I Could Have Been One of the Journalists Killed in Kabul

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/magazine/afghanistan-bombing-journalists.html

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Habib Zahori is a former New York Times journalist from Afghanistan who now lives in Ottawa.

On April 30, I read the first tweets about the initial bombing in downtown Kabul as I was going to bed. In Ottawa, the place I have called home for the past four years, news of an attack in Afghanistan always triggers a flurry of text messages to my mother. She assured me that everyone in my family was fine. I woke up an hour later to her texting me about a second blast. A suicide bomber, carrying a camera to blend in, had detonated explosives that killed 25 people, including nine journalists. She wanted to know if I knew any of them. I did.

Among those killed was the chief photographer for Agence France-Presse in Kabul, my friend Shah Marai. I met him during the presidential campaign of 2009 at Ghazi sports stadium in Kabul. He was known among the Afghan press corps as one of the kohna pekh ha, or the Old Stocks, referring to the group of Afghan journalists who started working for foreign media during the Taliban regime. Newcomers like me looked up to them for professional guidance. Marai began his work as a driver and worked his way up. For over two decades, he bore witness to everything that was happening in Afghanistan and took haunting pictures, until he himself became a picture.

[Shah Marai was A.F.P.’s chief photographer in Kabul. Read about the legacy of images he left behind.]

As soon as I saw his smiling face circulating on my Twitter feed, I felt the darkness outside my window grow thicker and come down on me like a weighted blanket. I had a flashback to the moment in 2014 when I found out about the death of another friend, Sardar Ahmad, who also worked for A.F.P. He was shot and killed along with members of his young family while celebrating the Persian New Year at a restaurant in Kabul. Just one of Ahmad’s three young children survived.

Ahmad’s death eroded my hope that a better future in Afghanistan was possible and made me determined to get out. That’s when I left for North America, despite overwhelming criticism and accusations of selfishness from my family members and friends. The agony of seeing Afghans dying all around me and not being able to do anything about it was too much to handle. I hated traveling outside Kabul to the provinces or going to cover the aftermath of explosions and suicide bombings. I couldn’t even handle going to restaurants and picnics. I needed to cut the invisible umbilical cord that connected me to home, my people and, most important, the endless pain and anguish I associated with them.

In Ottawa, I tried to scale down the number of news articles that I read about Afghanistan, then limited myself to reading only the headlines. Soon the dead and the maimed in Afghanistan became mere figures and numbers. But that self-deception did not last long. Every time there was a bombing or an airstrike, I was overwhelmed by regret and guilt for not being there to help. Last December, after a Taliban suicide bomber killed six people near the Presidential Palace, I had a panic attack when I couldn’t get in touch with anyone at home. When I angrily protested to my father that I had almost had a heart attack, he coldly told me that I was worrying too much and that life was not as bad as the media were portraying it. Then he casually said, “Sometimes it is easier to live inside the monster than outside of it.” Perhaps my father was right and things were not as bad as I thought. I limited my reaction after each bombing in Kabul to sending a text, “Everything O.K., inshallah?” and waiting for someone in my family to reply, “Yes, everyone is fine, alhamdulillah.”

That changed with Marai’s death. His face seemed to be swimming before my eyes, his disarming smile, the gap between his front teeth that we sometimes made fun of, the memory of him running toward me at news conferences and insisting I tell him a joke and his texts from Afghanistan in 2016, asking me to record a joke and send it to him via WhatsApp so that he could play it for his friends at a party. My vision became blurry, and then tears started racing down my cheeks.

War is a beast whose lust for human flesh is insatiable. Those who killed Marai did not achieve anything but feeding the beast and prolonging its life. By killing Marai, they did not only kill one man; they also destroyed the lives of all those who were dependent on him. He was the breadwinner of the family. Marai had married twice and fathered six children. The youngest, a girl, was only 2 weeks old. He also supported some relatives, including three blind brothers and two blind children.

You learn the humbling force of death only when you lose a friend, a family member or someone you know. You see its enormity and devastation in the cries of a bereaved mother or sister, the wailing of a newly widowed woman and the tears of an orphan. It also forces you to think about your own mortality. That could have been me if I had not left the country. If I had been in Afghanistan, I might have gone to the site of the first bombing and died with the rest of the journalists that day. I was filled with guilt and grief — a traumatic mix. I tormented myself for compromising my moral standards, for failing to do my duty as a son, a brother a friend. The sense of failing a loved one is scarring.

When I was growing up in Afghanistan, every time I felt overwhelmed by the never-ending violence, every time the monster of grief dug its sharp claws into my heart and every time I felt the walls of helplessness inching toward me, I would always think of one place: the West. I thought that if I could make it to this so-called land of abundance, freedom and security, I would be able to rid myself of the physical and psychological torments that had marred me since childhood. Now I was here, thousands of miles away from the anguish that I fled four years before. On the day that my friends buried Marai in his ancestral cemetery, I called a couple of them to let them know that I was grieving too. One of them said, “You are lucky that you are not here to see him being buried.”

The distance was supposed to buffer me, but it didn’t. There is no escape from the suffering that engulfs Afghanistan, no matter where I am.