The life of a foreign journalist can be a little tough sometimes. Not every country has the freedom of press rights that we have here in the United States. It can be even tougher to be a journalist in a war torn country like Afghanistan. So when you get an extremely brave one who runs to the action to cover it on Twitter, it becomes a big deal.
Mustafa Kazemi is a Kabul based journalist who does just that and he is becoming somewhat famous for his live tweeting. You can follow him here: @combatjourno. He went into overtime recently when he live tweeted during a Taliban siege on a lakeside hotel near Kabul that lasted for 11 hours.
His tweets started out small about him heading there and eventually moved to the fact that he was laterally ducking for cover because he was being fired at.
I’m headed to the attack scene now. Fierce combat underway right now. Prayers.
A lot of his posts during this time were about bullets flying overhead. Then this one came out grenades landing a little too close for comfort:
Two grenade blasts Shrapnels off my head
One of the great parts about what Mustafa did, is that he continued to do his job and talk to witnesses all while he was being shot at.
A witness says the hostage takers executes few people inside at the beginning with shooting them in the head each
The fighting got pretty intense and at one point in time he was convinced that the Taliban that were in the hotel were intentionally aiming at him.
God hundreds of shots flying towards us
Soon though the fighting ended and what follows is probably a byproduct of living in a war torn country and seeing this stuff all the time. He started to give accounts of the people he saw dead in the hotel after the fighting stopped.
One young man was shot dead with a lite cigarette in one hand & the cigarette pack in the other hand. He couldn’t smoke the cigarette.
Another young man was killed with his coke glass filled and not taken a sip. His hand was going to approach the glass.
According to one official, the Taliban had taken the pants off a young boy, he was lying dead naked in his own blood in a corner.
Mustafa had one Tweet of his many that stood out. It goes to show that this man who risks his life to bring us the news, fully expects to die because of it. Must be a hard job that I’m not sure I could ever do….
I was ready for death today again. But somehow I narrowly missed it. Strange.