The current crises and tragedies in Afghanistan and Ukraine are heart wrenching. What makes it worse is that it is not unique. Throughout history there have been wars and often worse aftermaths of war.
Another thing that is also not unique is the fact that it is the children who are always hit the hardest. There is a line in the Elvis song “Don’t cry daddy” which describes it best. “Why are children always first. To feel the pain and the hurt the worst?”
There is no better song though, to describe the failure of mankind to protect their children, the “When the children Cry” by White Lion. Below is the text and the song itself.
“Little child dry your crying eyes How can I explain the fear you feel inside ‘Cause you were born into this evil world
Where man is killing man and no one knows just why What have we become just look what we have done All that we destroyed you must build again
When the children cry let them know we tried ‘Cause when the children sing then the new world begins
Little child you must show the way To a better day for all the young ‘Cause you were born for all the world to see That we all can live with love and peace
No more presidents and all the wars will end One united world under God When the children cry let them know we tried ‘Cause when the children sing then the new world begins What have we become just look what we have done
All that we destroyed you must build again No more presidents and all the wars will end One united world under God When the children cry let them know we tried When the children fight let them know it ain’t right When the children pray let them know the way ‘Cause when the children sing then the new world begins”
Social Media could be such a great tool to unite the world, instead it has divided it. There are now people who only believe the ‘news’ they see on Social Media and take it as gospel, no matter how manipulated it is. Then there are those who solely trust other news outlets, often referred as the Mainstream Media. Luckily there are still some who have the ability to do some critical thinking.
Regardless what you think of this so called Mainstream Media, there is one point that can not be disputed. Between 1992 and 2021,1411 reporters from the ‘Mainstream Media’ were killed. Where as no keyboard warrior Social Media reporter has ever been killed.
I am not going through all the reporters that were killed. I just focus on a few of them. However I will have the list of all killed reporters and journalists at the end of the blog.
Ulf Strömberg
Strömberg, a cameraman for the Swedish channel TV4, was murdered in the early morning during a robbery at the house in Taloqan, Afghanistan where he and several other journalists were staying.
At around 2 a.m., armed gunmen broke into the house and entered the room where two journalists from the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet were sleeping. The intruders demanded money, which they were given, and also stole equipment including cameras, computers, and a satellite phone, according to Aftonbladet.
The robbers threatened to kill the two journalists-Martin Adler, a photographer, and Bo Liden, a correspondent-but left the room after an Afghan translator intervened on their behalf, according to a Reuters report. The gunmen then proceeded to the room Strömberg was sharing with his TV4 colleague Rolf Porseryd, a correspondent. Porseryd told reporters that Strömberg went to the door and slammed it shut when he saw the gunmen, who fired several shots before fleeing.
Strömberg, 42, was apparently hit in the chest by a bullet fired through the door. Though colleagues rushed him to a local hospital, his wounds were fatal.
If you ever needed evidence that history repeats itself. Strömberg was killed in Taloqan, Afghanistan on November 26, 2001.
Veronica Guerin
Guerin, a crime reporter for the Sunday Independent, was shot dead by assailants on a motorcycle as she was stopped in her car at a traffic light in Dublin. She had been repeatedly targeted for physical attacks, a shooting, and death threats because of her incisive, continuing investigation into Ireland’s criminal underworld that had garnered her CPJ’s 1995 International Press Freedom Award.
Two men, Brian Meehan and Paul Ward, were convicted for her murder in 1999 and 1998. Ward’s conviction was overturned in 2002, but he remains in prison, where he is serving a 12-year sentence for taking part in a prison riot. John Gilligan, a known Dublin drug trafficker, was also charged but was acquitted because of lack of evidence on March 16, 2001, despite the judge’s assertion that there were “grave suspicions” of Gilligan’s complicity in the killing.
On October 23, 2020 Spanish police arrested Gilligan at his villa in Alicante in southeastern Spain as part of an investigation into suspected trafficking of marijuana and prescription drugs from Spain to Ireland and the U.K., the BBC reported. During the raid, police recovered a Colt Python revolver which was buried in the garden of the villa — the same model that was used in the journalist’s murder, The Guardian reported. According to that report, Spanish and Irish police were examining the weapon to determine whether it was used in the assassination.
Veronica Guerin worked for the Sunday Independent. She was killed in Dublin, Ireland June 26, 1996.
Daniel Pearl
U.S. government officials confirmed on February 21, 2002, that Pearl, kidnapped South Asia correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, had been killed by his captors.
The exact date of his murder was uncertain, but authorities announced his death after receiving a graphic, three-and-a-half minute digital videotape containing scenes in which one of the killers slits Pearl’s throat, and then someone holds his severed head. The faces of the assailants are not visible on the video. This, and other details below, are documented in an extensive report on Pearl’s murder, entitled The Truth Left Behind: Inside the Kidnapping and Murder of Daniel Pearl, published in 2011 by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The Center for Public Integrity.
Pearl, 38, went missing on January 23, 2002, in the port city of Karachi, Pakistan, and was last seen on his way to an interview at the Village Restaurant, downtown near the Metropole Hotel. According to The Wall Street Journal, Pearl had been reporting on Richard Reid, a suspected terrorist who allegedly tried to blow up an airplane during a transatlantic flight with a bomb in his shoe.
Four days after his disappearance, a group calling itself “The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty” sent an e-mail to several U.S.- and Pakistan-based news organizations claiming responsibility for kidnapping Pearl and accusing him of being an American spy. The e-mail also contained four photographs of the journalist, including one in which he is held at gunpoint and another in which he is holding a copy of the January 24 issue of Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper.
The e-mail contained a series of demands, including the repatriation of Pakistani detainees held by the U.S. Army in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The sender or senders, who used a Hotmail e-mail account under the name “Kidnapper guy,” said Pearl was “at present being kept in very inhuman circumstances quite similar in fact to the way that Pakistanis and nationals of other sovereign countries are being kept in Cuba by the American Army.”
Another e-mail was sent on January 30, also including photographs of Pearl held captive. This e-mail accused him of being an agent of Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, and said he would be killed within 24 hours unless the group’s demands were met.
After scrutinizing the videotape that officials received weeks later, authorities believe that Pearl may have been murdered before the second e-mail was sent. During that footage, Pearl is forced to identify himself as Jewish and to deliver scripted lines reiterating some of the demands made in the e-mails, according to an FBI analysis of the tape that was provided to the Journal.
On February 12, 2002, before Pearl’s murder was discovered, Pakistani police announced the arrest of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, whom they identified as the prime suspect behind the journalist’s kidnapping.
On March 14, a U.S. grand jury indicted Saeed, charging him with hostage-taking and conspiracy to commit hostage-taking resulting in Pearl’s murder. U.S. prosecutors also unsealed a secret indictment filed against Saeed in November 2001 accusing him of participating in the 1994 kidnapping of U.S. tourist Bela Nuss in India. Pakistan refused to extradite Saeed, possibly to avoid damaging disclosures of links between the country’s intelligence agencies and militant Islamist groups that the United States wants to see eliminated.
In April, Saeed and three accomplices–Salman Saqib, Fahad Naseem, and Shaikh Adil–were charged with Pearl’s kidnapping and murder before Pakistan’s special anti-terrorism court. The trial, initially convened at Karachi’s Central Jail and later moved to a heavily guarded prison in Hyderabad due to security concerns, was closed to journalists and the public.
In mid-May, as the trial was under way, police found a dismembered body believed to be Pearl’s buried in the outskirts of Karachi on property owned by the Al-Rashid Trust, an Islamic charity that the United States has accused of funneling money to al-Qaeda. Police were reportedly led to the shallow grave by Fazal Karim, a member of the banned militant Sunni Muslim group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. At year’s end, Karim had not been charged, and though it has been widely reported that he was detained, authorities have never officially acknowledged his arrest.
On July 15, 2002, the anti-terrorism court announced that Saeed and his accomplices were guilty of Pearl’s kidnapping and murder. Saeed, who was accused of masterminding the crime, was sentenced to death by hanging; Saqib, Naseem, and Adil each received 25-year prison sentences. They appealed the ruling.
Shortly after the ruling, U.S. officials announced DNA test results confirming that the body found in May was indeed Pearl’s.
In mid-August, 2002, The Associated Press published a detailed account of Pearl’s kidnapping, citing two investigators who spoke on condition of anonymity. The officials said that, according to Karim (who had led police to the journalist’s body in May) and two others held in unofficial custody, Pearl was shot and wounded on the sixth day of his capture when he tried to escape and was murdered on the ninth day. The AP identified the two other detainees as Zubair Chishti and Naeem Bukhari, who is also known as Attaur Rehman and is a leader of the sectarian group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. The men also said that three Arabs, possibly from Yemen, were brought to the hideout on the ninth day, and that they were involved in filming and carrying out the execution.
Karim later identified one of the Yemenis among those arrested in a September 11, 2002, raid in Karachi, during which U.S. and Pakistani authorities detained several suspected al-Qaeda members, including Ramzi Binalshibh, allegedly a senior al-Qaeda leader who has claimed a central role in coordinating the September 11 attacks.
In 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, suspected of masterminding the 9/11 attacks in the U.S., was reported to have confessed to a U.S. military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to personally having slit Pearl’s throat, according to news reports. A trial date for Mohammed’s role in the 9/11 attack has been set for January 11, 2021, although it’s not certain if the trial will proceed, according to news reports.
A former U.S. intelligence officer, Robert Baer, told the United Press International (UPI) news agency in 2002 that he had given Pearl information about Mohammed, and that he believes it was the journalist’s investigations of Mohammed that may have cost him his life. Baer, who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for more than 20 years in Asia and the Middle East and wrote the book See No Evil, which criticizes the CIA, told UPI, “I have heard from [intelligence] people who follow this closely that it was people close to Mohammed that killed him, if it wasn’t Mohammed himself.”
UPI quoted a Wall Street Journal spokesperson as saying that, “Everything we know from before and after Danny’s murder indicates his reporting effort focused on [alleged shoe bomber] Richard Reid.”
On April 2, 2020, the Sindh High Court overturned the murder convictions of the four men accused in Pearl’s killing, according to news reports. The decision found Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who had previously been sentenced to death, guilty only of kidnapping Pearl and reduced his sentence to seven years, which he has already served. The Pearl family and the Sindh provincial government appealed, and the four men remained imprisoned as of October 2020, awaiting further action by the Supreme Court, according to news reports.
Daniel Pearl worked for The Wall Street Journal. He was killed in Karachi, Pakistan, between January 23 and February 21, 2002.
Ahmad Omaid Khpalwak
Khpalwak, 25, a BBC and Pajhwok Afghan News reporter, was among at least 22 people killed after gunmen and suicide bombers launched a combined attack on government buildings including the governor’s office and police headquarters in Tarin Kot, capital of Uruzgan province, local and international news reports said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the series of explosions and subsequent gun battle with Afghan and NATO security forces, the reports said. News reports said Khpalwak was killed in crossfire after the initial bomb blasts.
Khpalwak was in the local branch office of state broadcaster Radio and Television of Afghanistan when the attack began, according to Danish Karokhel, the director of Pajhwok. Khpalwak, who had office space in the building, was filing his morning report at the time.
In a statement released on September 8, 2011, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan said one of its soldiers had shot Khpalwak because he thought he was an armed insurgent reaching for a bomb under his vest. “He was unarmed; no weapon was found nearby. It appears all the rounds perceived as coming from him were instead fired by U.S. soldiers,” the ISAF statement said. Investigators concluded troops may have mistaken a press card Khpalwak was holding up as identification for a bomb trigger.
The BBC reported that Khpalwak sent his brother two text messages shortly before his death. The first read: “I am hiding. Death has come.” In the second, he wrote: “Pray for me if I die.”
Ahmad Omaid Khpalwak worked for Pajhwok Afghan News, BBC .He was killed in Tarin Kot, Afghanistan on July 28, 2011
Danish Siddiqui
Danish Siddiqui was killed on July 16, 2021, while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters in the town of Spin Boldak, near the border with Pakistan, according to news reports and Reuters, citing Afghan military officials.
Siddiqui, 38, was embedded with Afghan special forces at the time of his death, according to those reports. He told his employer that he had been wounded in the arm by shrapnel earlier that day while reporting and had resumed work after receiving medical treatment.
Siddiqui was talking to shopkeepers when the Taliban attacked, and was killed in a subsequent crossfire, an Afghan commander told Reuters.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters that the militant group had not been aware there was a journalist on the scene, and said it was unclear how Siddiqui was killed.
Siddiqui was a member of the Reuters photography team that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for “shocking photographs that exposed the world to violence Rohingya refugees faced in fleeing Myanmar.”
A Reuters spokesperson told CPJ via email that the outlet is working to verify the facts surrounding Siddiqui’s death and has engaged outside experts to conduct an independent review of the circumstances leading up to, around, and after his death. Reuters is also conducting an internal review, the spokesperson said.
CPJ emailed Afghanistan’s Ministry of Interior for comment, but did not receive any response.
Danish Siddiqui worked for Reuter. He was killed in Spin Boldak, Afghanistan on July 16, 2021.
So the next time you complain about or even ridicule the so called ‘Mainstream Media’ just remember the sacrifices they have made. Sacrifices which will never be made by these ‘experts’ on social media.
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Afghanistan is in the news again for all the wrong reasons. But I am not going to address that here, there are plenty of news outlets where you can read all about that.
I want to go more into the history, or at least the recent history, of Afghanistan.
The name Afghanistan (Afghānistān, land of the Afghans/Pashtuns, afāghina, sing. afghān) can be traced to the early eighth/fourteenth century, when it designated the easternmost part of the Kartid realm. This name was later used for certain regions in the Ṣafavid and Mughal empires that were inhabited by Afghans. While based on a state-supporting elite of Abdālī/Durrānī Afghans, the Sadūzāʾī Durrānī polity that came into being in 1160/1747 was not called Afghanistan in its own day. The name became a state designation only during the colonial intervention of the nineteenth century.
After the end of the Third Anglo-Afghan War and the signing of the Treaty of Rawalpindi on 19 August 1919, King Amanullah Khan declared Afghanistan a sovereign and fully independent state. He moved to end his country’s traditional isolation by establishing diplomatic relations with the international community, particularly with the Soviet Union and the Weimar Republic of Germany.[75][76] Following a 1927–28 tour of Europe and Turkey, he introduced several reforms intended to modernize his nation. A key force behind these reforms was Mahmud Tarzi, an ardent supporter of the education of women. He fought for Article 68 of Afghanistan’s 1923 constitution, which made elementary education compulsory. The institution of slavery was abolished in 1923. Khan’s wife Queen Soraya Tarzi was an important figure during this period in the fight for woman’s education and against their oppression.
Some of the reforms that were put in place, such as the abolition of the traditional burqa for women and the opening of several co-educational schools, quickly alienated many tribal and religious leaders, and this led to the Afghan Civil War (1928–1929). Faced with the overwhelming armed opposition, Amanullah Khan abdicated in January 1929, and soon after Kabul fell to Saqqawist forces led by Habibullah Kalakani. Prince Mohammed Nadir Shah, Amanullah’s cousin, in turn defeated and killed Kalakani in October 1929, and was declared King Nadir Shah. He abandoned the reforms of Amanullah Khan in favor of a more gradual approach to modernization but was assassinated in 1933 by Abdul Khaliq, a fifteen-year-old Hazara student who was an Amanullah loyalist.
Until 1946, Zahir Shah ruled with the assistance of his uncle, who held the post of Prime Minister and continued the policies of Nadir Shah. Another of Zahir Shah’s uncles, Shah Mahmud Khan, became Prime Minister in 1946 and began an experiment allowing greater political freedom, but reversed the policy when it went further than he expected. He was replaced in 1953 by Mohammed Daoud Khan, the king’s cousin and brother-in-law, and a Pashtun nationalist who sought the creation of a Pashtunistan, leading to highly tense relations with Pakistan.During his ten years at the post until 1963, Daoud Khan pressed for social modernization reforms and sought a closer relationship with the Soviet Union. Afterward, the 1964 constitution was formed, and the first non-royal Prime Minister was sworn in.
King Zahir Shah, like his father Nadir Shah, had a policy of maintaining national independence while pursuing gradual modernization, creating nationalist feeling, and improving relations with the United Kingdom. However, Afghanistan remained neutral and was neither a participant in World War II nor aligned with either power bloc in the Cold War thereafter. However, it was a beneficiary of the latter rivalry as both the Soviet Union and the United States vied for influence by building Afghanistan’s main highways, airports, and other vital infrastructure in the post-war period. On a per capita basis, Afghanistan received more Soviet development aid than any other country. Afghanistan had, therefore, good relations with both Cold War enemies. In 1973, while the King was in Italy, Daoud Khan launched a bloodless coup and became the first President of Afghanistan, abolishing the monarchy.
The picture at the start of the blog is of the King of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah rides in his limousine on Kabul’s central road Idga Wat in this 1968 photo. Zahir Shah, the last of King of Afghanistan lived in exile in Rome since a 1973 coup, returning to Afghanistan in 2002, after the removal of the Taliban. He passed away in Kabul in 2007, at the age of 92.
Following the election of Mohammed Daoud Khan as Prime Minister in 1953, social reforms giving women a more public presence were encouraged. One of his aims was to break free from the ultra-conservative, Islamist tradition of treating women as second-class citizens. During his time, he made significant advances towards modernization.
The Prime Minister prepared women’s emancipation carefully and gradually. He began by introducing women workers at the Radio Kabul in 1957, by sending women delegates to the Asian Women’s Conference in Kairo, and by employing forty girls to the government pottery factory in 1958. When this was met with no riots, the government decided it was time for the very controversial step of unveiling.On August 1959, on the second day of the festival of Jeshyn, Queen Humaira Begum and Princess Bilqis appeared in the royal box at the military parade unveiled, alongside the Prime Minister’s wife, Zamina Begum.A group of Islamic clerics sent a letter of protest to the Prime minister to protest and demand that the words of sharia be respected.The Prime minister answered by inviting them to the capital and present proof to him that the holy scripture indeed demanded the chadri.When the clerics could not find such a passage, the Prime Minister declared that the female members of the Royal Family would no longer wear veils because the Islamic law did not demand it. While the chadri was never banned, the example of the Queen and the Prime Minister’s wife was followed by the wives and daughters of government officials as well as by other urban women of the upper class and middle class, with Kubra Noorzai and Masuma Esmati-Wardak known as the first commoner pioneers.
I just wanted a side of Afghanistan not so many people are aware of. The country we’re so often shown today is comparable to a broken medieval society, but not so long ago, the barren landscape was dotted with stylish buildings, women wore pencil skirts and teenagers shopped at record stores.
I know at the moment the situation in Afghanistan appears to be dire, and it looks like the Taliban has thrown the country back a few centuries.
But perhaps this glimpse of Afghanistan’s past, can one day become the future again.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
History of Sorts 
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