6 Aug 2022

Lynne O’Donnell & Massoud Hossaini: the fall of Kabul one year on

From Saturday Morning, 11:07 am on 6 August 2022
Massoud Hossaini

Photo: Massoud Hossaini

A year on from the fall of Kabul, Australian reporter Lynne O’Donnell returned to Afghanistan, and now says she’ll never go back. 

O’Donnell returned for three days last month, only to be detained, forced to retract articles, and coerced into making a public apology for accusing the Taliban of sex slavery.

During this harrowing time, she was in close contact with Massoud Hossain, a Kabul-born photojournalist. The pair have worked together in Afghanistan for years, and both are on a Taliban death list. Hossain is currently based in New Zealand, where he has been given asylum.

O’Donnell is a Foreign Policy columnist and was Afghanistan bureau chief for Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the Associated Press between 2009-2017. Hossaini is a Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist who joined AFP in 2007. In 2021 he won the William Randolph Hearst Award for Excellence in Professional Journalism.