AFP chief photographer in Kabul Shah Marai was killed in a suicide blast in the Afghan capital on April 30, 2018. Here is a blog he wrote two years earlier on covering years of tragedy in his country.

“It was a time of great hope. The golden years,” writes photographer Shah Marai of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2011. Shah Marai is somewhat of an institution at AFP’s Kabul bureau. He joined the agency in 1995, working first as a driver and picking up a camera three years later, when the city and the country was under the rule of the Taliban, who imposed a medieval version of Sharia law. Like many of his compatriots, he saw the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, as a liberation. Fifteen years later, the euphoria is gone. “I’ve never felt life to have so little prospects.”