‘No hope’: photographer killed in Kabul just doing his job

Photographer Shah Marai has been killed in Kabul by a suicide bomber pretending to be a reporter.

Shah Marai, centre, embraces colleagues Massoud Hossaini and Lawrence Bartlett after Hossaini won the Pulitzer Prize, at the AFP office in Kabul. Picture: AFP

In 2016, more than a year after international troops pulled out of Afghanistan, Agence France-Presse Kabul photographer Shah Marai poured his despair into a blog post which talked of the end of hope, a life of few prospects with no way out.

The then father of five boys, two of them blind, longed for the “golden years” after the 2001 fall of the Taliban when troops poured into the country and “you could travel anywhere, south, east, west. Everywhere was safe”.

Now; “I don’t dare to take my children for a walk. I have five and they spend their time cooped up inside the house. Every morning as I go to the office and every evening when I return home, all I think of are cars that can be booby-trapped, or of suicide bombers coming out of a crowd.”

On Monday, Marai, 41, did what Kabul’s media do week after week — he ran to the scene of a suicide bombing to document the rising carnage wrought on his countrymen, women and children. The first bomber came on a motorbike. His blast near the national intelligence service headquarters killed four.

The second waited for rescue workers and media to arrive, walked in carrying a camera and blew himself up, killing nine journalists and photographers — including Marai — in the deadliest attack on media in Afghanistan since the invasion.

“We know a suicide bomber pretended to be a reporter. He showed his press card and stood among journalists before blowing himself up,” an Interior Ministry spokesman said.

A tenth journalist, the BBC’s Ahmad Shah, 29, was shot dead on Monday in eastern Khost province.

Yesterday, the Voice of Caliphate ISIS radio station in eastern Nangahar threatened further attacks on the media.

“Nobody is feeling secure here today, especially journalists,” Mahmoud Mobaarez, head of Radio Killid Kabul told The Australian. “Journalists are directly under threat.”

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres expressed outrage at the “deliberate targeting of journalists” while Reporters Without Borders demanded better protection for media.

But 11 children were also killed on Monday in Kandahar during an attack targeting a NATO convoy.

Two weeks earlier Marai and his wife celebrated the birth of their first daughter. The new ­father — who began his career secretly documenting life under the Taliban — had distributed sweets through the AFP office.

At least 24 others were killed alongside Marai in Monday’s bombings, which were quickly claimed by local ISIS affiliates. ISIS were also behind last week’s bomb attack that killed 57 people queuing at a Kabul voter registration centre.

Among Monday’s dead were three journalists from Radio Free Afghanistan, a cameraman from Tolo News, a journalist and a cameraman from Afghanistan’s 1TV. RFA video journalist Abadullah Hananzai, 26, was preparing to celebrate his first wedding anniversary.

In 2014, Marai led the funeral procession for his AFP colleague Ahmad Sardar who was gunned down alongside his wife and two of his three young children at the Serena Hotel. “I long for those years, immediately following the arrival of the Americans,” he wrote two years later, in the wake of a suicide attack that killed seven media workers from Afghanistan’s Tolo TV. “But there is no more hope.”