Our woman in Kabul

Saira Shah is no stranger to risk. Now, following the death of her cameraman James Miller, she wants to go back to Afghanistan

Gaza. 2 May 2003. Saira Shah's life and career were on a roll. Since her documentary Beneath the Veil, which exposed the realities of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, she had won prizes, been fêted on both sides of the Atlantic and continued to make powerful films in hot spots such as Afghanistan and Colombia. Her first book, The Storyteller's Daughter, was on the presses. And she and her friend, cameraman James Miller, had just started their own production company, through which they were now making a documentary about the Palestinian conflict.

Shah remembers feeling that she and Miller were now in a position 'to control our own destiny'. But that freedom, for him at least, was snatched away as quickly as it had materialised. Miller was standing two feet away from Shah when he was shot in the neck by an Israeli soldier. 'He was killed pretty well instantaneously,' she recalls, 10 weeks later, in her flat in east London.

She has just given me a detailed, sober account of the events leading to the shooting: the team's filming of Israelis bulldozing a Palestinian home, the journalists' decision to vacate the area as dusk fell, their approach towards a tank that was guarding their way - white flag in the air, 'TV' emblazoned on their helmets - to the moment when the shot rang out. Despite her apparent calm, the emotions are still raw.

'It was unbelievably awful. The only thing that protects you in those situations is that you go very numb; you don't actually emote. It's a bit like if you bang your elbow - it goes numb and then starts hurting later.' Is the numbness wearing off now? 'Yes. I'm probably at that stage now.'

The Israeli government has added insult to injury, not least for Miller's family (he leaves a wife and two young children), by denying responsibility, claiming that its soldiers had responded to hostile fire - something Shah vehemently discounts. 'A neck shot is a signature sniper shot,' she says. 'It may have been the worst bit of bad luck in the world, a 19-year-old panicky kid who loosed off a stray shot. But it didn't seem like that to me.'

Shah wonders whether she will ever make documentaries again, talking of feeling 'cut off' without Miller. The truth is that, having been a journalist for 17 years, she was already heading for a parallel, if not alternative, career path, in writing The Storyteller's Daughter.

Fleshing out the personal thread of Beneath the Veil, the book recounts British-born Shah's discovery of her father's homeland, Afghanistan, an evocative account of a young woman searching for cultural identity in a country ravaged by war and bigotry.

'My subject is perhaps the experience of a lot of people in Britain, who grow up here but are told that they come from somewhere else,' she says. 'I was born in London and brought up in Kent, but my father told me constantly that I came from this wonderful, mystical, fairytale place. But maybe what makes my experience different,' she adds, 'is that I actually went off to find it.'

Her parentage is more complex than at first glance: her father was half-Scottish, her mother Indian and British. 'We were just a hotchpotch,' says Shah, suggesting that this was why her father, a writer who died a few years ago, painted such a romantic picture of the pleasure gardens at Paghman, his family's town in the hills near Kabul.

'I think it was really important to my father that we didn't grow up feeling we didn't belong anywhere. He wanted us to have a metaphorical homeland, so he created a community out of stories. The only thing that surprises me,' she adds grinning, 'was how amazed and horrified he was when I turned around at 21 and said, "Well I'm going there, if that's where I come from." '

In The Storyteller's Daughter, she refers to herself as having a personality split between Kent and the Hindu Kush. 'Two people live inside me,' she says. 'Like a couple who rarely speak, they are not compatible. My Western side is a sensitive, liberal, middle-class pacifist. My Afghan side I can only describe as a rapacious robber baron. It revels in bloodshed, glories in risk and will not be afraid.' She recalls playing netball at school in Tunbridge Wells while humming an Afghan song that celebrated a massacre of British soldiers in 1842.

After graduating from university in London in 1986, having studied Persian and Arabic, Shah travelled to a country immersed in the long war against the Soviet Union, intent on experiencing first hand the country her father had described so vividly. She became a journalist because she could think of no other way of existing in a war zone.

'I turned up in Peshawar and went to the Mujahideen - all these men with their huge beards and turbans, most of them illiterate, looking at me very suspiciously - and I said, "I'm very important. Many people only write for one newspaper, but I write for many." It wasn't true, of course, but it was a very Afghan thing to do and they immediately fell for it. The next thing I knew, I was poncing around at the front line.'

Shah spent three years in Peshawar and the period was a coming of age in every respect. She soon realised that she had an instinct for journalism, filing important stories such as the Mujahideen's sale of stinger missiles to Iran, a scoop which led to the young reporter receiving death threats. 'I slept with an automatic under my pillow for six months,' she recalls. 'I thought, "I'm not gonna run away. I'll just sit it out."' It wasn't until writing the book that she realised how much she had experienced - the murder of an Afghan professor who had been her mentor, and bearing witness to the terrible carnage when an ammunition dump exploded in Islamabad. 'I was at such a high level of stress at the end of that. But I could not admit, even to myself, how afraid I was. I'm sure I was fairly unstable at that point.'

But the experience had established her credentials as a journalist. When she first left Afghanistan it was for Switzerland, where she married a Swiss reporter she had met in Peshawar (they divorced after five years) and worked in radio and television. Then she returned to Britain and a long stint with Channel Four as a foreign news reporter and occasional newsreader. She professes to have experienced none of the prejudices often confronted by women who want to be frontline reporters; her assignments included the Middle East, Algeria, Albania, 'and Kabul every time it fell - which was fairly regularly.'

She left Channel Four in 2001 wanting to branch out into documentaries. Beneath the Veil, which won her the Television Journalist of the Year award, could not have been more auspiciously timed. First broadcast in the UK in June 2001, it was still fresh in people's minds on 11 September and received countless repeats.

What made it so powerful was Shah's decision to go undercover, literally. Entering Afghanistan alone beneath a burqa, she passed herself off as an Afghan woman while filming the secret lives of women - a covert school for girls, a women's hospital allowed by the Taliban to fall into squalid disrepair. In a country where women were executed for entertainment, it was a gigantic risk.

The hardest part of that phase of the film, she says, was being separated from Miller and their director Cassian Harrison. 'We had massively bonded, we were such a good team; it was like travelling around with two big brothers. But suddenly I was on my own. I was very, very scared.'

So why does she take such risks? 'I don't know. I don't think I want to take risks. But I think I do get the bit between my teeth about things. I can be stubborn. I've never really backed down from anything once I've thought, "Well, I ought to do that." And that was the case with Beneath the Veil. I felt I ought to do it, because there were a lot of people trying to stop me seeing the women who were suffering under this regime.

'I'm not at all intrepid,' she adds. 'And I'm definitely not a war junkie. It's a calculated risk: you look at why you are doing something, you look at what it may cost, and you decide whether you are prepared to pay the price.'

Her friend, sadly, did pay the price. HBO, which commissioned the documentary, has decided that Shah should not film any more material, but that she should complete the project with what they have. 'It will be James's testimony,' she says. 'It was his first really big film as a director - and it would have been fantastic. I'll just do my best.'

Meanwhile, she is training every day with her boyfriend to take part in a triathlon, which is raising the money Miller's family need to pursue an independent criminal investigation into his death. Then she intends to return to Afghanistan, perhaps to live for a while and write more books.

'I've got to the point in my life where I've chased so many stories as a reporter and realised that facts just don't always convey the story. I'd love now to write fiction and try to reach some other sorts of truths through that.'

· To order The Storyteller's Daughter by Saira Shah for £14.99 plus p&p (rrp £16.99), call the Observer Books Service on 0870 066 7989. Published on 7 August by Michael Joseph.

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