Ahmad Sardar
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Ahmad Sardar (died March 20, 2014) was an Afghan journalist.[1] He, along with nearly his entire family, was killed by Taliban gunmen in a mass shooting in Kabul in March 2014. He was 40 years old.[2][3]
Sardar began his career as a journalist in 2001 with the fall of the Taliban, when he started working as a translator for Japanese journalists. He was hired by Agence France-Press in 2003 to cover the daily briefings by the United States-led coalition at Bagram Airfield,[4] and became well known in the Afghan media world, and had quickly worked his way up to senior correspondent for AFP at the time of his death.[5][6] He also headed a successful media firm, Pressistan, which he founded in 2009 to support visiting foreign correspondents and to train local journalists.[7][8][9][10] Interviewed in 2012, Sardar said of his job: "I don't think the experiences of a journalist in a country like Afghanistan and a city like Kabul are that pleasant. For example, suicide attacks: we have to go to the scene and look at something very tragic, we have no choice."[11] Ironically his last article was on male lion cub Marjan, on March 19, 2014, which narrated the pathetic state in which Marjan was being housed on a rooftop by a businessman, who had bought the male lion cub as a status symbol for $20,000, and kept his pet on a roof terrace.[12]