While “casualties among reporters have been relatively unusual in recent months in Afghanistan,” per the New York Times, two AP reporters embedded with the U.S. military in southern Afghanistan were injured by a roadside bomb yesterday. Per the AP:
Photographer Emilio Morenatti and AP Television News videographer Andi Jatmiko were traveling with the military when their vehicle was struck by the bomb Tuesday.
Both were immediately taken to a military hospital in Kandahar. Jatmiko suffered leg injuries and two broken ribs. Morenatti, badly wounded in the leg, underwent an operation that resulted in the loss of his foot.
The Times reports that “scores of journalists are arriving in the country to cover” next week’s elections “as violence builds across Afghanistan ahead of” the elections.
For more Afghanistan news, have a look at Greg’s news roundup. And, Foreign Policy has teamed up with the New America Foundation to launch this week The Af-Pak Channel, a collection of original posts and reports on “The War for South Asia,” as well as daily news roundups from other sources. In one recent post, Morton Abramowitz of the Century Foundation performs some media criticism, arguing that “the deepening U.S involvement in Afghanistan under the Obama administration is based on assumptions that merit and require more sustained examination by the media, given the vast importance of the enterprise.”
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.