On Thursday 12 November, at around 9 a.m., Muhammad Aliyas Dayee, a journalist at Azadi Radio in Lashkargah, in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, and his brother Mujtaba were driving to the office of the Helmand Journalists’ Association (HJA). They were only a hundred or so metres from home when a bomb, believed to have been attached to Dayee’s car, exploded.

Their other brother, Muzamal, who, with his family, was staying with Dayee, heard the explosion from the house. ‘We knew it was Dayee,’ he said. He was at the scene within two minutes. Mujtaba, who was bleeding heavily from his right side, had pulled himself from the vehicle, but Dayee was still in the driver’s seat. Muzamal and a passer-by wrenched the door open and dragged Dayee onto the road. His injuries were catastrophic. He drew one last breath and died there, on the street. He was thirty-two.

Muhammad Aliyas Dayee, one of three brothers among eight sisters, was born in Chahr-e Anjir, on the border of Helmand’s Lashkargah and Nad-e Ali districts, in 1988. Mujtaba, who was injured in the explosion that killed his brother, was a year older but, in looks, was almost indistinguishable from Dayee. Family and friends would often mix up the two. Their father, Muhammad, had moved to Chahr-e Anjir from Washir district when a web of irrigation canals constructed by his employer, the American firm Morrison–Knudsen, opened up the desert area to agriculture.

Dayee attended a madrassa in Chahr-e Anjir, where he studied secular as well as Islamic subjects until the age of thirteen. Early in 2001, however, his father became embroiled in a dispute with a local Taleban commander who had paid to marry one of Dayee’s younger sisters. When the commander saw Dayee’s father driving a new car, purchased with the bride price he had just paid for the girl, the commander was furious.

Muhammad and his first wife, Dayee’s mother, left Helmand for Herat. Six months later, however, in late 2001, the Taleban regime had crumbled under the weight of the United States’ military onslaught that followed the attacks of September 11. The family were soon able to return home to Chahr-e Anjir.

Dayee’s family earmarked him early on as the son who would put his mind rather than his hands to work. ‘When I met Dayee,’ said one of his closest friends and a fellow journalist, Zainullah Stanekzai, ‘he was doing everything—studying, working in the field, but his family didn’t want him to waste his time working with his hands: “He should study and find a real job,” they would say.’ Yet Muzamal said that Dayee liked working in the fields as much as he liked to study: ‘Everything he did, he wanted to do well’. Mujtaba remembers wealthy parents of Dayee’s classmates hosting parties for teachers as bribes to get them to award their children high marks. ‘But,’ he said, ‘they still never beat Dayee.’

The idea of becoming a journalist first came to Dayee while he was still at school. He and Stanekzai were already talking about creating their own radio station, when the international non-profit organisation Internews ran a week-long course for aspiring journalists in Lashkargah. Stanekzai had a motorcycle, and he and Dayee would ride from Chahr-e Anjir to attend the course after school each day.

In 2007, Dayee was offered a job with the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. One of his early reports for the institute, ‘From Pomegranates to Poppies’, published in November that year, resulted in government action: the provincial government allocated 1,000 acres of government land and fertiliser for farmers to cultivate pomegranates.

The next year, Dayee, along with three friends, founded Bost Radio, named after the historical name for Lashgarkar. It was there that Helmandis first heard his warm, growling voice as he hosted the station’s daily news programme. However, it was the light-hearted, weekly talkback show ‘Naghma Naghma’, named after the famous Kandahari singer Naghma Shaperai, that established his reputation as an affable joker with empathy for Helmand’s people. It was also in 2008 that Dayee began working for the Dari- and Pashto-language Radio Free Afghanistan, known locally as Azadi Radio, where he would work until his death. ‘Our father would cry tears of joy when he heard Dayee reporting on Helmand,’ recalls Mujtaba. ‘“He’s only young,’’ he’d say, ‘‘but look what he’s doing.”’

Dayee shielded his family from the threats he received, but they would hear about them from their own sources. ‘I’m only thirteen months older than him,’ said Mujtaba, tears constantly welling in his eyes, his face wrapped in bandages after being discharged from hospital in Kabul, where he was treated after the attack, ‘but look at my beard—you see the white? This alone is from worrying about my brother. For four years we’ve worried about him—that we’d lose him.’

In 2017, the Kabul Press Club recognised Dayee with the Brave Journalist of the Year award. The award is dedicated to the memory of Abdul Samad Rohani, a journalist with the BBC and Pajhwok Afghan News who was killed in Helmand in 2008. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, sixty-eight journalists have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001. Dayee, who is yet to be added to the list, will be number sixty-nine. Of those, twenty-one—almost a third—have been killed in the last two years.

In recent years, the stress his work placed on Dayee and his family had worn down his passion for his profession. ‘He had become tired of reporting,’ said Gul Ahmad Ehsan, another Helmand correspondent. ‘But this was his job, and he had no other way of supporting his family.’ His family also began to resent his profession. Mujtaba said, ‘Journalism is good for society but not for the journalist. You may be able to raise the voices of the people, but in the end you’ll be left with nothing.’

The Helmand press corps, made up of around a dozen male reporters, uses the HJA office in central Lashkargah as a communal workplace, rather than one of rivalry, where jokes and tea are shared as readily as ideas, stories, contacts and interviews. Dayee’s old friend Zainullah Stanekzai, now Reuters’ Helmand correspondent and the head of the HJA, remembers that, with all Dayee’s overlapping jobs and moonlighting, ‘if he was busy and couldn’t attend an interview, he would send another journalist to cover it,’ and vice versa. The Helmand journalists would also gladly share interviews among one another when they had gaps in their reports. Mujtaba, who worked for a time for the German press agency Deutsche Welle, said Dayee was not only a brother; he was like a father to him and to all the journalists in Helmand. ‘If you had a journalism problem,’ he said, Dayee ‘was the only person who could solve it. You didn’t have to search Google. He would always know.’

Dayee began working with foreign reporters in Helmand in 2016. He was a dogged reporting colleague with sound judgement and a knack for detecting falsehoods. Just as importantly, he was great company. He was the key reporter locally for getting Helmand stories out to the international press, including the Guardian, Foreign Policy, the Intercept, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Pacific Standard, Weekendavisen, Vice News, New York Times Magazine and the Daily Beast. He also worked with visiting academics and researchers, including Ashley Jackson, from the Overseas Development Institute, in London, who described his killing as ‘beyond heartbreaking’. He was an ‘incredibly brave journalist,’ she said, ‘with a sharp sense of humour and even sharper insight into what was really going on in Helmand. He will be missed by so many.’

I worked with Dayee as recently as mid-October this year, the week the Taleban again laid siege to Lashkargah. He picked me up from Bost Airport, as he had maybe a dozen times. Several Afghan Air Force Black Hawk helicopters arrived at the same time, depositing a company of Afghan National Army Special Forces sent from Kandahar to stem the Taleban advance around the city. In the previous few days, Dayee had taken in five families who had fled their homes in Nad-e Ali and Chahr-e Anjir ahead of the fighting. He erected a tent in his yard to accommodate the overflow. His brother Muzamal said it was as though ‘an entire district’ was in his home—‘maybe fifty people.’ We joked that reporting from the frontline in Bolan was like a holiday for him in comparison.

But with security forces stretched, Helmand’s capital was more vulnerable than ever to infiltration. Two weeks before Dayee’s death, Stanekzai was notified that Mawlawi Sharif, who is from Ghorak, Kandahar, and is believed to be responsible for carrying out targeted killings and kidnapping for the Taleban in Helmand, had given an order to conduct attacks against specific journalists, including Dayee, in Helmand. Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security had also notified the journalists of the threat. It was nothing new for Dayee, but he was typically wary nonetheless.

He was driving the brand-new car that he and his wife, Roshana, had bought: a low-slung Toyota with dark windows. I had said it looked like a Mafioso’s car—‘a smuggler’s car’, the Helmand equivalent, Dayee replied. It was ostentatious for Lashkargah and did not fit with his constant efforts to avoid attention, but the couple chose it mainly because it was nice for driving his mother, whose health and mobility are ailing, for picnics in Nawa and Chahr-e Anjir.

In the week of the attack, Dayee had been working with Nanna Muus Steffensen, a Danish journalist, on a series of radio reports for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. On Wednesday 11 November, Dayee went to the funeral of a friend’s father and then joined Muus Steffensen for lunch at the Bost Hotel, beside the governor’s residence on the most fortified street in the city. He parked his car before the last security gate, roughly a hundred metres before the governor’s residence. After lunch, the two crossed the road to the home of Bashir Ahmad Shakir, former head of security for Helmand’s provincial council and a powerful figure in Helmand. Shakir’s three black, armoured Land Cruisers, with the licence plates 001, 002 and 003, are often parked outside.

There, Muus Steffensen interviewed the commander of the army’s 215th Corps, Lt. Gen. Wali Muhammad Ahmadzai. They stayed for about an hour, before returning to the hotel at 2.30 p.m. It was the last time, as far as Muus Steffensen, his journalist friends, his brothers and Roshana are aware, that he and the vehicle were outside the walls of his home.

Around 9 a.m. the next day, Dayee went towards his car, which was parked in the small front garden, behind a locked gate. Mujtaba complained that his brother was always busy and never had time to talk. He decided to ride along; they could chat, and Mujtaba could find the medicine he had come to the city for. Dayee needed to stop in at the journalist’s association before collecting Muus Steffensen from her hotel. She had arranged an interview with an English-speaking local woman and, despite telling Dayee she would go alone, he had insisted on taking her.

Dayee checked beneath the car, as always. As they left the house and drove toward the city, Dayee was castigating Mujtaba about his neighbours in Chahr-e Anjir who had still not returned home after fleeing the fighting. ‘You should look after their garden, feed their chickens. They’re poor; if they need some money, just give it to them.’ Mujtaba said he heard a loud sound and felt what he thought was a heavy slap from Dayee: ‘he was always slapping me as a joke’. Mujtaba turned to his brother to ask, ‘Why did you slap me so hard?’ Dayee was not talking, Mujtaba said. ‘I couldn’t open the door, but saw the window was broken and climbed out.’

The car, crumpled in on itself and smouldering, windows blown out, was no more than 120 metres from the house, according to Muzamal. He arrived to see Mujtaba climbing out the window. The driver’s side door was jammed shut. He and a passer-by yanked it open. Dayee was still alive, but when they pulled him onto the road his chest and abdomen were open and his legs, Muzamal said, were ‘like meat’. A three-wheeled zaranj (utility vehicle) and a motorcycle had caught fire nearby. Bystanders were reluctant to help, in case there was a second explosion. ‘Dayee didn’t say anything,’ said Muzamal. ‘He just looked at me and died.’

Dayee had had many opportunities to leave Afghanistan, Stanekzai said. ‘He has a sister in the UK and had received many invitations, but he would say to me, “This is our country. Maybe one day I will have a son and he and my daughter might grow up in their own country in peace.”’ Dayee had also travelled to Uzbekistan to assess the possibility of taking his family there, and his bosses at Azadi Radio had flown him to Kabul on a handful of occasions when they deemed the threats against him particularly worrying. As for him leaving Helmand, however, Mujtaba said, ‘I told him many times he should leave the country,’ but Dayee would reply: ‘Helmand is my soul, my mother. I never want to leave.’

Yet the birth of his daughter, Mehrabani (‘Kindness’ in Pashto), in 2018, prompted Dayee to think more seriously about stepping back from journalism and the risks it attracted. In 2019, he bought a block of land between Bolan and Chahr-e Anjir. He quickly built a wall and planted 500 peach trees. ‘In two years,’ he told Stanekzai, ‘I’ll have a beautiful garden for my friends and family for picnics.’

Dayee had always loved to work in Mujtaba’s garden in Chahr-e Anjir. He would tell his brother, ‘My mind is clear among the trees and in the garden.’ But even though the area had been under government control since 2018, his brother discouraged him from staying for long periods, as Taleban fighters would occasionally appear in the night. Dayee’s orchard was closer to Lashkargah, however, so it was slightly safer. Muzamal said Dayee ‘felt at peace’ there.

Before he had his own land, Friday riverside picnics had been a regular favourite routine for Dayee, Stanekzai and other members of the Helmand press corps. In summer, they would take a car battery and a fan to a spot in the ‘jungle’, as they referred in English to a copse on the bank of the Helmand River opposite the hospital run by the Italian NGO Emergency, or off to the side of the Bolan Bridge. In the last year or so, though, although Dayee would tell Stanekzai ‘I want to buy a goat—we’ll eat kebab and play cricket,’ the picnics did not happen as often as they used to.

Not a single media report has been filed from Lashkargah since the day of Dayee’s death. Stanekzai, now the head of the Journalist’s Association, said that Helmand’s governor, the chief of police and the National Directorate of Security have said the threat against them remains. Even as Helmand’s press corps go to ground, however, a Taleban activist tweeted that there is nowhere for them to hide. ‘We don’t know what the future is for journalism in Helmand,’ said Stanekzai. ‘It depends on [the peace talks in] Doha.’

For Dayee, the sense of threat was omnipresent, and this is mirrored in his friends’ attempts to understand who was behind the killing. ‘Maybe the Taleban found a common enemy and used them to conduct the killing,’ said Stanekzai. ‘Maybe an official, maybe a family. There are a lot of possibilities.’ Just days before Dayee’s death, Mujtaba had called him and told him that, while it was important to look after the displaced families he was hosting, ‘you also have to look after yourself and your security’.

Mujtaba described hearing a radio report from Ghazni about his brother’s death while he was being treated for his own wounds. ‘The young men [being interviewed] were crying,’ he said. ‘They were saying, “He was such a great voice. Why did we have to lose him?”’ ‘He died for journalism,’ Mujtaba continued. ‘Not for his father’s mistakes or those of his family, but for his work. No one has even taken responsibility.’

• Tags: Afghanistan, Andrew Quilty, Free to read, Muhammad Aliyas Dayee, Notebook