Aaron Huey

10/04/2026

Post script: All my gear was blown up (except for the one camera and lens I carried through the ambush) by a Hellfire missile, fired from an Apache helicopter sent from the Dutch/US Special Forces base, to keep radio equipment and the vehicle itself from falling into Taliban hands. In the chaos of battle my backpack w my hard drives, computer, and photo gear had been abandoned in the one truck left behind. I lost a train of images and none of the gear was insured. Luckily David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, took care of it and paid for the replacement of every piece of it. Gratitude to the photo team as well Elisabeth Biondi + Natasha Lunn!

10/04/2026

(Chapter 4 of 4) A reading from my short story “Thank You Taliban,” written after an ambush that happened while on an assignment for The New Yorker with author Jon Lee Anderson for a story about the O***m eradication programs in the south of Afghanistan. Jon Lee just re-released his own story from that ambush as part of his newest book To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban. That ambush woke me up and started a new life for me, with a marriage to Kristin, now 19 years in, and the lives of my two children, Hawkeye and Juno, ages 16 and 10.

09/04/2026

(Chapter 3 of 4) When you really think you are going to die, there are no photographs left to take. Part 3 of a short story I wrote, about a Taliban ambush is southern Afghanistan, that changed my life.

08/04/2026

Taliban ambush part 2 of 4. More context from Jon Lee Anderson’s new book To Lose a War: “Nearby, a DynCorp crew had opened full automatic fire on a group of gunmen who had moved from deeper in the orchard to the tree line on the opposite bank and were shooting at us. Aaron Huey and I took cover behind a truck as Kelly joined the fight. Rockets exploded near the Diablos, and then the choppers disappeared. (They had both been hit several times, but made it back to the base, one with a fire on board.) After a few more minutes, the decision was made to retreat.
The road was almost obscured by the dust kicked up by the trucks in front of us. We passed another orchard, and, again, there were gunshots from both sides of the road. In the back of our truck, Bulmaro Vasconcelos, a machine-gunner from Hemet, California, fired into the orchard with a heavy machine gun. I saw a military cap in the road in front of us, and then a man lying face down. We couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead, and swerved to avoid running over him. It was one of the Afghan policemen. Kelly yelled for the truck behind us to pick him up.
A few seconds later, the window on Kelly’s side exploded and he yelled, “Sh*t! I’ve been hit!” He grabbed his leg, but kept driving, feeling the leg with one hand. He looked at the hand: There was no blood. The bullet, evidently slowed by the metal door, had not pierced his skin. “I’m all right,” he said. A bullet hit my side of the truck, and another struck the back. A minute or two later, we were out of the orchards and into more open territory, headed toward the camp. For the first time in four hours, there was no shooting.
In addition to the man we had found in the road, who had been shot in the head and was barely alive, four Afghan policemen had been shot, of whom two were critically wounded. One was spouting blood from the femoral artery in his right leg. Another had been shot in the lung and the liver. Sylvester Pocius, another goateed DynCorp contractor, had been grazed on the neck by a bullet that ricocheted off the bolt of his gun. The wounded were rushed into camp for emergency treatment and driven to the Special Forces hospital.” Cont. below

08/04/2026

The day we were ambushed by the Taliban. (chapter 1 of 4) This is a reading of a story I wrote about this incident. I called the story “Thank you Taliban.” It’s quite personal and not very journalistic. Jon Lee Anderson did the journalism while I lost my sh*t laying in ditches, crawling acoss poppy fields, and crouching under wheelwells. His writeup on this day appeared in The New Yorker and has been re-released in his new book To Lose a War: The Rise and Fall of the Taliban. Here is an excerpt from him to go with my images: “...we were in an open section of the village, and under fire. There were now twenty or so policemen, in small groups bunched up against mud walls, shooting in various directions. One of them had been shot in the shoulder and was bleeding. I tried, with Huey, to make a run for where I thought the American convoy was, but we were turned back by gunfire.

Some of the policemen began pointing at a distant farm compound. “Dushman!” — enemy — one yelled. They fired an RPG at the compound. The gr***de exploded, sending up a large black burst of smoke and dust.

Major Khalil appeared, leading a few of the policemen and a prisoner in a brown robe; they had tied his hands behind his back with his own shawl. Huey and I joined them as they made their way down an alley and toward the fields. When we were in the middle of the poppy field, Khalil screamed, “Taliban! Get down!” Then he and his men, firing their guns, advanced, with us among them. We could see the helicopters flying over the village and the river, seeming to leave the area. Several of the policemen asked me why they weren’t firing at our attackers. I didn’t know what to tell them.

As we approached a steep hill, from which the Afghan policemen were firing rockets and Kalashnikovs into the village… It had been about ninety minutes since the shooting began. As we looked for cover on the hill, Khalil directed his men to fire into the village. Bullets came cracking at us. The prisoner, his arms still bound, crouched next to me. There was a plume of black smoke; the men said that it was one of our vehicles burning. Khalil, seemingly panicked, ordered everyone to run.” (to be continued)

04/04/2026

The scenes before an ambush. Hot light, people watching from high ground, shouting, pleading, crying, and eventually it gets quieter when everyone leaves before the shooting starts. Long ago Jon Lee Anderson and I reported on the Opum War in Afghanistan for and it was recently re-relased as a chapter in his new book To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban.

Excerpt: “Doug Wankel walked up to an angry-looking farmer who was watching his field being destroyed and asked him, through an interpreter named Nazeem, how much he got for his o***m. Twenty-one thousand Pakistani rupees for a four-kilo package, the farmer said, and he harvested three to four kilos per jerib (a local land measurement equivalent to about half an acre). He added, “I get only a thousand rupees per jerib of wheat, so I’m obliged to grow poppies.” That comes to about $33 from an acre of wheat, and between $500 and $700 from an acre of poppies. In Uruzgan, the o***m was sold to middlemen who then smuggled it out of Afghanistan to Pakistan or Iran.

“How long have you been growing poppies?” Wankel asked him. The farmer looked surprised. “When I was born, I saw the poppies,” he said.

When we were ready to move on, the farmer said, as if to be polite, “Thank you — but I can’t really thank you, because you haven’t destroyed just my poppies but my wheat, too.” He pointed to where ATVs had driven through a wheat patch. Wankel apologized, then commented that it was only one small section. “But you have also damaged my watermelons,” the farmer insisted, pointing to another part of the field. “Now I will have nothing left.”

Wankel turned away. As we walked on, the farmer called out, “Are you destroying all the poppies or just my field?”

A young girl wiped away tears with her scarf and yelled angrily at a policeman. One of the local men, who wore a black turban, said to them, “We’re poor — we’re not with the Taliban or anything. You’ve made a big mistake. Now we’ll grow more against you.” He added, “I have to feed my children.” Words by Jon Lee, photos by me.

03/04/2026

Children and old men collecting o***m. From “To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban” by Jon Lee Anderson w photos by me: “I arranged to be escorted to the poppy fields by a local police unit, so that I could speak to farmers freely, without members of the eradication team present. There were six or seven young men, most of them wearing shalwar kameez instead of uniforms, under the command of a tiny hunchbacked man who walked with difficulty, using crutches. He wore a rakish turban and a dirty robe, and he spat constantly. Suppressing my misgivings, I went with them.

At the edge of a wadi, we found several men and a boy at work, harvesting o***m. The policemen stood at the edges of the field as I waded into the poppies with a translator, a local young man named Saibullah, who had learned English as a refugee in Pakistan. Once he had explained that I merely wanted to see how they collected the drug, they were friendly enough. The boy showed me how he ran his thumb over the oozing bulbs and then scraped the gooey brown o***m into a glass he held in his other hand. When the glass was full, he emptied the contents into a large bowl. It was eight twenty a.m. and the harvesters had been working since five a.m. It looked as though they had already collected about two kilos. Nazir Ahmad, a bearded man in a long, o***m-stained smock, said that he had twenty people to support and four jeribs of land, from which he expected to harvest twenty-five kilos of o***m.

The development projects meant to offset the loss of the poppies didn’t benefit people like him, Ahmad said. “The Karzai government doesn’t give the money to poor farmers growing poppy. It gives it only to its friends who grow it” — corrupt officials and landowners with political influence. (Many of the farmers were sharecroppers.) “We would be happy to stop growing o***m if they would give us some help, and stop giving the money meant for us to thieves.” Instead of receiving aid from government officials, Ahmad said, “if they tell us to break the poppies, we must pay them not to.”

03/04/2026

Jon Lee Anderson celebration post! Jon Lee is one of the greatest longform narrative journalists of all time, know for his reporting from conflict zones across every continent where they exist. He has a special gift for covering Afghanistan, reporting there from before 9/11 to after the return of the Taliban to power in 2021. He is also my friend, and the man who officiated my wedding to Kristin Moore on a rusting Soviet tank outside Kabul in 2007. His new book, To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban, feels especially relevant right now, as the US stumbles into yet another unwinnable war. Jon Lee and I travelled through the southern province of Oruzgan with a crew of mercenaries to watch the (attempted) eradication of o***m crops there in 2007 for and almost lost our lives in a 4.5 hour rolling ambush. Our story appears in the book in Chapter 10: Americans’ O***m War. In honor of Jon Lee’s new book, I’ll post some excerpts of his writing and a few carousels of images from our adventure, and from that chapter over the coming days. If you are an Afghanophile (is that a word?) or have ever had any interest in the fallout and failures of The Great Game, go pick up this book! I just saw it’s only 17 bucks online and some used copies already available for even less.

23/03/2026

They are going after Escalante National Monument again! I covered the dismantling of our National monuments for in 2017 and saw them reinstated in 2021. Fast forward to today and Senator Mike Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy have introduced a resolution to gut the management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and they’re using an obscure procedural tool called the Congressional Review Act to do it fast, with no public input. That plan is the only thing protecting 1.87 million acres of slot canyons (like Zebra and Spooky pictured here), fossil beds, and sacred Native cultural sites from mining and extraction. And if it passes, BLM is legally barred from replacing it with anything similar. There’s no do-over. 74% of Utah voters, including Republicans, want to keep this monument protected. Learn more about how to take action at . >>> https://act.wilderness.org/a/defendmonuments-1

18/03/2026

18/03/2026

On assignment for with my fraternal brothers of the hat. Hanging with old cowboys and rolling in cow s**t for a living up here in Siskiyou County, CA and loving it! Wouldn’t have it any other way! That big smiler is Roger Porterfield, age 92, maybe the oldest daily working rancher in this state! Can’t wait share more from this assignment with you later this year!

23/10/2025

I haven’t shared much about this project yet, but it’s been quietly in the works for over four years (behind-the-scenes storytelling coming soon). In recent months it’s meant seven-day work weeks and endless problem-solving. The takeover of The Met has taken many forms along the way, and there were moments I wasn’t sure it would ever see the light. But…this spring, an anonymous Indigenous donor stepped forward and made it possible for to finally assemble the team to realize it. At Amplifier our job and our skill, has always been putting the work of artists and movements into spaces that they couldn’t otherwise access, either where it’s not allowed, or in a scale of distribution that cannot be ignored. Hacking the streets, the ad space, classrooms, and now institutions. These are not our stories to tell, our job is to amplify those who carry these stories and histories as their own, those who continue the work of their lineage with boots on the ground every day. I am so lucky to be able to work with artists and community leaders like the 17 in this show, and grateful for their skill, time, and patience as we navigated into the unknown together. I will share more behind the scenes in the coming days, but for now please check our our launch video from last week >>> Repost from : “This Indigenous Peoples’ Day, seventeen Indigenous artists are taking over the American Wing of the in New York City (on Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape people, who were were forcibly removed and live largely in diaspora today) as it ends its centennial year. This augmented reality exhibition is unsanctioned, the Met did not know this was coming. ENCODED, is not a protest, or a demand for inclusion; it is a portal inviting us to see what happens when new narratives enter old frames. It is not a response to power. It IS power. (Cont. in comments)