On Losing Humanitarian and Journalist Friends

“You’ve got to learn to take steel”

I have never much cared for birthdays. Nor, frankly, did I expect to see 45. Too many of my friends and colleagues, some barely out of their twenties and thirties, have died in wars, were murdered, or lost to accidents and disease, leaving the rest of us to wonder how long our own luck might hold.

Death, I would tell myself, is simply part of life, the sort of gung-ho fatalism so many reporters covering conflict and humanitarian crises adopt as a form of self-preservation. Or, as the New Zealander Terrence White, one of the few foreign correspondents who stayed on in Kabul throughout Afghanistan’s brutal civil war of the 1990s, until severely wounded by an exploding mortar, used to say: “You’ve got to learn to take steel.”

A birthday, and a condition

When I turned 75, my much younger wife insisted we celebrate what she considered a genuine landmark. “You’re still here, with your friends and family,” she said, “and that’s something.” I agreed to a gathering on one condition: that we also remember those who did not make it.

Edward Girardet remembering lost comrades at his 75th birthday dinner in the French village of Cessy.

So when I raised a glass to our 70-odd guests - aid workers and reporters among them, people who had worked from Afghanistan and the Congo to El Salvador - seated at long tables in the garden of our French village house, I kept my toast simple. I did not want to dampen the evening by explaining how and why so many former comrades never got the privilege of a full life. I want to highlight some of that now, because these were exceptional individuals one cannot forget, the people who provide the salt and zest in life.

I had always assumed I had lost perhaps 15 or 16 friends and colleagues along the way during the course of my career. The real number, I have come to realise, is closer to 30. They were people who, in one way or another, contributed to the wellbeing of humanity through honest reporting, medical relief for fleeing refugees, or simply by stepping in to help communities in desperate need.

Some I knew well; others less so. All of them I had shared something with, whether reporting from the field in Afghanistan or Angola, or trading stories over a wine-lubricated dinner at La Coupole or the Closerie de Lilas in Paris. A few were flamboyant if not egocentric with a determined effusiveness for life. Many more were quiet and dedicated, determined simply to do their jobs, whatever the odds.

Andy Skrzypkowiak, who was murdered by fighters of CIA and ISI-backed fundamentalist warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Afghanistan’s toll

Afghanistan, more than anywhere, took its share.

Andy Skrzypkowiak was a 36-year-old British-Polish former SAS soldier turned freelance cameraman when he was murdered in a cave deep inside the Hindu Kush in October 1987. Fighters loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Islamist warlord then backed by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, had captured him for reporting on a rival guerrilla commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud. They held him for several days, then smashed his skull with a rock while he slept.

Andy, as with so many reporters who took these risks, loathed war but felt it his duty to record its realities. The British government did little to hold Hekmatyar to account; the former warlord now lives freely in Taliban-controlled Kabul.

That same month claimed two independent American filmmakers, Lee Shapiro and Jim Lindalos, killed while shooting a documentary in the country. I met the two of them on various occasions at the American Club, the usual haunt for many aid workers and reporters in Peshawar, to discuss their film, providing them with tips. The US embassy blamed a Soviet or Afghan government ambush; my own information suggested otherwise, notably that they were killed during an ambush by Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami against a rival resistance faction.

Prof. Syed Bahauddin Majruh, former Dean of Philosophy at Kabul University, was murdered by unknown gunmen most probably in the service of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Months later, in February 1988, it was the turn of Professor Syed Bahauddin Majruh, a close friend and one of Afghanistan’s most admired intellectuals. Unknown gunmen, believed to be in Hekmatyar’s pay, shot him dead in the doorway of his home in Peshawar. As founding editor of the Afghan Information Centre bulletin, Majruh had drawn on his own sources to provide accurate, unflinching reporting on the war, including on the ignominious conduct of factions like Hezb.

Then, on Christmas Day 1988, Dominique Vergos, a Frenchman I had first met in Paris years earlier, a former fashion photographer turned war cameraman and later spy for the British and Americans, was shot dead in Peshawar with two bullets to the nape of the neck. Whether that was the accidental outcome of a dispute with his night watchman, or a deliberate killing with Hekmatyar’s Hezb at the top of the list of suspects, we will probably never know. Truth in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier during those days was a flexible commodity.

Dominique Vergos travelling clandestinely inside Afghanistan during the 1980s.

Family photo

Dominique, a brash, Rimbaud-esque figure with long hair and a greying beard, had the looks of a rock star. He was married to Juliet Crawley; she was his opposite in almost every respect. He the show-off adventurer, she the posh, wry-humoured British aid worker as if straight out of Downton Abbey.

Juliet went on to marry another colourful, but tragic frontline figure: the British-American freelance cameraman Rory Peck, shot dead in Moscow in 1993. He was caught in crossfire while filming a gun battle outside the Ostankino television centre during Russia’s constitutional crisis. Inspired by her husband, Juliet went on to create the Rory Peck Trust in support of freelance journalists.

Juliet herself died of cancer in 2007, aged just 45. I had tea with her at the Lansdowne Club in London, some years before when she was sporting a pirate patch having lost her eye to the disease, and asked whether, having lost two husbands to violence, she ever planned to marry again. “Oh for God’s sake Eddie,” she shot back, “who the hell is going to marry me and become a hat-trick?”

Juliet Crawley, Vergos, Peck. An exceptional and outspoken former aid worker.

In July 1994, Hezb fighters kidnapped and shot dead another remarkable journalist: Mirwais Jalil, a 25-year-old Afghan BBC reporter, whose body, riddled with 22 bullets, was found dumped on the outskirts of Kabul after a bitter falling-out with Hekmatyar. I had last seen him barely a week earlier, when he had accompanied the French filmmaker Christophe de Ponfilly and me to Hekmatyar’s headquarters, from where the warlord was shelling the capital in a failed bid to seize it.

Mirwais Jalil interviewing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar shortly before he was kidnapped and then murdered, shot 22 times, by the Afghan warlord's henchemen.

Photograph believed to have been taken by Italian foreign correspondent Ettore Mo.

In April 2014, one of my Geneva-based colleagues, internationally acclaimed AP photographer Anja Niedringhaus, was tragically killed by an Afghan policeman as part of an internal feud. Another friend, Kathy Gannon, one of Afghanistan's longest term reporters travelling with her was severely wounded.

Anja Niedringhaus, a wonderful human being and an exceptional photographer.

Kathy Gannon.

Beyond Afghanistan

Not all of those lost were journalists, and not all were lost in Afghanistan.

Marla Ruzicka was a wonderfully warm 28-year-old American aid worker, founder of the Campaign for Innocent Victims of Conflict.

Remembering Marla Ruzicka

Center for Civilians in Conflict

I had known her since she turned up in Afghanistan during the NATO occupation, initially naïve but quick to learn. She was killed by a suicide bomb in Iraq in April 2005, targeted at a convoy of US contractors, while on her way to visit an injured Iraqi girl.

Pierce Gerety, an American aid worker who devoted his career to refugees caught up in war and disaster, was nearly 57 and serving as UNHCR’s Central African regional director when he died with 228 others in the Swissair 111 crash off Nova Scotia in September 1998.

Pierce Gerety: A man dedicated to humanitarianism

Wikipedia

Months earlier, the UN’s Michael Keating and I had lunch with him at the Muthaiga Club in Nairobi, swapping stories of narrow misses flying small planes across Africa and Asia. It felt bitterly ironic that a man so admired for his coolness under pressure should die so pointlessly aboard one of the world’s safest airlines.

Alexandra Tuttle in Nagorno Karabagh only a few months before she was killed.

It was often the sheer unexpectedness of such deaths that hit hardest. I had last seen Alexandra Tuttle, a 34-year-old Wall Street Journal correspondent, chatting enthusiastically at a Time magazine party. Days later, in September 1993, I heard on the BBC that she had been killed: the aircraft flying her to interview Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze had been hit by an Abkhazian missile as the pilot tried to make an emergency landing in Sukhumi.

British documentary filmmaker James Miller, who was believed killed by an Israeli soldier.

James Miller, a 34-year-old British freelance cameraman, was shot dead, deliberately, according to witnesses, by an Israeli soldier in Gaza in May 2003, while filming a documentary with the British-Afghan director Saira Shah about the war’s impact on Palestinian children. I did not know Miller well, but I knew Saira from our Peshawar days. Deaths like his, under such circumstances, leave their own mark.

Then, in October 2007, came the news that Alexandra Boulat, a highly talented, award-winning French photographer and co-founder of the VII Photo Agency, had passed away unexpected at 45 . She had been working in Gaza when she collapsed from a brain aneurysm and then flown to Paris where died three weeks later. We had been slated to work together in Afghanistan on a major article.

Another was Marie Colvin, the American correspondent for The Sunday Times, killed at the height of her career in February 2012 covering the siege of Homs in Syria, alongside French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik, in what appears to have been a targeted attack by government forces. Marie and I went back years, to our days filing for UPI, a wire news agency, in Paris, and later through wars in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.

So did that of Marie Colvin, the American correspondent for The Sunday Times, killed at the height of her career in February 2012 covering the siege of Homs in Syria, alongside French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik, in what appears to have been a targeted attack by government forces. Marie and I went back years, to our days as young reporters filing for UPI, a wire news agency, in Paris, and later through wars in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.

And then there was Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a 60-year-old Saudi journalist, who was ruthlessly slaughtered by Saudi agents inside their Istanbul consulate in October 2018 at the behest, according to US intelligence, of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. We had met several times and once had a long discussion on Saudi backing of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida by the Riyad government.

Christophe: Highly professional and a tortured soul

I could go on with this list, and mean no disrespect to those I have not named. But some losses sit closer than others.

Christophe de Ponfilly, one of my closest friends, a former flatmate, a French filmmaker, journalist and author, took his own life in the forest of Rambouillet, near Paris, on 16 May 2006. We had worked together for years, filming the brutal civil war in Afghanistan and in Liberia, travelling to remote tribes in Indonesian-controlled Western New Guinea, and making documentaries such as BBC2’s Frontline Doctors, about Médecins sans Frontières.

French filmmaker Christophe de Ponfilly (L) and author Edward Girardet drinking tea while waiting for a missile barrage to finish during the Siege of Kabul in 1994.

Photo: Terrence White

Christophe probably suffered from what we would now recognise as post-traumatic stress; we had both witnessed things still difficult to put into words. But Christophe also carried a profound depression and professional anguish, and I spent much of our friendship trying to help bring him back up. We worked well as a team, not least because I made a point of staying optimistic for both of us. Losing him was a blow I never saw coming. He had only just turned 55. We had spoken at length, three weeks before his death, about his first feature film, L’Étoile du Soldat, which we both hoped would open a new chapter in his life.

Tim Weaver, who died of cancer in July 2024: the sort of journalist with whom one all needed to work.

Tim: Stoic, and dedicated

Most recently came the death of Tim Weaver, a British journalist, from cancer in Montenegro, barely 60. Tim had freelanced out of Peshawar for the Washington Post, the Guardian and other papers during the Soviet occupation, and helped co-found the London-based television agency Frontline News. He later covered the Serb side of the Bosnian war, where he met his future wife, Yana.

Tim was the epitome of the dry-humoured, no-nonsense, faintly military Briton whom nothing outwardly perturbed. Told he had two or three months left, he threw himself an “exitus” party — and then held on for another year. He was exactly the sort of person one wanted beside one in a difficult frontline situation. As a friend of mine put it after his death: “They don’t make them like this any more.”

The trouble is, they do. More journalists and humanitarians will go on dying, or wearing themselves out, for work they believe in — and despite all the abusers of humanity, from Trump, Putin and Netanyahu to the Khameneis, Museveni and Mbasogo of this world, we still need them badly.

Lysa Hieber, a former US Air Force nurse, who died while vulunteering to help flood victims in northern Texas on 2 August 2025.

…And Lysa

Most recently of all, my wife lost her eldest sister, Lysa Hieber, a 65-year-old former US Air Force nurse, while working with flood victims in northern Texas. Amid the political vanity and division so many in power thrive on, Lysa’s story of an obstinate and humourful nurse’s courage, compassion and commitment still represents the best of America, and of the world.

A stepping stone

So today, at 75, I look back at these and so many other fellow human beings who left the world’s stage far too early, and think of the words of “Stepping Stone,” by R. L. Sharpe:

Isn’t it strange

That princes and kings,

And clowns that caper

In sawdust rings,

And common people

Like you and me

Are builders for eternity?

Each is given a bag of tools,

A shapeless mass,

A book of rules;

And each must make

Ere life is flown

A stumbling block

Or a stepping stone.

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Edward Girardet, a former special foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, PBS NewsHour and other media covering wars and humanitarian crises, is an author and editor of Global Geneva, a long-read online magazine with occasional print editons. He lives in Cessy, a small French village near Geneva. Girardet is currently finalising his latest book: The War That Followed Me: From the Hippie Trail to Afghanistan's Frontlines, a personal adventure account aimed primarily at younger audiences..