Gul Agha Sherzai, also known as Mohammad Shafiq, is a politician and former warlord in Afghanistan. He is a former governor of Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan. He previously served as Governor of Kandahar province, in the early 1990s and from 2001 until 2003. In October 2013, Sherzai resigned from his post as governor and formally announced himself as a candidate for Afghanistan's 2014 Presidential Election, and served as the minister of border and tribal affairs until the Taliban captured Afghanistan again in 2021.
Spin Boldak is a border town and the headquarters of Spin Boldak District in the southern Kandahar province of Afghanistan, next to the border with Pakistan. It is linked by a highway with the city of Kandahar to the north, and with Chaman and Quetta in Pakistan to the south. Spin Boldak has the second major port of entry between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Wesh-Chaman border crossing. It is also a major transporting, shipping and receiving site between the two neighboring countries.
Jay Anthony Lukas was an American journalist and author, best known for his 1985 book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. Common Ground is a study of race relations, class conflict, and school busing in Boston, Massachusetts, as seen through the eyes of three families: one upper-middle-class white, one working-class white, and one working-class African-American. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes.
Clifford J. Levy is deputy publisher of two New York Times Company publications, the Wirecutter and The Athletic. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and was considered one of the main architects of the digital transformation of The New York Times in the 2010s. In 2022, Levy was the newspaper's representative in controversial contract negotiations with the newsroom union, after which he left the newsroom to become deputy publisher.
Dexter Price Filkins is an American journalist known primarily for his coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for The New York Times. He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his dispatches from Afghanistan, and won a Pulitzer in 2009 as part of a team of Times reporters for their dispatches from Pakistan and Afghanistan. He has been called "the premier combat journalist of his generation". He currently writes for The New Yorker.
T. Christian Miller is an investigative reporter, editor, author, and war correspondent for ProPublica. He has focused on how multinational corporations operate in foreign countries, documenting human rights and environmental abuses. Miller has covered four wars—Kosovo, Colombia, Israel and the West Bank, and Iraq. He also covered the 2000 presidential campaign. He is also known for his work in the field of computer-assisted reporting and was awarded a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in 2012 to study innovation in journalism. In 2016, Miller was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism with Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project. In 2019, he served as a producer of the Netflix limited series Unbelievable, which was based on the prize-winning article. In 2020, Miller shared the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with other reporters from ProPublica and The Seattle Times. With Megan Rose and Robert Faturechi, Miller co-won the 2020 award for his reporting on United States Seventh Fleet accidents.
Aaron Glantz is an American journalist. He has reported on the opioid epidemic, the quality of care for U.S. military veterans, and the FBI's international war crimes office.
Christopher John Chivers is an American journalist and author best known for his work with The New York Times and Esquire magazine. He is currently assigned to The New York Times Magazine and the newspaper's Investigations Desk as a long-form writer and investigative reporter. In the summer of 2007, he was named the newspaper's Moscow bureau chief, replacing Steven Lee Myers.
Khojak Pass is a mountain pass connecting Qila Abdullah with Chaman in the province of Baluchistan, Pakistan. The road through the Toba Achakzai range connects the larger cities of Quetta, Pakistan, and Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Anand Gopal is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War through Afghan Eyes, which describes the travails of three Afghans caught in the war on terror. It was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the 2014 National Book Award for Nonfiction. He has won many major journalism prizes, including the National Magazine Award, for his magazine writing on conflict in the Middle East.
Paul Pringle is an American investigative journalist for the Los Angeles Times and author of the 2022 book Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels.
Choe Sang-Hun is a Pulitzer Prize-winning South Korean journalist and Seoul Bureau Chief for The New York Times.
Matthew Rosenberg is a Pulitzer-Prize winning American journalist. He worked at The New York Times from 2011 to April, 2024. He spent 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and was expelled from Afghanistan in August 2014 on the orders of President Hamid Karzai, the first expulsion of a Western journalist from Afghanistan since the Taliban ruled the country.
Alan C. Miller is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and the founder of the News Literacy Project, a national education nonprofit that works with educators and journalists to offer resources and tools that help middle school and high school students learn to separate fact from fiction. In 2020, NLP expanded its audience to include people of all ages.
Ben C. Solomon is an American filmmaker and journalist. Since January 2024, he has been a senior video correspondent at The Wall Street Journal. He was formerly an international correspondent for VICE News. He was the inaugural filmmaker-in-residence at Frontline after spending nine years as a foreign correspondent and video journalist for The New York Times. In 2015, Solomon won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of Times reporters working in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea during the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa. He has reported from over 60 countries including numerous war zones, including Syria, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine.
Abdul Raziq Achakzai, also known as General Raziq, was the chief of police for Kandahar Province. Many Afghans regarded him as a national hero while others viewed him simply as a warlord. In late 2001, Achakzai became a member of Gul Agha Sherzai's forces whom the Taliban had surrendered to after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Achakzai was considered to be one of the most powerful security officials in Afghanistan for the last few years of his life.
Ben Taub is an American journalist who is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He has written for the magazine about a range of subjects related to jihadism, crime, conflict, and human rights, mostly in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.
Danish Siddiqui was an Indian photojournalist based in Delhi, who used to lead the national Reuters multimedia team and was Chief Photographer India. He received his first 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography, as part of the Reuters team, for documenting the Rohingya refugee crisis. In 2021, he was killed while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and Taliban forces near a border crossing with Pakistan. His second Pulitzer was awarded posthumously in 2022 for documenting the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lewis M. Simons is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent on foreign affairs throughout Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
Azmat Khan is an American journalist and winner of a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. She is the Patti Cadby Birch Assistant Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is the inaugural Director of the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism.
