Laura Waddington

/Diary

“One night, near the Channel Tunnel, where Afghan and Iraqi refugees were trying desperately to jump on the trains headed to England, I met an Afghan man. He was cold, underdressed and very depressed. He was a house painter, born in the Panchir Valley. He told me that one morning he had left his house and when he came back there was no house, his whole family had been killed in an American bombing.”

Abdullah and the Fireflies: On Reading Survivance des Lucioles by Laura Waddington

Photo of Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud taken from a wallet and placed on the ground for me to film, as I sat talking with Abdullah. Massoud had been killed on September 9, 2001, by explosives hidden in the camera of suicide bombers posing as journalists. His assassination, a harbinger of what was to come.