Western reporter freed, Afghan fixer killed, a troubling pattern

(Sultan Munadi, an Afghan fixer killed in the raid to free a British journalist.)

A Western journalist escapes the Taliban. His Afghan fixer does not. The story involves a daring raid, the freeing of a top-notch reporter, but it leaves me uneasy.

"Fixers" are local nationals who speak good English and have good connections and work as interpreters and media facilitators.

A British national, Stephen Farrell working for the NYT and an Afghan, Sultan Munadi were kidnapped while reporting on the NATO air strike that killed dozens of Afghan civilians in Kunduz last week.

They were shuffled around by the Taliban for several days. The captors talked on their phones about moving the two to Pakistan. On Wednesday an early morning British commando raid caught the Taliban by surprise.

"We were all in a room, the Talibs all ran, it was obviously a raid," Farrell told a New York Times reporter in Kabul. "We thought they would kill us. We thought should we go out." He said they ran out and heard Afghan and British voices.

Farrell said Munadi went forward, shouting: "Journalist! Journalist!" but was shot multiple times, whether by friend or foe is unclear. "I dived in a ditch," said Farrell.

He praised Munadi and acknowledged his sacrifice. “He was trying to protect me up to the last minute.” As they left the room under commando siege, “he moved out in front of me.”

If the story is to be believed, and there's no specific reason it shouldn't be, it brings up several points. Farrell said he was hustled off into a waiting chopper and that he yelled for the commandos to check on Munadi, who wasn't moving. They said they had his picture, but we probably won't ever know if he was checked on. If Munadi had been a Westerner, he most certainly would have been Medevac-d by chopper.

The Afghans say his death shows that NATO didn't value his life as much as it did Farrell's. "It shows a double standard between a foreign life and an Afghan life," said Fazul Rahim, an Afghan producer for CBS News.

High level British officials acknowledged the policy of doing everything in their power to free a British citizen. A British defense official, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive details of the mission, insisted Munadi wasn't treated any differently from Farrell in the commando raid. But there would have been no commando raid to free an Afghan journalist. That much is obvious.

A good fixer can literally give the journalist a story. But Mundai, 34, had four children. His job was one of the world's riskiest. It is well-documented that Iraqi and Afghan reporters and fixers have been murdered, kidnapped and forgotten at rates that would have sent Western reporters home long ago.

(This fixer told me that the beheading of Naqshbandi caused him to doubt whether news agencies he worked with would negotiate for his life were he ever taken hostage.)

Farrell said it was pretty clear from their first day in captivity, that the Talibs would eventually make a deal for him, but the way they treated Mundai and reminded him of the beheading of another fixer named Naqshbandi, it was clear they would most likely execute him.

And Afghan fixers are still deeply troubled by the 2007 kidnapping of Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo and his Afghan fixer Ajmal Naqshbandi in Helmand Province.

"Mastrogiacomo was released two weeks later in exchange for five Taliban prisoners. Naqshbandi, 24, was beheaded.

Apparently the Afghan and Italian Government were willing to exchange prisoners for the Italian journalist, but not for the Afghan. Some say the Italian goverment was willing to deal for Naqshbandi, but the Afghan government was not.

"In some instances, foreign journalists are freed for all sorts of reasons, but the Afghan journalists are brutally killed and less attention is given to them," an Afghan journalist group said.

A young fixer who I met in Kabul first told me the Naqshbandi story. Unprompted, he told me how the Afghans had made a deal for the Italian, under pressure from the Italian government, but not for one of their own people. He was worried about what might happen to him in the same situation.