooting in Egypt can be a headache, this time, refreshingly, I had few problems.

Above, Ramadan Hassan's family hangs out on the front stoop of their home in Tora neighborhood. The family had a mural painted on the wall to celebrate Um Muhammad's (third from left) homecoming from the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. The family survives selling fish they catch from the Nile, which is just a few streets away, and running a clothing store south of Cairo.

Tora is one of Cairo's funky little neighborhoods. It's pretty sleepy until late afternoon, when the heat of the day subsides and people become more active.

Gamal Sayed Ibrahim in his shop, where he sells odds and ends and makes copies on Tora's main square.

Ahmed Morsy's grandfather was the neighborhood tailor before Ahmed took over and turned the family business into an ironing shop. Business has slowed down and Ahmed is struggling to provide for his wife and two children.

Ibrahim Ahmed Hassan, 20, hangs out with a friend in the pool hall, Abu Donia. Hassan is in his third year studying business at a local university and is setting his sights on a life outside of Tora, maybe even outside of Egypt.

Saber Saad sings the azan, the Muslim call to prayer, at Tora's small mosque. Before retiring last year, Saad worked in a munitions factory and was a wedding singer on the side.

Now that he's retired, Saber Saad spends most of his time with his 20 pairs of pigeons that he keeps in his rooftop aviary. He has been training pigeons for 25 years and finds it relaxing. Like most people in the neighborhood, Saad's family has been living in the same house for generations.

One of Saber's pigeons has nice wallpaper.

And now for something completely different...

2009-07-09T16:12:00.006+03:00

...my summer vacation!

After I got back from Afghanistan in June, it was off to the beach in Ain Sokhna, a couple hours from Cairo, with friends and baby Ray. (He is darn cute.)

Paul, a.k.a. Abu Ray, mama Helen and Ray taking in the sunshine.

Getting sleepy...

It's an indulgence to put cute baby pics up, but hey. It's my blog and I'll post what I want to.

I also went to Montana in June and put a thousand miles on my parents' car with a couple road trips. Above, the amazing Mission Mountains.

Father's Day Weekend found us all up at Rock Creek for some fishing. Above, my bro Matt tries to get his line untangled. (I also spend quite a bit of time untangling when I go fishing...) That's Meredith on the right--she and Matt had just gotten engaged. Wahoo!

My dad pulling on the ole weighters, getting ready to go fishin'.

Mom and Dad on the river, just getting started.

There's nothing like camping in Montana in June...overcast and rainy. Dad had to resort to (gasp!) propane to get the fire going.

Mmmm. The famous chicken kabobs.

Meredith and Matt.

It's me. In Spokane. Whirlwind weekend visit. I think I may have been talking to the famous Adam Lynn on the phone, but not sure. (Photo by Jed Conklin)

Sigh.

Gaza on my mind

2009-07-04T01:53:00.011+03:00

For Palestinians, there are basically three ways out of Gaza: through a tunnel, bound by shackles, or on a gurney.

It is difficult to describe a place more alone, more cut off from the rest of the world, a place where people live with the constant threat of violence, without a refuge.

For many of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents, suffering is merely a matter of geography.
The Gaza Strip’s entire length can be driven in an hour. At its widest, just seven miles separate the shores of the Mediterranean Sea from the blockades at the Israeli border.

Gaza is easy to navigate and easy to contain.

Israel controls Gaza’s land borders, maritime waters and airspace. Since Hamas took over governing the strip by force in June 2007, Israel has enforced an almost total blockade of Gaza. Israel controls what goes in and out, and whom. Only a system of hundreds of underground tunnels skirts the blockade, allowing food, fuel, medicine, and, yes, weapons to be smuggled into Gaza.

Determined to stop daily rocket attacks from Gaza, Israel began its latest military campaign in Gaza, dubbed Operation Cast Lead, on Dec. 27, 2008. During the devastating 22-day air and ground assault, around 1,400 Palestinians were killed, at least two-thirds of them believed to be civilians, and nearly 6,000 were wounded. Tens of thousands more were left homeless.

Between the rockets fired by Hamas and Israel’s bombs and tanks, the people stuck in the middle try to keep their families fed and clothed, provide shelter and fuel, and make attempts at normalcy.

Osama, a 21-year-old furniture maker, knows what it feels like to be trapped.

During Israel’s siege, air strikes destroyed his factory. Today he lives with his parents and siblings next to the bombed-out Ministries of Finance, Communication and Foreign Affairs. The windows in his apartment are still pane-less after being shattered during the air strikes on the nearby government buildings.

During the war, everyone suffered, even if they didn’t take a direct hit. Whole neighborhoods were without power and water for weeks. People spent sleepless nights listening to the barrage of artillery and missiles hit nearby buildings, watching friends, family and neighbors die around them.

Osama is handsome in his black button-down shirt, black dress pants and polished shoes. With his youthful appearance—his slight frame, hairless chin and wide smile—he looks like someone who has a whole lifetime ahead of him. But the recent violence has disillusioned and depressed him.

Two of Osama’s best friends found a fourth way out of Gaza: in a casket.

“Maybe next time you visit Gaza,” Osama says casually, “I’ll be dead too.”

***

Four sonic booms from F-16’s rip over Gaza City one afternoon. Sonic booms sound almost like bombs, but the ground doesn't shake the same way.

At Popeye, a brightly painted Gaza internet café and hookah joint, Nehad El-Rahim shakes his head and sighs. In his late forties, his close-cropped hair is already grey. He wears a white button-down shirt and khakis.

“It’s not easy to live in Gaza, even for one day,” Nehad says. “What about to live forever here? But, what we can do? This is our situation.”

An attorney who had settled his family in the United States, Nehad came back to Gaza in 2005, when Israel pulled its citizens from the territory, because he said he was ready to help form the new Palestinian state.

Four years later, his disappointment lingers in the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He finds it impossible to practice law in a place governed by Hamas, a militant Islamic movement which rules by fear and corruption. Even worse, he is unable to attain a visa to rejoin, or simply visit, his wife and two young children, now living in Ogden, Utah.

He spends his days tending to his elderly parents and reading books. He says people used to go to the beach to relax, until Israeli bombs killed eight people there. At the height of the military campaign, the Israelis dropped leaflets warning residents to vacate targeted areas. But if a beach is not safe, Nehad wondered, where is?

The fragile cease-fire in place since Israel called a halt to Operation Cast Lead teeters precariously. On this afternoon, Israel has threatened “disproportionate retaliation” for several rockets fired from Gaza, which had injured two Israeli soldiers and a civilian. A cloud of fear hangs over Gaza’s bright winter sky. Palestinians debate among themselves what the target will be this time and seem to brace for a new onslaught of violence.

I hire a tall, gangly 24-year-old named Hamadah as my driver and translator. A bright young man, he wears the universal uniform of youth: jeans, t-shirt and tennis shoes, his longish hair slicked back.

As we bounce along the ruined dirt roads of El-Attatra, Beit Lahiya and Jabaliya, Hamadah speaks in impeccable English about his girlfriend, who is studying medicine in Egypt. Because of her strenuous school schedule during the day, she calls him in the middle of the night, and they spend hours talking and making plans for their future. But he and others feel there is no future here.

“If you gave anyone here the chance to leave, they would,” Hamadah says

Hamadah dreams of escape. He dreams of the real life he will start with his girlfriend in a safe European city, away from the relentless violence that plagues Palestine.

Hamadah says none of his previous escape plans have worked. He now hopes that a German university will accept his student application and that his girlfriend will join him there. He works at improving his German-language skills and is saving his money in case there is no scholarship.

***

While some Gazans desperately hope for a life outside the territory, others cling to the ground in Gaza ever more firmly.

For some of these people, survival has come to mean something completely different. You may lose your mother, your father, your children, your home, or all of them at once. But you go on. You continue to live, to work, to raise your family, to pray, not only because you have no other place to go, but also out of spite. You refuse to give up. You refuse to be crushed.

And you pray for revenge.

In El-Attatra, a farming village in Northwest Gaza, the Abu Halima family was eating supper when the Israeli military attacked. Several family members crouched in a hallway, away from the first blasts, when a white phosphorus bomb tore through the ceiling directly above them. The bomb and ensuing fire killed Saleh Abu Halima and four of his children, one of them a 15-month-old girl. Several others were seriously wounded.

In the house next door, a relative, Nabeela Abu Halima, dons a hair-hiding scarf and a galabeya, the figure-concealing robe typically worn by observant Muslim women throughout the Middle East. She stands in her living room, the walls peppered with bullet holes and defaced with graffiti. Next to her is a bright red drawing of a naked woman.

Nabeela tells me about the day Saleh Abu Halima’s house was attacked, how she and her sons helped load two wounded people and the burned body of the baby girl onto a tractor, which rushed them toward the nearest hospital. As the tractor chugged down the dirt path toward Gaza City, Israeli soldiers in a building along the road ordered them to stop.

Nabeela’s eldest son, 18-year-old Matar, and another relative,18-year-old Muhammad, got off the tractor with their hands up. Both young men were shot in the chest by the Israeli soldiers, Nabeela said. Matar died instantly, Muhammad died minutes later.

Nabeela begins to weep. She said the Israelis next told them to leave, but she didn’t want to leave without Matar and Muhammad’s bodies. She pleaded with the soldiers. They shot her in the arm.

The group fled, carrying the wounded several more kilometers to the hospital. They were forced to leave the body of Shehed, the 15-month-old girl, by the side of the road for eight days. Relatives have pictures of the dead baby. Dogs feasted on her legs and stomach.

Nabeela came back to a vandalized home—Hebrew scrawled across the walls, trash on the floor, feces in the pots and pans. She claims that she wasn’t a Hamas supporter until recently.

Now, her anger and grief boil to the surface when she talks about losing her son.

“If Hamas members come back, I swear to god I will help them fire rockets into Israel,” she says.

In Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Sabah Abu Halima lies in a bed, her arm and lower body covered in white phosphorus burns. It was her husband and four children who were killed when the bomb ripped through the Abu Halima home. It was her baby, Shehed, whose burned body was abandoned by the side of the road.

Between gasps of pain, Sabah seems to take solace in a single vow.

“I pray to Allah that I will have revenge,” she says. “I pray and dream of killing myself among the Israelis.”

Instead of crushing extremism in Gaza, Israel seems to have added new recruits.

***

The conflict in Israel and Palestine has a 60-year history of attack and counter-attack. Both sides have suffered. Many of the Israeli military’s actions appear to have been punitive—punishment not on the actual perpetrators, but a collective sort of retribution for past violence. Hateful.

There was the case of Zeitoun, a neighborhood now known to Gazans as the site of the Samouni family massacre. In an incident widely reported by international media and under investigation by human rights organizations, some 100 Samounis huddled in a home the Israeli soldiers had instructed them to enter. Then the building came under attack from bullets and shells. Around thirty family members, trapped inside, died over the next several days.

Homes in Zeitoun were vandalized and destroyed. One family showed me where the Israeli soldiers gathered all of the furniture in the living room and lit it on fire, letting their possessions burn to ashes. The soldiers left behind disturbing graffiti and mountains of trash, and bullet holes in the walls.

Israeli bulldozers then destroyed Zeitoun’s chicken farms. One farmer lost 65,000 chickens. It’s as if they not only sought total physical destruction; they also sought to destroy people’s hope.

Late one afternoon, I meet Kauthar, a pretty young mother of four, as she entertains her 9-month-old son Muhammad in front of their demolished home in Abed Rabbo, Jabaliya. I photograph Kauthar, surrounded by the physical ruins of her life, as she throws her giggling little boy in the air.

Abed Rabbo, on the eastern edge of Gaza’s border with Israel, was without a doubt one of the most battered areas, first attacked by Israeli F-16’s, and later by tanks, during the military operation. Israel says that the neighborhood was a well-known rocket-launching area and reduced every single building to rubble.

I ask Kauthar if everyone in her family is safe. She shakes her head and points toward the sky. Then she tells me the shocking story of how two of her daughters died on Jan. 7, 2009, the 5th day of the Israeli invasion.

She says that on that day, the Israeli soldiers used loudspeakers to warn people to vacate their homes. Abed Rabbo had already been under attack from the air, and now the soldiers were going to raze all of the buildings with dynamite.

Kauthar, her daughters Amal, 3, Samar, 4, and Suad, 7, and her mother-in-law, came out of the house as instructed, bearing a white flag. An Israeli tank sat 10 meters away. After a few minutes, an Israeli soldier opened fire, shooting the three little girls. As Kauthar's mother-in-law picked up one of the girls and turned to run back inside the house, she was shot as well.

Other family members helped pull the girls back into the house. Khalid, the father, began calling everyone he knew for help. The family was stuck inside the house for three hours. There was an ambulance nearby, but Israelis ordered the driver from behind the wheel and shot at it. Amal and Suad died inside the house.

Finally the grandfather walked out of the house carrying one of the dead girls, in hopes that he wouldn't be shot. The soldiers allowed him out and the rest of the family followed. As they departed the neighborhood, Khalid said the soldiers shot at their feet.

Samar, the middle daughter, was transported first to Egypt, then to Belgium for medical care. The rest of the family is staying with friends until they can rebuild or buy a home.

While she talks, Kauthar absentmindedly throws bits of cement and random household objects at the pile of wreckage in front of us, emotion clouding her face.

Kauthar’s story haunts me. Two days later, I return to Abed Rabbo and walk to Kauthar’s former home, looking for her. I find her husband Khalid instead, who tells me that Kauthar is unwell and was visiting the local mental clinic to get tranquilizers.

The last time I see Kauthar is the day before I leave Gaza. She shows me a photograph of her and her daughters from an identification badge. We go one last time to the wrecked home in Abed Rabbo, but stay just ten minutes, Kauthar’s agitation growing as time passes.

When we part, we exchange telephone numbers, and I want to give her something to remember me. I want her to know that I won’t forget her or her story. So I give her the scarf I am wearing, my favorite, given to me by a dear friend.

I miss that scarf often, and when I do, I think of it around Kauthar’s neck and how the breeze tugged at it while Kauthar stood watching my car pull away. I think of Kauthar’s daughters, the two little ones in heaven and the one who remains alone and afraid in a Belgian hospital, separated from the most important people in her life.

And I think of Kauthar, and all of the other Gazans left behind who, amid suffering and incomprehensible loss, find the strength to go on.

Guarding War-dak

2009-06-27T09:45:00.005+03:00

"I take you to all the garden spots," Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson joked, after we had ventured to Kandahar, Farah and, finally, Wardak province.

Wardak is a beautiful but troubled place. The province lies just southwest of Kabul and, along with Logar province to its east, has become a key safe haven and gateway for insurgents, suicide bombers, and other anti-government types to Afghanistan's national seat of government. Attacks on the Afghan capital have increased in the past couple of years, with a notably large-scale, coordinated suicide bombing earlier this year: "20 Dead as Taliban Attackers Storm Kabul Offices," New York Times, Feb. 11, 2009.

For this last NPR.org assignment, Soraya and I embedded with a U.S. Special Forces (which I call SF throughout this blog post) team tasked with facilitating Wardak's new program, the Afghan Public Protection Force, or APPF. It's a Neighborhood Watch-like system, Afghan-style: Afghans receive three weeks of training , radios and AK-47's, and are then dispatched to checkpoints in their own villages to keep an eye out for trouble. It differs from previous security programs, because the Afghans guarding the villages have lived in them their entire lives. The idea is to make it harder for insurgents to use Wardak province as both a safe haven and a staging ground for attacks on Kabul and elsewhere, all the while increasing the locals' trust in the Afghan government.

Special Forces was implementing the program in the three districts of Wardak immediately south and west of Kabul: Mayden Shahr, Jalrez and Nerkh.

Listen to Part 1 of Soraya's NPR series on the APPF here .

Listen to Part 2 here.

Our first day with Special Forces, we attended a graduation reception in Wardak's Mayden Shahr district for the newest guardians of the APPF. It was a chance for us to become acquainted with the program, talk with some of the key players and meet some of the guardians, who busied themselves proudly marching around the grounds.

The uniforms, reminiscent of Castro's Cuban revolutionaries, actually came from China.

I wasn't allowed to photograph any of the U.S. Special Forces operatives' faces or identify them by name, a condition for us being able to come along. Having their photographs and identities out in the open can ruin their careers and also make their work more dangerous, as they sometimes must operate undercover. Soraya wasn't allowed to use the soldiers' names for the stories either, leading to some entertaining conversations about aliases and what the individual guys wanted to be called on the air.

A variety of footwear at the graduation ceremony. Everyone was issued either black or brown boots, but such gear can fetch a good price, so some of the guardians may have sold theirs.

Tor Gol, a community leader, former mujahideen commander, and one of APPF's champions weeps during a remembrance of three of his men, who were killed when a remote-controlled bomb exploded underneath their APPF truck in Nerkh district.

Recently-graduated guardians celebrate with a little traditional Pashtun dancing. (Note to self: not a good idea for the only woman present at the celebration to get too close to the men while they're dancing--they might take it as a come-on.)

After the ceremony, it was time to install some of the graduates into one of the checkpoints on the edge of a village in Mayden Shahr district.

An operative gets quick photos of all of the guardians, and another records names and phone numbers.

Checking out the new digs.

Special Forces left the guardians in their new spot...

...and checked on them later that night, realizing the electricity wasn't functioning and nobody had flashlights. The guardians were there doing their jobs though, and had set up positions around the checkpoint.

The following day we set out for Nerkh, dubbed "Dirty Nerkh" by the Special Forces operatives. (They have a nickname for almost everything and everyone. They started calling me "Lord Helmet" and "Gazoo" because my black helmet is about four sizes too big for my head and looks totally ridiculous.)

While the APPF program has been successfully received in Jalrez and Mayden Shahr districts, recruiting guardians in Nerkh has been difficult and the program has met with resistance. There are bad guys in Nerkh, and the locals are helping them. It was in Nerkh that the APPF truck was bombed, killing three guardians and wounding three more. It was in a Nerkh valley that Special Forces was ambushed and a couple guys wounded. It is in Nerkh that "Death to America" is spray-painted in Dari on the walls lining the road.

We camped at a recently-established American combat outpost (basically a name for a rustic, no-frills military base) for our three-day foray into the district.

First order of business: distributing new AK-47's to the recently graduated group of guardians.

The new guardians switch out the ammunition in their magazines before receiving the new weapons.

Tor Gol, the former mujahideen commander, lives in the Nerkh village of Khan Ezzat and is responsible for recruiting nearly every guardian in the district. He walks on crutches and wears a fresh scar on his forehead since he was injured when the APPF truck was blown up. He's one of those guys who probably could go either way: a powerful enough leader to side with either the Americans or the insurgents. For whatever reason, he's thrown his lot in with the Americans.

Nazar Gol, at 16 the youngest Nerkh guardian, and a relative of Tor Gol's.

A Special Forces convoy is seen through a hole in the wall of an Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP) checkpoint in Nerkh. The team agreed that first evening to take us with them on a patrol as far as the proverbial line in the sand, a bend in the road where everything can and does change, a place where they hope new APPF checkpoints will disrupt insurgent activities.

We wanted a chance to talk to some Nerkh residents and see the area for ourselves, so we strapped on the body armor (and giant helmets) and hopped in the trucks.

After the new Nerkh APPF checkpoints are installed, they'll partner with the Afghan National Police and Afghan National Army. The hope is for the Public Protection guardians to be a local link between the rural population and the national government. Nerkh is dirty, uncharted territory for this experiment.

An ANCOP policeman stands on top of a house near the checkpoint.

The commander of the ANCOP checkpoints requested that the Special Forces team accompany them on a patrol up the road, past the place where the APPF truck was bombed, into a seriously sketchy area. Because part of Special Forces' goal is to back up these Afghans who are trying to secure their own areas, of course they consented on the spot.

Which, of course, was great. As journalists, we need to try to see it all--good, bad and everything in between. We wanted an honest look at what this new program is up against.

It's so strange to feel the chill when you enter a hostile area. We crossed the line in the sand and stopped at this school, where a large crowd of young men stood outside. While the SF parked the trucks in formation, the young men scattered in all directions--not a good omen.

We dismounted and ANCOP and the SF knocked on the gate of the school, which was answered by a teacher. I didn't have to understand what he was saying to know that he wasn't happy to see us. The ANCOP commander greeted everyone, then the Special Forces team leader, whom I'll call Johnny, tried to talk with the teacher.

Within perhaps 15 minutes, we learned that a couple of the children standing around had told the ANCOP guys that just a few hundred yards further, roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades awaited us. The ring of truth was that one of the boys reportedly said, "We don't care about what happens to the Americans, but we don't want our fellow Afghans to die."

Uh, okay then. It was time to get out of there.

SF are fighters and, I have to say that this group impressed me with their level of sophistication, experience and honesty (not to mention their cojones). But, it was getting dark, and ANCOP just bugged out of there.

Things are always more complicated than they look.

The following day took an unexpected turn, which I guess is always possible in a war zone. We were headed back to the combat outpost, when suddenly everybody stopped. We were hanging out by the side of the road and team leader Johnny was talking on the radio away from the trucks. Something was going on, but I wouldn't find out until a few hours later what the team had in mind. I was just along for the ride.

SF received a tip on the location of a weapons cache not far from a village where a new APPF post was going to be installed. The informant also told the operatives that an insurgent ambush lined the road on the way to the cache.

Part of SF's mission is to help clear areas to make them secure enough for the lightly-armed guardians to move in and establish a foothold. Finding the weapons cache suddenly became the day's top priority.

ANCOP, the nearby Afghan police units, were supposed to accompany the Special Forces team on this operation, but they decided they didn't want a piece of the action. In short, they bailed on their American counterparts. Special Forces, however, decided that they needed to meet this threat head-on. So they set a plan as best they could, and took us all into the great unknown. (Again, cojones. I guess this is their job, but...God.)

Oh man. Out of the frying pan, into the fire I guess. The possibility of getting blown up or shot or watching somebody else get hurt went through my mind, and I said a little prayer as we ventured up the road toward the possible ambush and weapons cache. I was only comforted by the notion that, if I had to see action, at least it would be with this group of highly-trained, extremely experienced men. If anybody would know what to do in a combat situation, it would be these guys.

The trip was slow, because the team had to stop frequently to make sure the road was clear of IED's.

Late in the afternoon, we rode into a village where I swear the air crackled with tension. Some of the shops in the bazaar were closed and the men along the dirt track set their gaze upon us as we rolled through. It was like the needle on the record player scratched in the middle of everyone's favorite song. Everybody was watching us. It was downright spooky.

The soldiers stopped where they had been told to expect the ambush, at the end of the bazaar. Johnny dismounted and motioned for me to follow him. Disoriented, I stumbled off the truck and watched as the team began to clear the fields on the far side of the road.

Standing next to the truck, I nearly had a heart attack when I heard and felt a very loud burst of gunfire. I immediately flattened myself on the ground next to the wheel. It was just instinct, I didn't think about it. Then I realized that everybody else was still standing there, no big deal. Nobody was worried. It dawned on me that the gunfire was from the truck next to me (duh) as the Americans tried to draw out the ambush by firing a few bursts from a mounted 50-caliber weapon.

All I could do at that moment was laugh. And I did. A couple of the guys did too. I am a combat rookie.

Because it's what I was there to do, I followed Johnny into a field. I have never felt so exposed. I briefly thought, "What am I doing?" But then auto-pilot took over and I just tried to make pictures and stay close to the person with the weapon. I couldn't photograph his face, so I had to stay behind him the whole time.

Johnny took off running through an apple orchard. "Are you still with me?" he yelled over his shoulder. Despite the extra weight of my cumbersome body armor and the cameras swinging from my shoulders, I was determined not to be left behind, alone, unarmed in the middle of a field like a sitting duck. I just ran along right behind, like I was Johnny's little black shadow.

Johnny saw something or someone through the trees...

...fighting-age farmers.

(Deep breath. Pulse slows to normal rate.)

For whatever reason, there was no ambush. Johnny and his crew were certain there would be action just up the road (you really could feel it in the air), but it was late in the day. There was no Afghan police or army counterpart, which on any other day may not have been an issue, but the team was carrying two civilians: Soraya and me. They didn't feel right about taking us any further that day. The fight for the weapons cache would have to wait.

Bombs and sugar water

2009-06-22T21:43:00.006+03:00

Nuria, 7, rests in the burn unit of Herat Regional Hospital on May 10.

She was taking shelter with her mother and two sisters in a housing compound on May 4th, when U.S. forces used air strikes to quell a day-long battle against the Taliban in the village of Garani, Farah province, Afghanistan. Nuria's mother died during the bombardment, and her sisters were both badly burned.

NPR's Soraya Nelson, Los Angeles Times' Laura King and I traveled to west Afghanistan to report on the incident, which had the potential to be the largest civilian casualty occurrence since the U.S. invasion in 2001. Please listen to Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson's report for National Public Radio here and read Laura King's LA Times story here. This was an extremely complicated, nuanced story that they worked on for a full week, reconstructing and comparing events through countless interviews. They both did an amazing job, in my opinion.

We started in northwest Afghanistan at Herat Regional Hospital's burn unit, where we found five survivors: one woman and four young girls.

Nurse Marie-Jose Brunel tries to help 12-year-old Tallah Barakat straighten her legs in the hospital's burn unit. In addition to her burns, Tallah also had a compound fracture of her leg.

Naeem Barakat, 13, supports his sister Tallah while she takes a drink of water.

Barakat prays next to the bed of his youngest daughter, 5-year-old Fereshte. His wife, the mother of Fereshte, Nuria, Tallah and Naeem, was killed.

Tallah is soothed by her father.

From Herat, we flew south to Farah City, an hour's drive from Garani. However, this police checkpoint just outside of the provincial capital was as close as we were able to get to the village. A secured ring surrounds Farah City. Outside the last checkpoint, danger for Afghans and foreigners alike is very real. A 10-km stretch of the highway to Garani passes through an area occupied by hundreds of Taliban, according to Garani tribal elders, Afghan police and international coalition forces. As a result, neither the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission nor the United Nations, nor we journalists were able to view and investigate the area first-hand in the days following the incident.

We may have been alright getting to the bombed area--it's getting back out that probably would have been a problem.

The day after we arrived in Farah City, the Afghan government held a reparations ceremony for families of the civilian victims. This was another chance to talk to villagers who witnessed the events on May 4th and their aftermath. Above, a Garani resident weeps during an opening prayer for the victims.

According to residents of Garani, the first U.S. strikes came long after the Taliban had fled the village, perhaps as long as 90 minutes. The first bomb hit a mosque, and villagers, many of them children, took cover in two housing compounds. Bombs hit both compounds, killing as many as 140 civilians. The U.S. military has stated the civilian death count as low as 20-30, but recently admitted mistakes in the incident: "U.S. Report Finds Errors in Afghan Airstrikes," New York Times, June 2, 2009.

A resident of Garani meets with Afghan government officials during the reparations ceremony in Farah City.

Family members were paid $2,000 for each death, for a grand total of $180,000.

Each recipient was recorded and fingerprinted so that reparations couldn't be claimed twice.

Brothers Humayun, left, and Yassin accept money for their dead family members from Farah province governor Rahoul Amin. The brothers came to collect for their deceased parents and nine siblings, but only nine family members were on the Afghan government's list of dead civilians from the village of Garani.

I can't really imagine losing my entire family and my house just like that.

Mohammad Ayub's son Dawajan, 1, plays peek-a-boo in his father's clothing while they wait for the reparations ceremony to begin. Ayub's wife and 2-year-old son were missing and presumed dead.

While we interviewed and photographed the farmer, a pall of hopelessness fell on his features. He asked if one of us would take Dawajan, as the baby was still nursing when his mother died, and Ayub didn't know how he would be able to care for him. His livestock had been destroyed along with his house. He had no money for milk.

Dawajan's diet had become the only thing his father had left: a bit of sugar mixed with water.

Courage

2009-05-07T22:01:00.003+03:00

Schools for girls have never been plentiful in Kandahar. (Find Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson's NPR report on girls' education in Kandahar here.)

Some blame this on the Pashtun honor code, known as Pashtunwali, a male-dominated tradition that, among other things, advocates "protecting" women. Especially in rural areas, this generally keeps women at home, covered and away from the prying eyes of unrelated males. A family's honor is only as pure as its women's virtue. However, there are also economic factors--some families simply can't afford to send their children to school. Added to this are three decades of war and general lack of security throughout Afghanistan. Sometimes, it's just not safe to go anywhere. Unfortunately, this all means that many girls are not allowed by their families to go to school and never get the opportunity to learn to read, write or realize their full human potential.

The years under the Taliban's strict reign did not help matters. A sort of Pashtunwali on Islamic steroids, the Taliban institutionalized women's existence to roughly around the Dark Ages. A list of restrictions imposed on women by the Taliban published online by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) includes the prohibition of women's education, work outside the home, and any activity outside the home unaccompanied by a close male relative. (Afghanistan has always been a conservative place. Women have been wearing burqas for centuries. RAWA also notes that many of the restrictions on their list were first put into practice during the time of Ahmed Shah Massoud's government from 1992-1996, before the Taliban came to power.)

Billions of dollars in aid have poured into Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Some of this money has been earmarked specifically for girls' education. In the past eight years, girls' schools have been built, teachers have been trained and girls' school enrollment has increased even in Kandahar, although it still lags behind much of the rest of the country, according to Afghanistan's education minister.

In the past couple of years, security in Kandahar has deteriorated, and with that, gains in women's education have slid backwards. A number of acid attacks on school girls, threats on students and teachers, and the very real fear of assassination of anyone willing to speak out for women's rights or human rights, have contributed to a drastic decrease in girls' enrollment at public schools.

So, what did women do when the Taliban closed girls' schools in the late 1990's? They formed secret schools in people's homes, of course! Hundreds of literacy programs and schools for girls and women have sprung up in Kandahar city homes.

Marzia, 17, teaches the first grade to a group of girls and women aged 14-40 in the courtyard of her Kandahar home. She was teaching as part of a World Food Program (WFP) and Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) program that exchanges women's participation in the 10-month long class for monthly food rations.

More than 400 micro-schools exist in Kandahar just through the WFP/CIDA program. There are hundreds of home schools in Afghanistan founded through other non-governmental organization like these. And who knows how many more informal schools and tutoring programs operate in secret?

A student answers questions about the Dari alphabet at the front of the class.

All of the women wore burqas for our visit, except Marzia, the teacher. She refused to cover her face or hide her identity. She told us that she strongly believes in serving her country and that her faith in God gives her courage and strength to continue this work.

The women were sheltered from the sun by a plastic blue tarp overhead.

Two young women whisper during the lesson.

A student recites letters of the Dari alphabet while the rest of class repeats after her.

Hands folded, a woman listens.

A woman peeks over the wall separating her house from the class next door.

The youngest student in the class, a 14-year-old.

Tents pitched in the courtyard serve as classrooms for overcrowded Mirwais School for Girls. On Nov. 12, 2008, men on motorcycles splashed acid on 11 students and four teachers as they walked to the school.

Shamsia Husseini, 17, shown in her Dari class, is the only one of those attacked who has returned to school.

The older girls in Shamsia's class are still very much afraid. They also expressed anger and hostility at the many foreigners who came to talk to them, but who were unable to help make their lives safer. They questioned how such a thing could happen with so many foreign soldiers in Kandahar; did the Americans just not care about them? (I should note here that most Afghans don't make a distinction between the Americans and other armies--German, Canadian or anyone else. All of the soldiers are American.)

A student clears the chalkboard at the front of a classroom.

Girls chatter and mill about during a break between classes.

Three students share a textbook during class in a tent outside the main building.

"Do you want to go to Kandahar?"

2009-04-28T07:45:00.014+03:00

This was a question I really didn’t expect to hear, not on this trip, maybe not ever.

Kandahar didn’t factor into my plans. I just didn’t think it was a possibility, not just because it is considered dangerous enough to keep most un-embedded foreigners out, but also because of the high cost of secure lodging and transportation.

But, to my surprise, NPR’s Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson was asking me to accompany her on a week-long reporting trip to the city in one of Afghanistan’s most volatile southern provinces.

I wouldn’t have gone to Kandahar on my own, but this was to be Soraya’s third trip there and she has been reporting from conflict zones for 10 years. She has lived and worked in Afghanistan for the past three years. I trust her judgment. And she offered me the opportunity not just to provide visual content for NPR’s website, but also to experience a place and a people that few outsiders get to see, and to do it relatively safely.

It was too tempting to pass up.

Journalists take calculated risks everyday. Just being here in Afghanistan is risky. Every time we leave the security of the hotel or guest house, there are risks. We weigh the need to work on an important and compelling story with the ability to do it as safely as possible.

Working in Kandahar presented some challenges.

For the first time ever, I wore a burqa to work. I had to work quickly, never staying in one place for longer than 20 minutes. I tried not to attract attention to myself, the car, the driver, the translator or Soraya. I traveled in a nondescript small car, changed my daily routine outside of the guest house and tried to think a little like the enemy. I thought about where I would strike if I was a bomber or a kidnapper and tried not to put myself in those situations; or if I had to go there, I didn't stay long. And some places were simply off limits.

No matter how many precautions you take, or how many things you do to try to prevent something bad from happening, bad things can still happen. But if we let fear completely take over, no stories would be written, no photographs would be taken. One piece of advice somebody gave me before I left for Kandahar was, "Just do your work and take care of yourself and don't worry about the rest." A way of saying, you can only worry about what is in your control.

A few street scenes:

Women's market. (Unlike in Kabul, in Kandahar it is rare to see a woman not wearing a burqa. I was pleasantly surprised to discover the wide range of colors--green, brown, lavender, rose, peach and olive--worn by the women in public. I had only seen the stereotypical blue burqa and occasionally a white one.)

Flat bread frying in a bazaar stall.

Rickshaw driver. Afghans consider the rickshaw the mode of transport least likely to be targeted by roadside bombs.

Radio salesman. During the reign of the Taliban, music, dancing, television, cinemas and many other aspects of cultural life were against the law.

Bike traffic.

Women's market.

Tea shop.

Chawk-e Madat Square.

A photojournalist friend once told me that Afghanistan feels safe until it isn't. The feeling of security one can have in Kabul is deceiving. A bomb can come out of nowhere.

I got a different feeling when I was in Kandahar. People there live with a much more frequent and sustained level of violence. Afghans die as they go about their daily lives. Kidnappings occur regularly. Assassinations have become terrifyingly efficient. As both the seat of provincial government and the largest city in the southern part of the country, frequent suicide attacks and IED's aim to destabilize the entire region.

The day after we arrived in Kandahar, a man detonated an IED just outside the main gate of Mirwais Hospital, the city's main public hospital. The intended target was a passing Afghan National Police truck. Two people were killed. The five injured included Nassir Ahmad, 8, shown in the emergency ward at the hospital.

Forty-five minutes after the blast, only some bits of blood and debris from the trees overhead remained.

I don't think I was imagining the underlying dark vibe I felt from strangers, subjects and others I met. The people of Kandahar are weary. There is no security and life is cheap.

The dead woman's young daughter was seriously injured and on an operating table somewhere in the hospital.

More from Kandahar coming up...

Drugs, Part 2

2009-04-26T17:07:00.005+03:00

The second part of the NPR drug series focused on the former Russian Cultural Center, a bombed-out campus of buildings in Kabul that has become a notorious addict hangout used primarily by men.

You can look at Part 2 of Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson's series on NPR's website here.

According to a February 2009 United Nations survey, around 650 addicts live in the buildings at the Russian Cultural Center, and officials estimate 1500-2000 additional people come everyday to buy and use drugs. Heroin is the drug of choice, with 98 percent of the residents either smoking or injecting it. The drug is cheap. Unemployment, poverty and despair are all in ample supply.

Conditions at the site are terrible. The buildings provide little shelter from the elements. There is no electricity, plumbing, heat or clean water. The floors inside are covered in trash, dirt and human waste, a ripe place for disease to spread. The UN says that during the winter months, 2-4 people died each day at the center.

To stem these daily deaths, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime set up an emergency detox program on the grounds of the center in February. They also began feeding the residents one hot meal per day, so at least they wouldn't starve to death. Although meant merely as a stop-gap measure, this program has become the largest ad-hoc drug treatment center in Afghanistan.

The Russian Cultural Center was an experience. We decided to go mid-morning, hoping people would be stirring before the day's midday meal. Soraya asked both her driver and her fixer to come in with us. The "counter-narcotics" police wanted to accompany us as well (for our own security--why else?), but we refused. We were saved from that situation by allowing a doctor from the detox program to come in with us. Better than the police any day. (Part of Afghanistan's problem is that everyone is involved in the drug trade. It's just too lucrative. Police, members of Parliament, government ministers...)

So, we were five people. To me, that's way too many. In Afghanistan, it's true, I never just go off and shoot by myself. I always have somebody with me, whether it is a driver, translator or another photographer. Especially going into a potentially risky environment, I'd rather not go alone. People can get pretty agitated about photographs even if they're not high on narcotics. But it's very difficult to be unobtrusive with five people.

So, in we went.

A drug dealer sits at the entrance to one of the buildings. Heroin is cheap and readily available at the former cultural center, despite the so-called counter-narcotics police just outside.

When we actually got inside, I was totally shocked by what I saw: room after room packed with men all squatting and in various stages of smoking heroin. I've definitely never seen anything like it.

Addicts light up in a dilapidated room. Users melt the heroin paste then inhale the smoke to feel the effects of the drug.

Some people were definitely upset that we were there, others graciously allowed me and Soraya to talk to them and photograph them. It's always amazing to me what people are willing to share of themselves, even something like their addiction. But I think doing this kind of work would be impossible if I didn't always try to treat everyone I meet with basic respect and humanity, no matter what their situation.

Heroin paste that has already been melted and is ready to smoke.

Ruhollah, 25, an Afghan refugee returnee from Iran, smokes heroin.

We only had 15 minutes or so before it was time to go. Soraya, who understands Dari (Afghanistan's Farsi dialect) said she could hear people threatening us.

A bombed building serves as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime emergency detox program, where addicts can try to quit. The detox center serves the 650 residents with a daily hot meal, and if they choose, detoxification assistance, medical aid and counseling.

Muhammad Rahim, 28, sits in an acute detox room where he will spend a week before moving to a second recovery area.

It's Muhammad's first time trying to quit.

A recovering addict in the final phase of detox sits next to the fire at the center.

Each of the former Russian Cultural Center's 650 residents will receive soup, bread and a little fruit for lunch.

Hundreds of men line up and wait patiently to receive a portion of food.

A man sits hunched over his soup and bread, the first and only meal of the day, just outside the emergency detox center.

Afghans have very few options for treatment of drug addiction. International donors have spent lots on opium eradication, but almost nothing on treatment.

Drugs, Part 1

2009-04-17T00:17:00.003+02:00

The first assignment I worked on in Kabul was a two-part series with National Public Radio's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson about Afghanistan's growing drug addiction problem. You can see NPR's web presentation of Part 1 here. (Please listen to Soraya's audio piece. It's good.)

The Afghan government is doing little to treat its own addict population, and funding for treatment from international organizations lags way behind funding and support for opium eradication. Experts we talked to said that a new United Nations survey being conducted is expected to show that 1 in 12 Afghans abuses drugs.

For the first part of the series, we visited Karima and her six children in the neighborhood of Shahre-Kohne, literally translated as "Broken City", in Kabul. Karima is addicted to heroin, opium and hashish and the week before we visited her, she was so desperate for cash that she tried to sell her 5-year-old daughter. Karima has exposed all of her children to the drugs from pregnancy onward.

A nearby drug treatment program, the Nejat Center, has been reaching out to Karima. Counselors and doctors have been visiting the small room where the family lives, trying to convince Karima to quit. She says that she wants to quit, but so far hasn't been able to.

Karima prepares her morning fix--a mixture of heroin and opium rolled in a cigarette.

Rika, 3, sits next to her mother and watches the process.

Karima said that her husband got her hooked on the drugs. That's 5-year-old Raisa (the one Karima tried to sell) on the far right and 3-year-old Rika, playing with her mother's cigarettes.

Fahima, 12, watches her mother. Karima makes Fahima go out and buy her drugs for her.

Rika, 3.

Fahima sits calmly while her grandmother Fariba, left, and Karima, right, giggle from the effects of the drugs. Both of Karima's parents are also drug addicts.

Pooh and cigarettes.

Fahima answers the door. Her hair is falling out in chunks and she has kidney stones. All of the children suffer from their exposure to heroin and opium smoke, as well as malnutrition.

Karima reaches for her few cooking utensils so she can begin to prepare lunch. Private donations to the Nejat Center were used to buy Karima a small stove and some gas for cooking, as well a few cans of food and cooking oil.

For lunch, potato soup with a little onion.

Arun, 7, and Raisa, 5, wait while Karima slices onion and potato. Karima's addiction means that sometimes there is just enough food to stifle the hunger pangs, but not enough for the children to thrive. And sometimes no food at all.

The youngest, 1-year-old Ghodratullah, sleeps soundly in his crib.

Karima hands off her still smoking cigarette to Fahima. The Nejat Center counselors recently discovered to their horror that the 12-year-old girl also smokes some of her mother's heroin and opium.

Afghanistan: Orientation

2009-04-13T20:24:00.003+02:00

To the annoyance of my parents, I am here in Afghanistan once again.

I arrived in Kabul two weeks ago and am hoping to stay a month or two, continuing work on a couple of projects and making myself available for assignments. (Hint, hint. Hello? Hello?! Anybody???)

A friend and colleague has graciously offered to put me up in her house for awhile--and I finally know how to give people directions on how to get here. One of Kabul's many challenges is the lack of actual street names, let alone house numbers. Some streets are so famous that everybody knows them, like Flower Street, which is a well-known street full of shops. Some streets have mysterious names, like Toilet Street. Others are simply called Line 5 or Line 8 (although many Afghans don't seem to know these streets), with one unnumbered door in the wall following another.

Still other streets are known only by their landmarks, like mosques, bazaars, stores or restaurants. I can't post my exact location on the Internet, so I'll just say that my street is unofficially known by the name of a restaurant serving a popular fried food. I feel like laughing every time I have to give people directions but hey, whatever gets me here.

I've gotten a couple of assignments, which I'll share later. Until then, I'll wow you with a few images from my daily existence here...

This is an Afghan dish called palaw, which I call "lunch", served nearly every day where I am staying. The dish is a giant plate of meaty rice cooked in meat juices (often lamb) with some kind of stew to eat with each spoonful. I always get a portion of yogurt, which I never touch. The bread is actually very good and fresh from the bakery everyday.

Walls, razor wire, fences: the view from the second-story balcony. Oh, yeah--by the way, this is pretty typical of the weather we've been having. Rainy, chilly, muddy...

...which is why I am thankful for the wood stove in my room. My friend Taimani (the dog) loves it too.