Hyderabad: Danish Siddiqui, a Reuters photojournalist and a Pulitzer awardee who was covering the fight between Afghan soldiers and Taliban in Kandahar, was killed during clashes in Spin Boldak district in the Afghan city, sources confirmed on Friday.
"Deeply disturbed by the sad news of the killing of a friend, Danish Seddiqi in Kandahar last night (Thursday). The Indian Journalist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize was embedded with Afghan security forces," Afghanistan's Ambassador to India Farid Mamundzay tweeted on Friday. "I met him 2 weeks ago before his departure to Kabul. Condolences to his family & Reuters," Mamundzay said.
On Wednesday, the Taliban had claimed it had captured Kandahar province, Afghanistan's major border crossing with Pakistan's Balochistan province. The militant organisation has been making some territorial gains in Afghanistan at a time when the United States is withdrawing its army from the landlocked country at the crossroads of Central and South Asia.
Siddiqui, based out of Mumbai, graduated with a degree in Economics from Delhi's Jamia Millia Islamia University in 2007. He set his foot into professional journalism as a television news correspondent and later switched over to photojournalism as an intern with Reuters in 2010. In 2018, he won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for his feature photography on the Rohingya refugee crisis. He had also covered the 2015 Nepal earthquake in 2015, the Battle of Mosul in 2016-17, the 2019–2020 protests in Hong Kong and the 2020 Delhi riots.
