Azmat Khan
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Media TribeShaunagh talks to Azmat Khan
This episode features award-winning investigative reporter Azmat Khan. Azmat is a contributing writer to New York Times Magazine, a visiting professor at Columbia University and a fellow at Carnegie. Azmat previously worked for PBS Frontline, the Buzzfeed investigations team and AlJazeera in the US.
She has exposed major myths of war, prompting policy impact from Washington to Kabul, and she has won nearly a dozen awards including the National Magazine Award for Reporting; the Overseas Press Club Ed Cunningham Award for Magazine Reporting; the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism; the Deadline Club Award for Independent Digital Reporting; the Deadline Club Award for Magazine Investigative Reporting; the SAJA Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding Reporting on South Asia.
Episode credits
Hosted and produced by Shaunagh Connaire and edited by Ryan Ferguson.
Episode transcript
Shaunagh Connaire
Welcome to Media Tribe. I'm Shaunagh Connaire, and this is the podcast that tells the story behind the story. It's an opportunity for you and I to step into the shoes of the most extraordinary media folk who covered the issues that matter most.
Azmat Khan
So, I mean, if you looked at what the military did put out. According to their data, about one in every 157 airstrikes resulted in a civilian death. And of the sample of 103 airstrikes that I looked at, one in five was resulting in civilian death, which is 31 times higher.
Shaunagh Connaire
Today. I'm chatting to Azmat Khan. Azmat is an award-winning investigative reporter and New York Times Magazine Contributing Writer, a Carnegie Fellow, and a professor of journalism. Azmat, great to see you again.
Azmat Khan
Lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.
Shaunagh Connaire
Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. How is everything with you?
Azmat Khan
Things are busy. I'm in the thick of an investigation right now and deep in the book. So, of course, dealing with all of that, with the pandemic and trying to support those around me. So it's definitely an interesting time.
Shaunagh Connaire
It's hectic. So Azmat, do you want to tell us about your journey into journalism and how you became an investigative journalist?
Azmat Khan
Sure. So I had a bit of an unconventional entry into journalism. I think that some of the key values of journalism, of caring about injustice and caring about accountability, were central to me. And I think part of that was sort of the result of growing up in the age of nine 11 and the Iraq War. I was in high school at the time and watched what would unfold to be a decade, and even longer and continues into today of the global war on terror. And I found it fascinating. I found it infuriating in certain ways, and, particularly, when you look back at some of the journalism and the lead up to that war, it's a really troubling and interesting time period. And I think that shaped a lot of my interests. And so, I had gone into school to do political science and women's studies, and it actually wasn't until graduate school that I seriously considered journalism.
Azmat Khan
And a part of that was I cared about injustice. I cared about research. I cared about understanding fundamental problems, but I also cared about reaching an audience and having the best tools to uncover truth and facts. And as much as I love academia and I enjoy doing research, and I enjoy reading lots of books and scholarly articles, I also really like having access to information and materials that aren't part of an existing record. And there are many academics who do such incredible original research, but there are a lot of barriers to doing that kind of what journalists do as reporting because of restrictions. This kind of approvals you need in order to interview people. To talk to people. To speak to human subjects, as it's called. There's a process of approval you have to go through, and I wanted greater reach, and I wanted more tools, and that's sort of what started getting me to think about journalism seriously.
Azmat Khan
So I was at Oxford, I was finishing my graduate thesis, and I was just looking down at this thick pile of papers and thinking, "Oh my gosh, Azmat, three people are going to read this. That is so depressing. What have you done? You've wasted this time that you've spent in graduate school for something that very few people will ever read." And that was the beginning starting point for me. Well, I would like greater reach. I want more tools. I want to be in the thick of it. I want to collect information and study larger patterns and problems. What's a great way to do this? And that's how I got into journalism. So I actually... it was 2008 at the time. And obviously, a lot was happening in the United States. It was a presidential election that year. But part of my graduate research had been related to Pakistan.
Azmat Khan
And so, it was a country that I'd been really interested in and fascinated by and wanted to do research in. But one of the best ways to do that is actually through journalism. And I did a little research. I realized that this was a country in which a decade before, there had been one single TV news channel. And that there had been a privatization of media. And now there were dozens, and there were lots of opportunities to work in news media there. And then there was so much happening in the country. There was what we now recognize is this very extensive drone strike program in Pakistan, the United States ramped up in 2008.
Shaunagh Connaire
Of course. Yeah.
Azmat Khan
There was this incredible lawyers march to reinstate this deposed Supreme court justice. So there was this crisis in the courts and this movement in the streets. And then there were a lot of changes and just political power there. And so it was fascinating to me. And to kind of prep myself before going. I did... almost like an internship in local media in my hometown in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to kind of prepare myself. And that was 2008. So, there was the presidential election. And I think until September, Michigan had been a battleground state until the recession really took hold. And so there were a lot of politicians coming through Michigan, and I just took some clips from work at this local TV station. And I moved to Pakistan, brought them to these channels, did interviews, and managed to get a reporting position.
Shaunagh Connaire
Azmat, you actually went to Pakistan just off your own bat. Nobody commissioned you to go there. You were very much, "I'm going to head over here and become a journalist."
Azmat Khan
Yes. But to be fair, I had spent time working there before I'd done field research there. I knew the country. I have relatives there. I learned that I didn't speak it as well as I thought I did. I spoke the language. And so, it wasn't as though I were going completely unaware of what I was getting into, but I will say that it was a steep, steep learning curve. The media industry there is so different. So I started out as a producer, was reporting for an English channel. So I first worked at an [inaudible 00:06:37] channel that was launching an English channel. I started reporting for that English channel. And it was incredible because there was no dearth of news in that country. Every day there were so many different things competing for your attention. And the news media, there is a little bit more experimental because it was so new in many ways. And it was wild and fascinating.
Shaunagh Connaire
It was your baptism of fire by the sounds of it, which is always a good thing, of course. And so from Pakistan, you obviously have gone on to work for some of the biggest brands in US journalism. I think I first came across you at PBS Frontline. And then, of course, you have written for New York Times Magazine, which I definitely want to go into. But do you want to tell our audience a bit about the other outlets that you've worked for and kind of how you wiggled your way into those places, Azmat?
Azmat Khan
I would say my journalistic education really happened at Frontline and the time that I spent there. And so I think I had... so I had come back from Pakistan after this wild year of reporting and returned to a country in recession and newspapers were declining, and I knew what I was good at and what I was most interested in, which was research and writing and reporting. And there was a position open at Frontline, and it actually took me, I think, several months to get, and I was following up relentlessly. But there was a researcher reporter position. And honestly, I think I was on the verge of taking another job because it was taking so long. But it wound up really just becoming a home for me and where I really learned to love investigative journalism, where I know that you had Raney Aronson, the executive director of Frontline, on recently.
Azmat Khan
Yeah. And so, she was really great at opening up the process behind the reporting and the ethics of that reporting. And so it was really just a wonderful upbringing for me. And so from there, after several years at Frontline, I moved to a reporting team at Al Jazeera America, their flagship show America Tonight. And that was fascinating because I got to do some of my own investigations instead of just collaborating on a team. But I was also able to do more broadcast work and figure out, "Is that what I love, is it." And I realized very quickly it was purely investigative journalism that I was most into. And so then from there, I moved on to BuzzFeed's Investigations Unit. And then, after that is when I started writing for the Times Magazine.
Shaunagh Connaire
Amazing. I mean, for anybody that doesn't know you, I mean, you epitomize the greatest of investigative journalists today. I really do think that. And so I'll go straight on to my next question, which is, of course, the kind of major question within the interview. Is there a story or report that you are quite proud, in fact, I'm obviously very much hoping we can talk about your extraordinary investigation that was featured in New York Times Magazine called The Uncounted.
Azmat Khan
Absolutely, that I think is maybe one of the investigations that was the hardest, took the longest. And I think, is one that I'm the most proud of. And part of that is because it was a culmination of so many other kinds of reporting that I had done. So this really started in early 2016 for me. And I was watching the war that was happening in Iraq and Syria. That the United States had been fighting for a year and a half at that point. Primarily via airstrikes in support of forces that were fighting ISIS. And I was looking at all of the reporting coming out and I was seeing very little about civilians who were dying from these airstrikes. I think I'd even had to do a story when the air campaign began, and you would see these online reports of civilian casualties in Syria. People who said, "Look, these strikes hit civilians."
Azmat Khan
And then they would just kind of quiet down after a while. And I think by early 2016, I was seeing reports that in major papers that would say something akin to the United States of has killed 20,000 to 25,000 ISIS fighters in this air war. And I think at the same time, they were admitting to maybe eight civilian deaths, which is really unprecedented if you know the numbers and you're familiar with war, and I'd been working in war zones for a while at that point, you know that those numbers are extreme.
Shaunagh Connaire
Absolutely.
Azmat Khan
And it's hard to believe, but more than that, it was more shocking that they were going uncontested. And I wanted to know if I could do a ground sample of these airstrikes. Is there a way for me to go on the ground and actually try to do some kind of a systematic sample that allows us to infer from this or understand from this how accurate these strikes really are? How often civilian casualties happen? And why they're happening?
Azmat Khan
And I had done other ground samples in war zones before. So, when I was on BuzzFeed's Investigations Team. I've done a sample of US-funded schools and seven battlefield provinces in the country and, basically, was able to show that a fraction of these exists today and are functioning as they were intended to. What happened with them? And I just took that model of, "Okay, can I get a data set that would allow me to test this out and see it on the ground." And so there weren't... I didn't have access to data that said, "Here is where every American airstrike has happened." The military doesn't release that. So it's not like I could work from existing data. Instead, I put my head together with a sociologist and another reporter. His name is Anand Gopal, and we sort of devised a strategy for me to do a ground sample that would try to find areas that were similar in size and makeup and try to sample them.
Azmat Khan
And it was not an easy process. I think, on one of my first trips to Iraq, I was able to interview a lot of people who'd fled these places, but I wasn't able to go to them myself. My second trip, I was. I could go to the first town, and I started that sample, and the findings were stunning. I was looking at, I think, in the first town I went to, Qayyarah. I went to the sites of 10 airstrikes in this one town. And half of them resulted in civilian death at the time. I wound up expanding the sample. But that's how I knew that there was something here that the numbers were real. There was a much bigger story at play. And I had to reach a number of airstrikes that was statistically significant and get to a number of towns that allowed me to do what's called a cluster-based samples. So I just kept showing up in these towns.
Shaunagh Connaire
So in very simple terms, for anybody who hasn't read your piece, what you were trying to disprove was that precision airstrikes are not in fact precise in very basic terms. And it was coalition forces, who were, of course, targeting ISIS in places like Mosul. But your findings showed that, in fact, they were killing loads of civilians. I think you said one in every five attack killed a civilian. And that those figures had never been exposed before.
Azmat Khan
Right. So, I mean, if you looked at what the military did put out in terms of information. According to their data, about one in every 157 airstrikes resulted in a civilian death. And of the sample of 103 airstrikes that I looked at, one in five was resulting in civilian death, which is 31 times higher than what they were claiming. It's not twice as high or three times as high. It's significantly higher. And so, a major part of my mission wasn't just to show that, but it was to dig deeply into, why? Why are they so off? What are they missing? Is this a problem of just proximity? And there's somebody nearby who happened to be near this legitimate ISIS target? Or is it something else? And I actually found that the number one cause of these deaths was often poor or outdated intelligence, which is not something that's often associated with them.
Azmat Khan
But the goal was to understand, are these precise in the way that they claim to be? The military and the United States, US government officials were saying, this was the most precise air campaign in the history of warfare. And even if it is the most precise to date, what's interesting is that, if you have a problem of intelligence and you think you're hitting a bad guy or whomever it might be, but they're not actually, precision doesn't matter, right. You can be precise. You can hit the exact house you want to hit, but if the intel is wrong and that's not the bad guy you thought it was. The fact that you can drop the most technologically precise coordinate and bomb in one particular spot is meaningless, right. That doesn't help you when your intel was wrong. So that was one of the other major findings.
Azmat Khan
But on top of that, it was a look at sort of, what do we owe those we harm? And the stories of survivors. So there were a number of families featured in the story. But then the main character was a man named, Basim Razzo. Who had lived in the United States for a while, and had been sleeping in his home one night and woke up to the scene of an airstrike. His wife, his daughter, his brother, and his nephew died in a single night. And he's really just somebody who was able to take you through that story of what those kinds of losses mean. The effect it has on someone.
Azmat Khan
And then this sort of journey for justice when there is no system left in place, right. When American troops are not on the ground in Iraq. When there is no means to try to request a condolence payment or some kind of compensation, or even an acknowledgement of that loss. What do you do? And so he was somebody I followed in that process and really sort of told the story of his case. And later, obtained the documents behind what happened in his airstrike and what went wrong and sort of used his story as the anchor to that investigation.
Shaunagh Connaire
Awesome story. Is so desperately sad. But I'm guessing Basim is not unique. He was stuck in the [inaudible 00:16:55], isn't that right? And so he was severely injured after these US airstrikes. So he actually had to travel through Syria, Raqqah, also under ISIS control, to get into Turkey, to have operations and surgery that he needed. What I'd love to chat about as well was that you were tracking the YouTube videos that the coalition forces were uploading. So you could actually see where they were dropping their bombs, and that's such... it's documentary evidence. You cannot deny that they were [inaudible 00:17:26] US bombs. And you were also when you're on the ground, actually going through fragments of those bombs. But the US forces eventually took those YouTube videos down. Is that right?
Azmat Khan
Yeah. So the goal is to show, "Look, we're winning this war." It's partly intended to match ISIS's propaganda efforts online. But it's also to just be a little bit transparent about this. And so, when I did that sample of a hundred strikes. I would bring the coordinates of the strikes in my sample. I would show them to the military, and I would ask them, "Did you conduct this airstrike?" And that's because it could have been the Iraqi Air Force. I was trying to understand and give them the opportunity to respond. In many cases, they told me, "No, we didn't. We had nothing to do with that airstrike." And then I would go and look through these videos that I'd been collecting that they'd been uploading, and I would match them.
Azmat Khan
So I would basically match some of these areas of these strikes to videos they themselves, the United States-led coalition, had uploaded to be able to show, "What's going on here? "Do you not know where your own strikes fall? Do you not know the GPS coordinates of bombs you've dropped? What's behind this? And what does it mean if you can't even track those? And you're telling me no, that you didn't do this. And then, on top of that, I ask you about a particular video, and then you remove it from YouTube. What does that tell us? Not just about transparency. But about effectiveness. And about whether or not we're really winning this war in the way that you claim."
Shaunagh Connaire
I mean, also, within your investigation, I think there's a line saying that their take is that Iraqis are guilty until proven innocent. So somebody like Basim is treated as if he were ISIS, even though he had nothing to do with ISIS. And so that was part of his journey as well, was to kind of go to the authorities and tell them, and kind of clear his name, that his family were wrongly targeted and he has nothing to do with ISIS. And so that felt like a really, really strong thread within your investigation as well.
Azmat Khan
Yeah. I mean, what does it say if a video of your house being very precisely bombed shows up on YouTube. People are going to think... and labeled a car bomb factory, which is what happened to Basim Razzo, right. People are going to think you're ISIS. And so, he was scared that in post-ISIS Mosul, people would attack him and his family because of that video and the sort of insinuation that he was ISIS because they had uploaded that. Now he had gone through every means he had to try to clear his name. He even had a cousin who was a professor at Yale. She penned an [inaudible 00:19:57] about it. The military said it would investigate. They lost track of it, and they never got back to him. They stopped looking at his case. And this is someone who was more privileged in terms of access to military officials.
Azmat Khan
He had relatives, friends. He was friends with other professors. If he was unable to get that answer, what likelihood does an ordinary Iraqi have to be able to get an acknowledgment of that loss to prove their innocence, to say, "Excuse me, no, I'm not ISIS." But yeah, it's a system that essentially functions to label any of those who are caught up in it as guilty, and to prove their innocence is extremely hard. In fact, the threshold level required for the intelligence for an airstrike is so much lower than the threshold to prove your innocence after the fact. It's just so tough. In most cases, it's all but impossible. He's one of the only examples of anyone who's been able to have one of these face-to-face meetings and get an acknowledgment of his loss.
Shaunagh Connaire
It's disturbing, and it's grotesque. And I think, also what you mentioned in your piece is that the Americans, when they do kill civilians, they say, "They are unavoidable accidents." I mean, when somebody says that to your face, Azmat, how do you kind of withhold the anger and the rage? What do you even say to that, that a civilian or a child dying is just an unavoidable accident.
Azmat Khan
That making the stories of those who are on the receiving end of that come alive is part of the response to something like that. And certainly, with the publication of a story that's part of your effort is to make these not just numbers or statistics, but to make these victims of war we never hear about or hear from come alive to allow them the opportunity to speak in their own voices. But for me as an investigative reporter, I think that being lied to or being misled or being told something that isn't true is really just encouraging, right. Especially when there's an injustice involved. Sure. It could make me angry, but it often just propels me to do my work. To dig deeper or to collect more evidence or to get wider in scope because it often means there's something there. And so, I don't want to misportray the militaries responses to me.
Azmat Khan
I actually think that there were many within the military who were incredibly helpful or who advocated for providing responses. I mean, there were others who weren't as helpful or who actively tried to obstruct giving me... looking at these coordinates or whatever it might be. But at the end of the day, my goal was to try to understand that air campaign in totality in a way that hadn't been done before. It's not about whether or not this is avoidable. Is the military willing to take the precautions it would need to prevent those? Would it consider those necessary in order to stop them? And that's a debate we don't really have. People don't talk about their actual numbers.
Azmat Khan
The military has a rate for the number of civilians it would allow for a particular kind of airstrike to die. And it would exchange as proportional to the military advantage gained, that number changes. It's classified. We don't know, for example. There are some who've said it was as high as 13 during the anti-ISIS air war that you're aware of in advance of the death before it has to go through more approvals. But yeah, I mean, we put a cost on life in that way, and it's not saying it's unavoidable, is it accurate. There's an actual calculation that takes place.
Shaunagh Connaire
So, Azmat, you spent 18 months on this investigation. You visited something like 150 sites in Northern Iraq. I know when we had our lovely lunch probably a year ago, now for the non-journalists listening in, it wasn't as if you just rocked up to the New York Times Magazine and said, "Here, I have a great investigation. You wouldn't hand me a blank check and let me go off and do this." Can you kind of accurately describe how difficult it is to get investigations like this over the line? Because I don't think we can overstate how important this level of journalism is.
Azmat Khan
So I think it would have been very hard for me in early 2016 to go to any editor or news organization and say, "Hey, I want to spend the next 18 months investigating air war. Will you fund me to do this?" And I know this because I was kind of talking about it with people at the time, but it wasn't seen as a high priority, right. The anti-ISIS air war was uncontroversial. The public didn't particularly care about the civilian costs of it. The public is mostly interested when it comes to stories about ISIS, it's mostly interested in stories about ISIS's brutality, which is understandable, and that reporting should be done right. That's necessary. I'm not disputing that. But newsrooms, in terms of its editorial direction, weren't prioritizing that kind of coverage. And so, honestly, it was something that I think I just started applying for reporting grants to do.
Azmat Khan
I knew that at the time that I started working on this I was kind of unhappy with something I'd been assigned. I felt like this was going untouched through deep investigation. So I thought, "Well, let me see if I can fund the beginnings of it. Let me see what I can find." And I think that by October of 2016, I had done that first ground sample and that in Qayyarah knew that this was solid. And that's when I started seriously pitching it. I think I had talked about it with some editors in advance of going to Iraq, but it was really after Qayyarah that I felt like it was strong. And so, after I'd gone to... wound up being three different towns, and sometimes I'd roll up to a town, and it would be depopulated, or you can't get access to it.
Azmat Khan
And I would find all of these restrictions and problems. But halfway through, I think, is when we brought it to the New York Times Magazine. And it was great to get their investment of time and resources. At that point, a lot of the sample had been done. I would say about half of it had been done, but there was still more to do. But for Qayyarah, I think I was seeing around 30 to 40% of them were resulting in civilian deaths. And that's really stunning to see. But no editor would have known that until you've done the work to be able to show it.
Shaunagh Connaire
Yeah. It's amazing. So you really had to go out and do it yourself before you actually get a commission. So, kind of put in your own resources and time. It's good for our audience to understand that. And that's how investigative journalism usually works. Before my last question, you're now writing a book, Azmat. It's all related. And what's the name of the book, and when should we expect it out?
Azmat Khan
It's called Precision Strike, and the manuscript is due to Random House next year. So I'm in the process of writing and reporting. I'm still making trips. But it's an extension of the work that I did in Iraq. It extends to Syria, [inaudible 00:26:57], Pakistan. But also looks at some more philosophical questions about what we owe those we harm? Whether we could actually live in a society in which air war didn't exist and what it would take.
Shaunagh Connaire
Yeah. Well, no doubt that's going to be a brilliant book. So we all will buy that when it comes out, Azmat, last question, always a [inaudible 00:27:19] crack, really this one, but is there a moment in your career that's been rather crazy that you've never really told anybody about it? I'm sure you have a ton of them because of all the traveling you do.
Azmat Khan
Sure. I think that one of the biggest challenges for me was actually when I was in Pakistan more than a decade ago and doing that reporting. And I started getting death threats from people claiming to be Taliban. And I had no way of knowing who it was. I actually went through... as an investigative reporter as somebody who's obsessed with figuring things out. I really wanted to know what was happening. Is this real? Is it actually this... I was getting these threats from somebody claiming to be this specific militant commander of the Pakistani Taliban, and everything about it didn't ring true. And yet, they were able to track my every move. Follow me to particular places. Tell me what car I was traveling in, what license plate, number of the car, where I was, my address. All of these disturbing details. And I essentially had my own personal stalker, and I wound up leaving the country coming back, and it continued. And it got to the point where I was getting this daily countdown. So they would say, "You have two weeks to leave the country."
Shaunagh Connaire
Oh, my God.
Azmat Khan
The next day they'd be, "You have 12 days." The next day they'd be, "You have 10 days." And I'd be like, "Wait, you just skipped two days. Give me my two days back."
Shaunagh Connaire
They can't count.
Azmat Khan
Exactly. So, there are all of these things that jar you as a reporter. And one...
Connaire:
Who was that, Azmat, though? Did you find out?
Azmat Khan
I don't know. My theory is that I must've just made some guy angry, and this was his revenge is that he went to the Pakistani intelligence agencies and had them really just mess with me.
Shaunagh Connaire
Oh, Gosh.
Azmat Khan
I don't know. And so it still is confusing to me to this day. This enduring mystery.
Shaunagh Connaire
Oh, that's horrible. Have you gone back since?
Azmat Khan
Oh yes. Yeah. Many, many times.
Shaunagh Connaire
Because you have family there I know. Yeah. Oh, bloody hell. That's awful.
Azmat Khan
There was a period of time in which I didn't. But in terms of the crazy things that have happened to me that I can talk about. This is one that I think sort of reflects the weirdness of this job. And sometimes, you can't solve everything. You can't figure out everything. And just how plaguing that can be for someone like myself.
Shaunagh Connaire
No doubt. Oh, well, what a weirdo and loser that person was. Azmat, you're an absolute star. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast. Everybody should follow you on Twitter and keep an eye out for your book. We really appreciate your time, Azmat. Thanks a million.
Azmat Khan
Happy to. Wonderful talking to you, Shaunagh.
Shaunagh Connaire
If you liked what you heard on this episode of Media Tribe, tune in next week, as I'll be dropping new shows every week with all sorts of legendary folk from the industry. And if you could leave me a review and rating, that would be really appreciated. Also, get in touch on social media at Shaunagh on Twitter or @shaunaghconnaire on Instagram and feel free to suggest new guests. Right. That's it, until next week. See you then.
Shaunagh Connaire
This episode is edited by Ryan Ferguson.
