O’Donnell said the Taliban had said their articles were “fantasy, lies and made up” and based on sources that did not exist. If they were real, he was asked to read us their names, as well as their notes, pictures and recordings.
Pulitzer-winning photographer Massoud Hossaini, who usually travels with O’Donnell to Afghanistan but stayed in New Zealand this time, kept in touch with her via an encrypted messaging app and followed her every passage to Kabul using live geolocation tracking.
They also followed his movements through the application Australian diplomats.
In his first message after landing in Kabul on Sunday, O’Donnell told Hossaini it was “too early in the morning to tell what it’s really like,” but the atmosphere was different. “There is a kind of fear in the air,” he wrote.
O’Donnell told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that the once bustling streets of Kabul were quiet. Men queued outside construction sites, desperate for a day’s work in exchange for a pittance, and the city’s roads were empty after the Taliban confiscated thousands of cars from everyday Afghans.
“There were no smiles,” he said. “Just incredible stress and tension.”
A child begs along a footpath in Kabul, Afghanistan, in May. Credit: AP
Hossaini said O’Donnell was picked up from her lodgings by intelligence agents on Tuesday and taken to an office inside the former headquarters of Afghanistan’s intelligence service.
“That scared me a lot because I thought they were going to kill her, or they were going to beat her because they did that to a lot of journalists, a lot of my friends,” he said.
There, they sat in plush chairs and officers asked O’Donnell about his complaint, told him to hand over the phone and accompany them to jail. They also offered her tea and water, which they said was proof of how well she was being treated.
“I was accused of being an agent. It was very Kafkaesque,” O’Donnell said. “I was kind of joking because I found it to be a very ridiculous conversation.”
Hossaini said senior Taliban figures had previously told their supporters to kill him and O’Donnell for their denunciation.
O’Donnell was released after agreeing to publish the retraction and taken to a guest house. In a message to Hossaini the next morning, he wrote: “I am fine and keeping a low profile until I leave the country.”
However, Hossaini said they did not breathe a sigh of relief until O’Donnell’s flight to Islamabad had taken off, worried that the Taliban would storm the plane and arrest him.
A local man who drove O’Donnell around Kabul has not yet been found, and the people he visited during his short stay were detained and questioned after they left.
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“[The Taliban] to rule in this way, like a terrorist,” he said. “The main message they want to convey is the same: we don’t let anyone speak and if anyone speaks against us, we will punish them.”
O’Donnell said he would not return to Afghanistan under the Taliban, a decision shared by Afghan-born Hossaini.
“They know they operate with impunity and the difference with me is that I got on a plane and left,” he said. “Afghans don’t have that luxury.”
O’Donnell said local journalists lived in fear of being arbitrarily detained, beaten and killed. Many had fled to Pakistan, but faced the constant threat of deportation.
A United Nations report released on Wednesday found that more than 170 journalists and media workers had been subject to human rights violations since the Taliban took control of the country last August. Most had been in the hands of the regime.
In this period, six journalists were also killed, five of them at the hands of Islamic State militants.
The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed that officials had provided consular assistance to O’Donnell while he was in Afghanistan, but could not provide further information on the case due to “privacy obligations”.