Reporting from Afghanistan: Trey Yingst reveals 'jarring' conversations with Taliban officials
Yingst said the people who pay the highest price in the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan are the Afghan civilians
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Fox News foreign correspondent Trey Yingst discussed what it was like to cover the Taliban as a foreign journalist on the ground in Afghanistan with Fox News host Bill Hemmer on "Hemmer Time."
Yingst, who is currently reporting from Kabul, said the first people he saw when landing at the airport in Kabul were "a convoy of Taliban fighters" in white vans.
"You can see all the images you want online and in the video feeds and wires that you want," Yingst said. "But when you see these Taliban fighters get out of the trucks…it is something that’s difficult to describe."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Yingst noted that it is difficult to get into Afghanistan to cover the conflict, and he had to get permission from the Taliban in order to report there.
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"Right now, the Taliban is trying to engage with the international community," he said. "So they’ve been interacting with the media in quite a bizarre way."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Yingst said that Taliban officials asked him if he would cover them in a favorable way, but that his obligation as a journalist in the country was to tell the truth and report what was happening.
"Our role as journalists around the world, it doesn’t matter where we’re reporting, is, to tell the truth," he said. "We don’t take orders from the Taliban when it comes to our reporting."
"The real losers in the media industry…are the local journalists," he continued, citing examples where the Taliban would beat or torture Afghan journalists but allow foreigners to report more freely for fear of an international incident.
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Yingst also said that despite the Taliban’s violent history, in order to report from the country, you had to see them as "human beings."
"Despite the fact that they may have a very dark past, they may have killed many people, fellow Americans even, you have to just treat them like people, give them a level of respect, and try to understand where they’re coming from in their conversation, but also remember who they are," he said.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Some of these conversations, Yingst said, may be "jarring," relaying his experience of listening to the Taliban brag about the number of Americans they had killed.
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Despite the difficulties as a journalist covering the Taliban and the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, Yingst said it was important to understand that the Taliban does not represent the Afghan people, many of whom had their entire lives and dreams taken away from them overnight.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"While we cover this Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the people who pay the highest price are the Afghan civilians, who can no longer listen to music, who can no longer go to a play, unless it is about the Quran. They can no longer freely walk through the streets safe and secure," he said. "They are living in an Afghanistan that is years behind what this country was, and years behind what it could have been."