An Afghan journalist embarks on a journey to discover who killed her family thirty years ago, only to uncover the deaths of hundreds of civilians from an American-backed program, as documented in a film by Mauricio Rodríguez Pons and Almudena Toral.Winner of three 2024 News and Documentary Emmy Awards. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-new-yorkers-the-night-doctrine-wins-three-emmys
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 [BIRDS CHIRPING]
00:09 A raid is one of the most offensive and intrusive ways
00:18 to place yourself in someone's life.
00:20 To come to people's homes at night
00:26 when they are most vulnerable in such a scary way.
00:30 And when that happens to someone who isn't the right target,
00:46 they're left with that trauma night after night and years
00:49 after.
00:54 It is a psychological strategy.
00:58 The US knew that when they used it here in Afghanistan.
01:01 For years, I've gone on a quest to count the deaths
01:10 from these night raids.
01:11 This story is personal to me.
01:21 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:25 My name is Lindsay.
01:26 When I was two years old, a night raid in Nangarhar
01:36 province killed my sister and mother during the Civil War.
01:42 My father was killed later in fighting.
01:45 [FOOTSTEPS]
01:48 [GROWLING]
01:56 I was adopted by a British family living in Pakistan.
02:03 When I was 12 years old, I moved with them to Israel.
02:06 When I was in my early 20s, I started
02:13 looking into my biological family.
02:17 I didn't know anything about them.
02:19 I actually tried to hire investigators
02:26 to help me look into it.
02:28 They were totally uninterested to help.
02:30 By that time, I had become a reporter in the UK.
02:41 So I decided to go back to my homeland
02:44 and investigate my past myself.
02:46 But what I found in Afghanistan was bigger
02:53 than anything I had imagined.
02:56 A bridge that would tie past, present, and future.
03:10 Hours ago, the last American troops left Afghanistan.
03:13 The US's longest war is over.
03:16 20 years since it began on October 2001.
03:25 In 2001, everything changed.
03:27 Days after September 11, the first CIA officers
03:34 touched down in Afghanistan, targeting
03:37 the Taliban in Al-Qaeda.
03:40 Over the past two decades, that strategy
03:43 largely consisted of drone strikes,
03:45 airstrikes, and night raids.
03:47 I was in Nangarhar looking into my personal story
04:00 when I met a widow named Masala.
04:06 She told me the story of how masked soldiers came
04:10 to her home in the middle of the night
04:13 and shot and killed her only two sons.
04:16 I knew what it felt to live without knowing why
04:22 your family had been killed.
04:23 That it is not possible to move on from the grief
04:30 without answers.
04:31 I felt this huge responsibility to look into what had happened
04:35 to Masala and others.
04:39 I learned that the raid on her home
04:41 was conducted by elite squadrons of Afghan special forces
04:45 backed by the United States.
04:48 They were known as the Zombies.
04:50 I was a little girl.
04:55 I was a little girl.
04:56 I was a little girl.
04:57 They were known as the Zero Units.
05:03 Over the last four years of the war, these units killed hundreds of civilians.
05:22 They were overseen by the CIA, and their targets were selected using American intelligence.
05:29 I spent more than three years investigating hundreds of night raid operations.
05:38 I also spent six months trying to find soldiers from inside the unit to talk to.
05:52 I really wanted to find out how they felt when civilians were killed in these operations.
05:59 I met two Afghan soldiers who I'll call Basir and Hadi for their safety.
06:13 They fought in this unit for years.
06:18 [Helicopter]
06:23 [Helicopter]
06:29 [Speaking in foreign language]
06:34 [Speaking in foreign language]
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07:34 [Speaking in foreign language]
07:59 In 2019, Basir and Hadi told me about a night raid in Logar province, when they killed four members of a family.
08:09 I'd later speak to the surviving grandfather and uncle.
08:15 This was not the first time they had killed civilians, but it was this raid that felt like a turning point in their lives.
08:25 [Gunfire]
08:30 [Gunfire]
08:35 [Speaking in foreign language]
08:41 [Gunfire]
08:52 [Gunfire]
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