BASIT FAROOQ:
Indian photojournalist Danish Siddiqui, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was killed in Kandahar province while on a reporting assignment embedded with Afghan security forces, Afghan ambassador Farid Mamundzay said on Friday.
“Deeply disturbed by the sad news of the killing of a friend, Danish Seddiqi in Kandahar last night. The Indian Journalist & winner of Pulitzer Prize was embedded with Afghan security forces. I met him 2 weeks ago before his departure to Kabul. Condolences to his family & Reuters,” Mamundzay tweeted.
In other tweets in Hindi, Mamundzay said Siddiqui, the chief photographer for Reuters in India, was with “Afghan security forces when they were attacked by terrorists” in Kandahar province on Friday.
Afghanistan’s Tolo News channel cited sources as saying that Siddiqui was killed in Spin Boldak district of Kandahar. It added that Sediq Karzai, an Afghan special forces commander in Kandahar, was killed in the same incident.
An Afghan commander told Reuters that Siddiqui was killed on Friday while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters near a border crossing with Pakistan in Spin Boldak.
Afghan special forces were fighting to retake the main market area of Spin Boldak when Siddiqui and the senior Afghan officer were killed in what was described as “Taliban crossfire”, the official said.
Siddiqui had been embedded with Afghan special forces in southern Kandahar province since earlier this week and was reporting on fighting between Afghan commandos and Taliban fighters.
On Tuesday, Siddiqui had reported on a mission by the Afghan special forces to rescue a wounded policeman who had been cut off from others and had been trapped by the Taliban for 18 hours on the outskirts of Kandahar city, the capital of the province.
His report included graphic images of vehicles of the Afghan forces being targeted with rockets, and he had tweeted a brief video of the armoured Humvee vehicle he was in being hit by a rocket.
Siddiqui was part of a Reuters team that won a Pulitzer for its coverage of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. He also won praise for his images of communal violence in northeast Delhi in 2020 and the devastating second wave of Covid-19 infections earlier this year.
In a profile of himself on the Reuters website, Siddiqui had written: “I shoot for the common man who wants to see and feel a story from a place where he can’t be present himself.”
The Mumbai-based photojournalist also wrote: “While I enjoy covering news stories – from business to politics to sports – what I enjoy most is capturing the human face of a breaking story.”
Fierce fighting has been reported in and around Kandahar city since last week. The Taliban have captured key districts near the city and engaged Afghan forces in several police districts on the outskirts of the capital.
India evacuated some 50 diplomats, support staff and security personnel from the consulate in Kandahar on an Indian Air Force flight on July 10 amid growing concerns about the security situation in the city.
Over the past few days, Spin Boldak district has witnessed heavy fighting after the Taliban captured the key border crossing that links to Chaman in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. Reports on Thursday said Afghan forces had recaptured the crossing, though this was denied by the Taliban.