Doug Stanton

I spent much of October and November 2001 in northeastern Afghanistan, in the company of the Northern Alliance, the Afghan army then battling the Taliban. The front lines were hot — it was the first time I had ever been shelled or shot at — but they weren’t moving. We’d crouch in trenches a few hundred metres away from the Taliban, and the Northern Alliance and Taliban soldiers would trash-talk each other on their walkie-talkies in between bursts of gunfire and mortar strikes. But everyone was sleeping in the same trenches they had occupied the night before, and the night before that.