A Friend And Colleague Remembers Ajmal Naqshbandi

A Friend And Colleague Remembers Ajmal Naqshbandi
April 16, 2007
By Teru Kuwayama (PDN)

Editor's note: The kidnapping and murder of Afghan journalist Ajmal Naqshbandi, who had worked as a translator and fixer for many photojournalists in Afghanistan, mobilized journalists around the world. Naqshbandi had been abducted March 6 along with Italian reporter Daniele Mastrogiacomo; their driver, Sayed Agha, was murdered a few days after their abduction. Mastrogiacomo was released March 19 in what appeared to have been an exchange for five Taliban prisoners being held by the Afghan government, but Naqshbandi continued to be held. The Committee to Protect Journalists circulated a petition, signed by over 300 journalists, demanding action on Naqshbandi's behalf. But on April 9, a spokesperson for Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah announced that Naqshbandi had been beheaded because the government of Afghan president Hamid Karzai had not met their demands.

New York-based photojournalist Teru Kuwayama, who had worked closely with Naqshbandi, shares this remembrance of his friend and colleague, and pays tribute to the often unnamed fixers like Naqshbandi and Agha who risk their lives to help journalists tell their stories.

Ajmal Naqshbandi was one of my first friends in Afghanistan. We met in Kabul in 2002, in the months following the fall of the Taliban regime. Kabul was a city in ruins, emerging from eight years of totalitarian madness, and decades of warfare.

I met Ajmal at a nameless guest house, where he was working as the manager. He must have been twenty years old at the time. As foreign armies, aid groups, and journalists flooded into the country, young Afghans like Ajmal who spoke some English were in demand as translators and fixers. The luckiest might make hundreds of US dollars a day working for the television networks. Ajmal was making a couple of dollars a day running the guest house for its most recent owner, a Northern Alliance commander who had seized the property and was renting it to a handful of French aid workers. It was my first time in Afghanistan, and Ajmal and I were both new at what we were doing. We became friends, translating our worlds to one another. He would ask me about life in America, and the strange world he was watching on the new satellite TV, and would tell me about life growing up under the Taliban, and about a girl in Ghazni he was in love with. When I left Kabul, I gave him what was left of my money, about $30, so he could take a computer class¬—he had already started working on the side as an assistant to a Japanese newspaper reporter who had moved into the house, and he was hoping that if he learned word processing, he could get a better job at an NGO.

Two years later, when I returned to Kabul, Ajmal was waiting for me outside the airport in a four-wheel-drive SUV. He hugged me, handed me one of his extra mobile phones, and drove me to a new guest house he had opened a few streets away from our old place. He had a position as a correspondent for the Japanese newspaper, and aside from filing news reports for them, he was sought after as a fixer and translator by journalists from all over the world.

In a chaotic, dangerous environment, Ajmal inspired trust. He was brave without being aggressive, unfailingly considerate and polite, and he was well liked by the reporters he worked with. Like us, he lived and worked in a balancing act of ambition and caution, and made it somehow seem almost safe. It wasn't just something he did for the money - without any formal training at all, he practiced journalism with a level of commitment and integrity that most of his clients could aspire to. We didn't hesitate to put our lives in his hands.

The last time I saw Ajmal was in December, a few months before he was killed. He had become the go-to guy for arranging meetings with the Taliban forces in eastern Afghanistan, and he told me that he had been warned by the Afghan government not to help foreign reporters to interview "the enemy." The country had taken a definitive slide for the worse, and the sense of optimism that I remembered from my first visit to Afghanistan was gone. New buildings of glass and steel and luxury hotels had risen all over Kabul, but no one had any illusions about who ruled the land outside the city limits.

Even Ajmal was bleak in his outlook for Afghanistan's future. Like many Afghans, he was frustrated by the pervasive corruption in the new government, worried about the increasing insecurity throughout the country, and angry at the apparent disregard for civilian casualties inflicted by foreign armies. He asked me, not for the first time, about getting out, and if I thought an Afghan could get a visa to come to America. I had no good answers for him, but I begged him to be careful in Afghanistan, because he was operating in a truly dangerous space. Unlike the foreign reporters he worked with, Ajmal, and his fellow fixers, translators, and local journalists, had no safety net. As the go-between between two sides, he was exposed on both ends, and in many ways, we feared less that the Taliban would harm him, than that he might end up arrested by his own government, or detained by coalition forces and disappeared forever to some non-existent interrogation center.

In the end, Ajmal died as a poker chip on the bargaining table between Dadullah's Taliban faction and Karzai's national government. Both sides claim to represent the people of Afghanistan, but neither seemed to care much about the life of one of Afghanistan's best citizens, and brightest hopes. For those of us who knew Ajmal, it's hard to imagine a future without him. It was people like Ajmal who made the story of Afghanistan inspirational, not just tragic.

It's hard for me to fathom what goes through the minds of people like Karzai and Dadullah. Perhaps they thought Ajmal's life was insignificant, and would be forgotten. It might have been a good bet, because sadly, that's how things often go. Ajmal wasn't the first to die in this line of work, and I don't expect him to be the last. Seven journalists are confirmed as killed in the line of duty this year alone, another seven cases remain unconfirmed. All of them were local journalists, with names like Ajmal, Abdulrazak, Jamal, and an unknown number of "media workers" or "journalist assistants" like Sayed Agha, a 25-year-old father of four who died with Ajmal, two weeks into his career as a driver for foreign journalists. These are the people who do the heavy lifting, who face the greatest dangers, and who most often pay the greatest price for our work.

As it happened, Ajmal wasn't forgotten. People from all over the world, who, in most cases had never met him, stepped up, and refused to let it go. From Kabul to Rome to New York, thousands of people mobilized and worked for his release. Ultimately, we couldn't bring him home, and for those of us who knew him, it's a sickening, heartbreaking reality that's just starting to sink in.

I can remember my last moments with him, sitting in the apartment in Kabul he'd bought for himself and his new wife, the girl from Ghazni. We talked about how much our lives had changed in the past five years, and how unimaginable our current lives would have been to us back then. We talked about our plans for the future, and for the coming year in Afghanistan. At the time, I couldn't have imagined an Afghanistan without him. I still can't.

Donations to the families of Naqshbandi and Agha can be made at (youarenotforgotten.net).The donations are managed by November 11, a 503c tax-exempt organization.