Fox News foreign correspondent Trey Yingst appeared on the network’s America Reports to talk about his reporting from the Afghan capital of Kabul.
The Wednesday segment kicked off with footage over the past several weeks that included, but not limited to, Yingst reporting in Kabul, Afghans chaotically grabbing food from an aide worker in a car, interviewing Taliban officials – including spokesperson Suhail Shaheen – and Yingst interviewing an Afghan female law student before cutting off the interview due to a Taliban fighter showing up, as Yingst put it, “with a weapon in hand, intimidating her, forcing us to abruptly end the interview.” The footage also showed Yingst inside a hospital where children were being treated for malnutrition.
The segment then turned to Yingst live in Fox News’ New York studio, sitting adjacent to co-host Sandra Smith, who asked him “What was it like for you to operate as a reporter in that environment as long as you did, not just in Afghanistan, but taking us, taking our viewers inside the Taliban?”
Yingst answered:
There’s a lot of pressure when you’re reporting inside Taliban-controlled territory, but I think that’s where my crew and I operate best. We have to not only stay safe but also get the story out to our viewers. Our focus was always on safety, how can we get outside the hotel, into the streets of Kabul and talk not only with the Taliban and people that are most affected by the rule
of Taliban and this new chapter for Afghanistan. And so it was a day-to-day calculation that we had to make every time we left the hotel, whether we were with Taliban fighters at the Pul-e-Charkhi Prison, a prison that the group took over and freed thousands of their fighters or whether we were in the malnutrition ward of a hospital, talking with the families who will starve if international aid does not start flowing back into the country.
Trace Gallagher, who appeared remotely and was filling in for co-host John Roberts, asked Yingst, “How are you doing your sourcing and is it a logistical nightmare to get your reports on the air?”
“It’s a logistical challenge, absolutely,” said Yingst. “You drink a lot of tea with people. That’s, I think, how we approach sourcing when it comes to the Taliban because you have to make sure that you gain the trust of officials and these fighters because we’re not talking about an average source when we’re reporting stateside in somewhere like New York or Washington, D.C. You’re talking about radical factions of a group that is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.”
Yingst continued:
So we interviewed Anas Haqqani, for example, of the infamous Haqqani Network. And talking with this top Taliban official, this is someone who has directly ordered suicide bombings. Actually in the past at the hotel where we spoke to him at.
So you have to take all of this into account while understanding that the individuals you’re speaking with are human, they have motivation, they have reasons why they do things and they experience emotion and you have to really dig into that emotion, let them know that you are there as journalist, not to help them or to hurt them, but to tell the truth and the story on the ground in Afghanistan and then you have to work from there. Sometimes that takes hours, you set up these meetings, you have conversations behind the scenes with bad individuals, objectively bad humans, and then you basically say, “We are hear to tell the story and you tell that story in accurate fashion to our viewers in way that people can understand and ultimately care.”
Sandra expressed appreciation for Yingst’s reporting.
“You are giving us a remarkable look at a day in the life of a reporter inside of Afghanistan, Trey,” she said. “To the perspective you can give us now on the threat that we face today, a month after the United States left Afghanistan.”
Yingst said that “the biggest danger right now is the Americans left behind who could be targeted by the Taliban or they could be targeted by groups like ISIS-K. You have U.S. allies, American residents, even citizens, still on the ground in Afghanistan.”
Watch above, via Fox News.