On my first trip to Kabul for CPJ in July 2006, I met Sultan Mohammed Munadi at The New York Times bureau. Munadi, who was killed today, was working on a story when I walked in, but he took time to help me find a driver.
For the next 10 days or so I rattled around the city in a beat-up Corolla with a broken windshield and worse shocks. The driver, also Mohammed, spoke no English, and I found that resorting to my road-block Arabic didn’t help much. So Munadi was at the top of our speed dials when we needed to communicate.
One noon it turned out that Munadi was only a block away when we called for help. He suggested we all have lunch, which we did in an Indian restaurant. I learned that driver Mohammed, wiry, grizzled, with a slight limp, wearing the traditional kalwar shameeze that was in about the same frayed condition as his Corolla, had been a fighter, an “RPG boy,” for Ahmed Shah Massoud, one of the factional leaders who waged war against the Russians. We all spoke of our families, of our children. It took a lot of explaining from me to get them to understand what CPJ was all about— I think they were both skeptical. With Munadi’s help the talk flowed easily and naturally. It was a great lunch, not for the food but for the company.
If you want to get a sense of Munadi, read his blog entry on The New York Times Web site. The full text is at “Hell? No. I Won’t Go,” but here’s a quote that reflects what men, and women, who work as journalists in Afghanistan are all about:
. . . at the age of 34, it is difficult to be away from my country. I would not leave Afghanistan. I have passed the very darkest times of my country, when there was war and insecurity. I was maybe four or five years old when we went from my village into the mountains and the caves to hide, because the Soviets were bombing. I have passed those times, and the time of the Taliban when I could not even go to Kabul, inside my country. It was like being in a prison.