Reporting from inside the warzone with Sumaira Khan

A Pashtun childhood, weapons as utensils, and a father who became a lighthouse

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Sumaira Khan as a journalist whose work directly shapes how Pakistanis understand their region, and noting that this kind of reporting is rarely covered closely inside Pakistan even when it matters most. He asks the obvious question first: how does a woman end up doing this kind of work?

Sumaira’s answer is rooted in lineage. “I’m Pashtun from both sides,” she says. “Even as kids, weapons are part of our culture — you can say they were another utensil lying at our homes.” Her father, a businessman who was constantly travelling between cities, kept the family stationed in Pindi and Islamabad and never let his absence destabilise them. Her mother, who never had formal schooling, was the household’s anchor. Sumaira describes herself as the rebellious one in a conservative Syed-Pashtun family — six siblings, age gaps of a year each, an elder sister who became “the first graduate of that area” and then married into the US and stopped working.

She is, by her own account, the only working woman left in the family. “I think they made me and broke the mould,” she says. The decisive figure was her father, who pushed back against the biradari assumption that media was only for showbiz and dance and pulled her into the industry against the family’s collective will. Later in the conversation she returns to him repeatedly. He was, she says, her lighthouse.

North Waziristan at eighteen — the first embedded female journalist

The career started in 2004, while she was still doing her B.Com — a degree her mother extracted from her on the condition that Sumaira would at least try to become a banker. (She is direct: “I hate bankers. I never wanted to become one.”) She enrolled in a Mass Communication programme and immediately put herself forward for what would have been an impossible assignment for most reporters of either gender: an embedded visit to Mir Ali, North Waziristan, with ISPR, ahead of the Musharraf-era operation in the tribal belt.

She was the first female journalist to do it. She did not ask for money. “Having adventures, complex situations, working — if a man can do those jobs, why can’t I?” The question was, she says, addressed to herself first. She joined Khyber News, then Pakistan’s first regional channel in Pashto, and spent 2004 to mid-2007 covering FATA from the field. She did not want a studio. “Once you are in field, you are free from all these makeup worries. They become unnecessary. The only thing you bother about — my content should go straight and authentic. I should not go into self-censorship.”

Muzamil asks what stayed with her from those years. She names US drone strikes in Bajaur and the Damadola attack, where madrassa children were among the dead. “I saw people digging out those rubbles and taking out bodies of infants,” she says. “That was the most problematic time for me. There was a point I decided not to get married after seeing those bodies of kids.” When Muzamil asks whether she had PTSD, she answers that she has never had time to find out. “Maybe it’s with me, but probably I’m not able to recognise it.” She points out — and Muzamil agrees — that Pakistan has no rehabilitation mechanism for journalists who do this work. This conversation, she says, is only the second time she has been given the space to process any of it.

Tea with Benazir, four days before her assassination

After Lal Masjid — which she covered from the zero point as the only female reporter on site — PTV recruited her as both anchor and field correspondent. She lasted six or seven months. The reason is one of the most quietly devastating passages in the conversation.

Four days before December 27, 2007, PTV sent her to FF-8 to interview Benazir Bhutto. Sumaira was waiting for her cameraman; Benazir offered her a cup of tea. The icebreaker, Sumaira remembers, was her own upcoming engagement on December 29. “She asked what colour I would wear. She told me girls don’t put mehndi on properly in fashion these days. She was a diva, she was a celebrity — and so motherly. Whenever I think of her, there is a vision of being a mother.”

At the end of the fifteen-minute interview, Benazir told her not to leave her profession. She gave her a candy from her own bag. Four days later Sumaira was nearby Liaquat Bagh, doing her own pre-wedding shopping, when she heard. She followed the ambulance to what was then Central Hospital Pindi. At the studio, her fellow anchor Anwar-ul-Hasan handed her a cup of coffee. She was shivering. He told her she had to be brave because her family was watching. She covered the riots, postponed her engagement to January 5, then covered the 2008 general elections alongside Sadia Afzaal and Kamran Shahid. Then she left. She does not say it directly, but it is clear she needed to leave that room.

The Marriott blast, twenty-four feet deep

She moved to Express News Urdu, then Express 24/7, the country’s then-second English news channel. Then, in September 2008, the Marriott blast. She was at the Prime Minister House for an iftar dinner hosted by Speaker Fahmida Mirza — close enough that “every table was just literally turned. Things were flying in the air. We thought we were picked up and thrown to the ground. It was the strongest gravity.”

She convinced a commando to walk her to her car. The threshold of the blast told her — journalists had learned to calculate it by feel — that it was Marriott. She drove there. The crater was twenty-four feet deep with groundwater pooling in it. Sadruddin Hashwani arrived next, disoriented, his own house directly opposite. Sumaira walked alongside him through the burning chambers of his hotel — fire still on, chemical smoke in their eyes — and broadcast Pakistan’s first live coverage from the Marriott blast site with a satellite backpack. The German chargé d’affaires, severely wounded at the coffee shop window, asked for an interview before he could rest. Later, when he had recovered, he summoned her to the German embassy, gave her small German figurines and explained that she was the only person he had wanted to speak to, because he needed to get it out before he could sleep. “I came to know,” Sumaira tells Muzamil, “humans are tough, but they are not that tough.”

Why a war correspondent — and the cost at home

Muzamil presses on the question of why. Why this work, why this beat, especially as a woman? He tells her about a young Lums student in his office who wants to be a war journalist and how taken aback he was. Sumaira’s answer goes back to her mother — six children, an absent travelling father, a woman who held everything together — and her grandmother, who kept guns in the house “for safety purposes” and let the children play with disassembled revolvers. Sumaira and her four brothers grew up in knickers and shirts. “Whatever they wore, I wore.” Her eldest brother, she says, deserves all the credit after her father.

Her mother only needed reassurance that Sumaira was not smoking cigarettes — for years she would secretly smell her clothes when she returned home. Once that anxiety was settled, the family let her go. Sumaira mentions, almost in passing, that her YouTube channel today reviews jet fighters, tanks, missiles and air-defence systems. “I think it’s in my genes.”

The cost, though, has been substantial. After four years of national-desk reporting at Express Tribune — covering the prime minister, the diplomatic corps, defence, foreign affairs, the polio drive, with around 700 stories under her byline — her mother was diagnosed with cirrhosis in Atlanta and given three months. Sumaira flew her back at her mother’s request, because her mother wanted to die in Pakistan. She moved to Khyber News and took a controllership in walking distance of her home so she could be present for her mother and two young children. Her mother died in 2015. In 2017, her husband — who had managed a chronic pollen allergy for fourteen years — sneaked back to Islamabad without telling anyone, against her instructions, and suffered a fatal cardiac arrest within five minutes of arriving at his brother’s house in the H-8 pollen belt.

The single-parent reality is the next register of the conversation, and Sumaira is unsparing about it. “Being a war journalist is nothing to deal with. Dealing with your personal life — it’s a real fight.” She talks about the allegations a working mother in media absorbs from her own social circle. “They’ll say: your mother had no time, she didn’t take care, you know what kind of industry media is, women just roam around in it. I’ve literally come across these allegations.” The work, she says, becomes its own answer. The children are the trophy.

August 15, the only Pakistani journalist at Torkham

In April 2018, Indus News asked her to join their planned English channel. She managed their 2018 election transmission as controller, then returned to reporting, which she calls her love affair. By August 2021, she was at the Torkham border on the day everything turned.

She watched the Taliban take Torkham — Pakistan’s second-largest trade point — from the previous regime. “They took their weapons. I was there. ANDSF and ANA and other intelligence agencies’ men — I don’t know where they took them.” She watched them then take the Jalalabad Governor’s House, in a zone she describes carefully as a hub of TTP miscreants operating against Pakistan. She decided to cross into Afghanistan.

Muzamil asks the question that lands like a slap: a country of 220 million with 42 national news channels, in the middle of an event that will shape the region for generations, and she was the only Pakistani journalist there. “I still cannot believe that,” she says. He extends the point — even the Islamabad Dialogue, which had Cameron Munter and Robin Raphel speaking at length, was reduced to a few tweets and a ticker in the local coverage. “There was no understanding that this is what they said. Just talking points lifted from online. It’s lazy journalism.” Sumaira is direct: “This is what I’m always against.”

She frames the larger shift in one sentence that Muzamil lets sit. “First it was the Soviet withdrawal, we were with the Americans. Today it was the US withdrawal, and we are with the Soviets.” The Russian foreign minister’s two visits to Islamabad, she says, were a major regional development that Pakistani media broadly missed.

Bagram, dinner at the airport, and what the Americans actually agreed to

Sumaira’s read of how Kabul fell so fast — Zaranj on August 6, everything else by August 15 — turns on Bagram. The Americans evacuated Bagram Airbase on July 2 or 3. They “left the area blank, everything torn, thrown, thrashed.” Ashraf Ghani made a symbolic visit but did not stay. That same night, the Americans left. The Taliban then released their own prisoners from Bagram prison. “That gives us a plain feeling that it was handed over to the Taliban. But the Ashraf Ghani regime never admitted the fact.”

She is even more pointed about what the negotiation was. “Did they negotiate with any other faction of Afghanistan? No. They only negotiated with the Taliban. They admitted their flag, they admitted their demands, and they did evacuate in time.” She adds an image that captures the entire choreography: in the last hours before the American departure from Hamid Karzai International, US forces and the Taliban’s Badri 313 and Al-Fatah units secured the airport together, and had dinner together. “In the last few months I saw them securing the Taliban and I saw the Taliban securing the international forces.”

Strategically, she says, the Taliban took border crossings before they took Kabul. They choked the country first. Muzamil agrees: “They had no other option than to fall.”

Kabul after the silence — and where the women actually stood

By the time Sumaira and her colleague Shahid reached Kabul, having stopped to report from Jalalabad along the way, the city had been taken three hours earlier. “Maut ka sannata hota hai jaise,” she says — the silence of death. The retreating ANDSF soldiers, she reports, tried to vandalise and loot buildings on the way out, and some attempted rapes were blamed on the Taliban. Her account here is careful and worth quoting at length: “I always say these Taliban are very clever. We think they are simple, ignorant, rough. They are not. They very calmly caught those soldiers and made them confess in front of the people — yes, we did the looting, we did the rapes, we kidnapped children.”

By the third or fourth day, women began coming out again. Sumaira refuses to flatten the picture. “They told every woman to cover her head, but there was no such thing that you have to cover your face. Why should I lie about it? They never said that. In fact, it was officially announced — you are not bound to cover your face.” She is equally clear about what came later, and what she said to Zabihullah Mujahid’s face when she returned: girls above primary are not in school, women have not been given ministries or Sharia court slots, the amnesty for former soldiers has been broken with targeted killings, and the Taliban have allowed their own foot soldiers to mix freely with the TTP. “They are going on the same old formula as the Ashraf Ghani and Hamid Karzai regimes,” she says.

ISKP, the Baron Hotel marine, and the economy that runs on five trade corridors

On the economy, Sumaira’s read is granular. The Afghan economy is paused but not zero. Five trade corridors with Pakistan — Ghulam Khan, Angur Adda, Torkham, Chaman-Spin Boldak, and Kharlachi — keep oxygen flowing. Imports come in, but Afghan exports cannot leave because Afghanistan has no functioning central banking system to process the paperwork that countries like Pakistan require. Afghanistan is fully landlocked. Its only seaport access historically routed through Zaranj into Iran. The exports that do move are perishables — fruit, dry fruit, vegetables — along with velvet and satin cloth, jewellery, minerals, and the lapis lazuli that comes from Nuristan and Badakhshan.

ISKP, she insists, is not a headache. It is a disease. She told Mujahid to his face. The faction is “very ruthless” — drawn heavily from Arabs with pockets in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Egypt — and its IED attacks on mosques, schools and Taliban command centres are mounting. Hamdullah, a senior Kabul security commander, was killed in one of them. Joe Biden’s pre-blast security advisory at the airport, she points out, was not the sort of thing a US president issues without prior intelligence: “It’s not his job to do.” The deadly blast that killed thirteen marines came the next day. She had been at the Baron Hotel gate fifteen minutes earlier. One of the marines she spoke to that day was the one who told her to pack up and leave because the threat was severe. He was guarding the gate when it went off.

The Durand Line, the TTP demands, and a strategy that backfires

The conversation closes on the most sensitive border in the region. Sumaira is clear-eyed about the fence incident — the visible roles of wire were not even installed yet, contrary to the Twitter narrative; the central Kabul administration intervened, the commander apologised, the wire was returned. The TTP then used the incident to relitigate the Durand Line.

“They say the territory up to Attock is theirs,” she says. The line is being fed to two ethnicities — Pashtun and Tajik — on the Afghan side of the border. “This is causing problems.” But she is also clear about why TTP’s demands are unworkable: withdraw the military from the entire tribal area, reverse the FATA merger back to agencies, separate KP, give them political offices the way the Afghan Taliban have in Doha, and install Sharia first in FATA and then everywhere. “This is like going nuts,” she says. The Afghan Taliban, she predicts, will tell the TTP to go home once Daesh is contained, because they cannot afford to host another kiosk on their land while trying to rebuild an economy.

Muzamil asks why Pakistan is even at the table with the people who killed the APS children. Sumaira’s answer is purely strategic: Pakistan’s eastern border is on fire; you cannot fight on two fronts; you calm one to prepare for the other. She thinks Pakistan now understands that the time for ease has not arrived — and that the army is confident, methodical, and cutting TTP supply lines through FATF instruments first, the way you always do.

2050, and why Afghanistan is the bottleneck

By the end of the conversation — at the one-hour-thirty-eight-minute mark, which Muzamil apologises for — he asks the question he asks every guest. How does she see Pakistan in 2050? Sumaira answers as a working journalist and a patriot at once. The next generation, she says, is exhausted by war. The regional managements are exhausted by war. The hope is real, but conditional. “If there is no peace in Afghanistan, there is no peace in any other immediate neighbour. Afghanistan is the bottleneck. Powers should stop playing their games there. Let it flourish. And pay heed to our own countries.”

Muzamil thanks her and wishes her well on the trip she is planning to Jerusalem — to cover the West Bank as a Pakistani, with a Pakistani passport, by whatever route she can find. It is, she has said earlier in the conversation, another dream to achieve. Anyone who has listened this far has no reason to doubt she will.