Two Perspectives on One Tragic Raid in Afghanistan
In early 2019, I travelled to Afghanistan to investigate the deaths of my mother and sister three decades earlier—a personal search for answers. While seeking out distant relatives in a remote corner of the eastern province of Nangarhar, I met a widow named Mahzala. Sitting before me with shoulders bowed, her small frame cloaked in black, she quietly relayed a story that completely changed the trajectory of my investigation. She told me that her two sons had been killed in a raid several months earlier by masked men who descended on her small home in the middle of the night. She didn’t know why they had been targeted, or by whom.Our chance encounter spurred me to begin investigating the units that had killed her sons. I learnt that the raid on Mahzala’s home, along with hundreds of others...