Mahpekay Sediqy is the deputy director at the Kabul Orthopaedic Organisation (KOO) in Afghanistan's capital and a bilateral amputee, herself. Sediqy lost both legs to a mine while collecting firewood as a child during the Taliban's time in power in that late 1990s. She had never aspired to anything more than completing sixth class at school but, following her accident, Sediqy was taken under the wing of KOO's director at the time and has since gone on to complete a bachelor's degree in prosthetics and orthotics and helped hundreds of people with physical disabilities to walk, some for the fir ..read more

It was the second time I’d met and interviewed this Taliban commander. I refer to him in the podcast as Ismael. The first time, several weeks ago, he didn’t want me to record our conversation. It did, however, give me the opportunity to obtain the kind of information I needed to be confident that he was who he said he was. Ismael and I spoke in a provincial capital—a government-controlled area. It had taken him half a day of travel there and he was about to lie down to sleep when I arrived, but he insisted we start the interview straight away.  I started by asking him about the early days ..read more

This episode, the second from my recent trip to Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, I speak with the most senior Afghan National Army (ANA) officer in the province, the commander of the Afghan National Army’s 215th Corps’,  Lt. Gen. Wali Mohammad Ahmadzai. I interviewed Gen. Ahmadzai on October 17, where, in the exact same guesthouse on the exact same day, two years earlier, one of his old army comrades, Abdul Jabar Qarahman, who President Ghani had sent to the city to oversee an effort to prevent its fall in 2016, was killed during a meeting by a bomb that had been placed under his chai ..read more

At only 28, Farahnaz Forotan has worked at three of Afghanistan’s largest television broadcasters since 2012, hosting flagship talk shows at two of them, including 1TV’s hugely popular weekly program, Kabul Debate, which she's headed since 2019. Forotan is also the founder of My Red Line, an online advocacy campaign allowing Afghans to voice the rights they enjoy now and which they refuse to forfeit or negotiate on as peace negotiations proceed in Doha. We began by talking about Forotan’s earliest years, during the late 1990s after the Taliban had taken control of Kabul and about the conf ..read more

Saad Mohseni is one of Afghanistan’s most influential businesspeople, and the co-founder of it’s most popular television network, TOLO TV. He is the son of an Afghan diplomat who, soon after the 1979 Soviet invasion, sought political asylum in Australia. There, he worked in finance until the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, when he returned to Kabul with his brothers in search of business opportunities. The three brothers founded MOBY Group in 2003, and within a couple of years had established Arman FM, Afghanistan’s first privately owned radio station, a revelation in a country where music ..read more

On October 11, Taliban fighters in Helmand converged on the districts surrounding the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, capturing huge swathes of government-held territory in a matter of days and raising concern that the city would fall to the insurgents. The offensive was the Taliban’s largest, countrywide, since representatives of the group signed an agreement with the U.S. in Doha in February, which both sides said they hoped would pave the way for bringing an end to the war. Although it wasn’t specified in the publicly available version of the agreement, U.S. officials have repeatedly stated ..read more

Dr. Yama Torabi is a Senior Research Associate and a political scientist. He holds two masters degrees, in Political Science and International Relations, and a PhD in International Relations.  ​In 2005, Torabi founded Integrity Watch Afghanistan, which, after completing his studies in France, he returned to Kabul to direct between 2009 and 14. He was commissioner and rotating chair of Afghanistan’s Joint Independent Monitoring and Evaluation Committee (MEC) between 2012 and 17, and head of the government’s Special Anti-Corruption Secretariat (SACS) from 2017 until earlier this year. We co ..read more

This episode, I speak with Abdul Jamil, a 75-year-old member of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) originally from Marjah in Helmand province.  It's a special and sobering episode, because the 33-year-old Helmandi journalist Aliyas Dayee, with whom I'd worked since 2016 and who assisted with this and the previous two episodes, is no longer with us.  On November 12, less than a month after this interview was recorded, Dayee was leaving the provincial hospital in Helmand's capital Lashkar Gah with his brother after dropping their mother off for a routine visit when a bomb exploded beneath ..read more

I first met Rahmatullah Amiri as he was being wheeled into an operating theatre in Kabul one night in August 2016. A few hours earlier, Amiri was in an evening class at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) when three gunmen stormed the compound after breaching the front gate with a car bomb. 13 students, teachers and security staff were killed in the attack. 49 others were injured, including Amiri, who was shot three times. Amiri survived the night and, after undergoing several surgeries, and completing his bachelor’s degree in political science and public administration from AUAF, ha ..read more

This episode, I speak with Abdul Jamil, a 75-year-old member of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) originally from Marjah in Helmand province.  It's a special and sobering episode, because the 33-year-old Helmandi journalist Aliyas Dayee, with whom I'd worked since 2016 and who assisted with this and the previous two episodes, is no longer with us.  On November 12, less than a month after this interview was recorded, Dayee was leaving the provincial hospital in Helmand's capital Lashkar Gah with his brother after dropping their mother off for a routine visit when a bomb exploded beneath ..read more