Author: Ceci McWilliams (Page 1 of 2)

When Nazira Khairzad, former goalkeeper of the Afghan Women’s National Soccer Team, flew out of Germany, she risked never being allowed back in. On October 31st, she and her sister, Nazima, were three days out from the Ultra-Trail du Mont-blanc, a technical 26-kilometer race through Mallorca’s Serra de Tramuntana mountains. Nazira’s legs were still sore from the marathon she’d run the week before. But as she waited to display her refugee travel document to the security officer at Frankfurt am Main, Nazira had bigger concerns on her mind. 

Nazira’s status in Germany is tenuous. After the Taliban took over Afghanistan, she fled to Italy, where she obtained asylum. But in 2023, she moved to Frankfurt to support her sister, who was ill, and her parents. Reuniting with her family came with a price. As a non-resident in Germany, Nazira isn’t allowed to work or travel. The status she holds, called duldung, denies her residency but delays her deportation. Still, its protections are limited. Each time Nazira leaves the country to do what she loves most–play sports–Germany can refuse her re-entry. 

To Nazira, the risk is worth it. 

Nazira is used to hiding. As a young girl, she and her sister started the first girls’ soccer team in their native Bamiyan, a city in central Afghanistan. They snuck off to early morning practices multiple times a week, telling their parents they were going to an English class that met before school. Mostly in secret, Nazira’s love for sports took hold. At 11, she won a 10k, crossing the finish line in a long dress and tattered sandals. Her parents only discovered she ran when, after a race, she was broadcast on their home TV.

Born in 2004, Nazira came of age after U.S.-led coalition forces ousted the Taliban regime. In the two decades that followed, women ran, swam, and biked in triathlons abroad. Powerlifters won gold medals in India and Kazakhstan. The Afghan Women’s National Team formed in 2007, winning its first international match in 2012. By 2013, female Afghan athletes had accumulated some 100 medals. Through running, soccer, and skiing, Nazira added to that tally. As a female athlete, she was a minority in a conservative culture. But for most of her life, she was safe. 

That changed in early 2021, when the Taliban started to gain control of the provinces surrounding Kabul. One night, Nazira woke up to her phone ringing. It was a driver from Free to Run, the organization that sponsored Nazira’s first race, offering to help her escape. Calling from the city center, he said Talib soldiers had entered Bamiyan.

Violence had been on the rise in Bamiyan for the first time since the Taliban’s regime. In September of 1998, Taliban soldiers first entered Bamiyan and killed an estimated 500 people. Three years later, the group exploded the towering Buddhas of Bamiyan, hollowing out a cliff the height of a ten-story building. 

This history fresh in her mind, Nazira pushed a desk in front of her door. She changed into a long black dress, threw clothes into a small suitcase, and gathered the trophies, medals, and certificates that adorned her room, tying them up in a tapestry. At around 4:30 in the morning, her father called to tell her their neighbors were driving to Kabul. “You should go with them,” she recalls him saying. 

When Nazira got to Kabul, she joined her sister Nazima, who’d left home months earlier, in the basement room she was renting with several other women. For months, they shared a twin bed, their heads resting on opposite ends of a top-bunk mattress. 

It was around this time that Nazima–an athlete with a unique hunger for adventure–ventured into the black market. She’d won a scholarship to study in Malaysia, and needed a visa so she could travel to Pakistan for her appointment at the embassy (there is no Malaysian embassy in Afghanistan). Between odd meetings with a network of fixers, she traveled around the country, giving tours to English-speaking tourists. In May of 2021 she moved to Pakistan, narrowly escaping her country’s fall to the Taliban. Meanwhile, Nazira joined the Afghan Women’s National Team as a goalkeeper and started training for a match in Tajikistan, set for the end of August. 

These plans were upended on August 15th, 2021, when the Taliban reached Kabul. As a high-profile female athlete, Nazira was especially at risk. During this time, photos were circulating online of Mahjabin Hakimi, a volleyball player, her head severed from her body. The message was clear: women in sports should fear for their lives.   

Nazira took refuge with her ski coach, Gul Hussain Baizada. Through his work as a tour guide, Baizada had contacts outside the country who he said could help them flee. Nazira called her parents from the airport. “If you stay in Afghanistan,” she recalls them telling her on the phone, “the Taliban will kill you.” 

It was family, not escape, that brought Nazira to Germany. After the Taliban took over Afghanistan, she fled to Italy with her ski coach. In a matter of months, she obtained asylum and made plans to take college courses, and in February of 2023, earned a spot on AC Milan. “I see football like a member of my parents, like my brother or sister,” she said in her introductory video for the team. “I cannot live without football.” 

But just when she started gaining a sense of stability in Italy, everything changed. Her sister, Nazima–who went to Germany on a short-term Schengen visa, after her visa to Malaysia was denied–had been dizzy for months. She blamed her symptoms–vomitting, fatigue, and short, acute headaches–on stress. But soon, her illness became impossible to ignore. On July 27th, 2023, Nazira left her new team, her asylum status, and her college career in Italy to reunite with her family after nearly two years of separation. A month later, Nazima underwent an emergency operation to remove a brain tumor. Nazira stayed in the hospital for three months as her sister recovered, sleeping on a chair or, sometimes, in a supplies closet. 

Sure she was in Germany to stay, Nazira applied for asylum. After over a year of waiting, her application was processed and rejected. By EU law, refugees can’t apply for asylum in two countries. A non-resident, Nazira now straddles a bureaucratic contradiction. “Exclusion of deportation (Duldung),” it says in German on her ID. And under that: “No residence permit! The holder is required to leave the country!” 

As her relatives obtained asylum one by one, Nazira adapted as best she could to her second country of refuge. As she had in Italy, she started to learn the language and joined a team, FC Mittelbuchen. In August, the opportunity arose for her to play at the professional level, for FIFA’s newly inaugurated refugee team. Selection camps would be held in Australia and England. By duldung rules, Nazira was supposed to stay in Germany. But for Nazira, the risks of leaving Germany–a country that seemed to want her gone–were worth it. 

“Duldung is not a right to stay,” said Nazira’s lawyer, Elke Gabsa. “It’s the opposite.” Roughly translated as “toleration,” duldung puts a temporary hold on deportation. To put it simply, Germany wants duldung holders to leave, but for some reason, can’t deport them yet. 

“There’s actually like a hundred different reasons,” said Emily Frank, a social scientist and immigration scholar in Berlin. In 2021, the German government listed the reasons it issues duldung at the request of a group from parliament. According to the document, some duldung holders are too sick to travel. Others are caring for a sick relative. Some are studying, while others are in the midst of vocational training. Many are missing (or withholding) travel documents. A small number are kept in Germany to await criminal proceedings. The most common reason listed is “other.” Often, the grounds for duldung are up to the discretion of the immigration official. Nazira’s is an apt example. Of her case, Gabsa told me, “We ask our authorities to give a residence because we think a special person is good for our country and there are serious reasons for the person to stay.” 

Despite these reasons, Nazira faces the same restrictions as other duldung holders. Unable to participate in many aspects of daily life, people with duldung live in limbo. They can’t work unless they get permission from the office of immigration. Some forms of duldung–and there are numerous–require holders to live in shared refugee housing, limiting their mobility, privacy, and ability to integrate into German life. As a rule, people with duldung can’t access language courses, though there are exceptions. The limited time stamp on duldung presents new, less formal challenges. Employers often hesitate to hire people with duldung who, even with permission to work, are often regarded as short-term candidates. For the same reason, landlords keep from renting to people with duldung. When Nazira completed an intermediate German course, she couldn’t enroll in the next level, a six-month course, because her duldung is only valid for three months. 

In many ways, duldung holders are much like asylum-seekers, barred from work, travel, and school. But people still awaiting an asylum decision have one vital thing duldung holders lack: hope. “In a sense, a decision has already been made,” Frank said of duldung holders. 

Despite the humiliation life with duldung often entails, thousands of people stay in Germany with this status for years. Out of more than 240,000 people with duldung in 2021, over 46,000 of them had been in Germany for over three years, according to the government report from that year. Almost 15,000 of them had been in Germany for over a decade. They continue to face restrictions to employment, education, housing, and travel–rules that, it would seem, sap the German economy. So why does Germany keep issuing duldung? “My impression is that it’s a deterrence mechanism,” Frank said. “Maybe some people will give up on it and leave.” 

More than an effective deterrent, duldung is a convenient catch-all for non-residents whose deportation Germany can’t justify. It’s also a buffer: as soon as the grounds for duldung go away, the German government may revoke its protections. In other words, duldung offers some safety–but only for as long as Germany deems it necessary. 

St. George’s Park spans 330 acres of land in Staffordshire, a county in the West Midlands of England. An on-site Hilton Hotel looks onto the National Football Centre, which boasts fourteen outdoor pitches, bright green against the gray England sky. Since its inauguration in 2012 by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, St. George’s Park has been home base to England’s 28 national football teams. In September, Nazira and twenty other candidates for FIFA’s new Afghanistan women’s refugee team got a chance to play there. 

Worried travel would jeopardize her ability to stay in Germany, Nazira didn’t initially plan on going. But after Gabsa, her lawyer, told her she could use her Italian refugee document to travel, she left for an eight-day trip, where she reunited with several players she knew from her stint on the Afghan Women’s National Team. 

Two weeks after her trip, Nazira was selected as a goalkeeper for the Afghan women’s refugee team. The first match, set for October 26th in Qatar (and later diverted to Morocco, after Qatar denied the team visas), conflicted with Nazira’s plans to run the Mallorca race. She and her sister had been training for nearly a year, often going on five-mile jogs together through Neuberg. Not one to flake, Nazira packed a bag for the 26-kilometer trail run, determined to keep goal in the next match. 

For the second time, Nazira broke the rules of duldung, leaving her German ID at home on the day of her flight. Again, as she left Germany and re-entered–still feeling the high of a successful race–with no deportation scare. 

Nazira faces a future speckled with these moments of uncertainty. Now a member of two soccer teams, she alternates between practicing in Hanau with FC Mittelbuchen and lifting weights on Zoom with the scattered refugee team. Between practice, she cares for her parents, often accompanying her mother, who has diabetes, to doctor’s appointments. Each session with her lawyer seems to signal an ongoing limbo. In mid-November, Gabsa told Nazira that her third request for asylum had been denied. Gabsa is working on another appeal. “I tried to argue that it can also be a human rights violation if members of a family need each other for private reasons,” she told me. 

Nazira got asylum in Italy in 2023. Within the next year, this status will expire. Without asylum, Nazira will lack the documents she needs to travel. Unable to travel, she won’t be able to play in matches with the Afghan women’s team. Still, Nazira’s chances for obtaining asylum in Germany will stay the same. 

Nazira faces one clear path out of limbo. She could go back to Italy, wait five years, and apply for residency, which would allow her to travel freely to Germany. Each asylum rejection is a reminder of this alternative. But after two years of involuntary separation from her family, life with them seems impossible to abandon. Her mother needs a medical interpreter. Her father needs a caretaker. She needs her family as much as she needs soccer. “I moved to Italy and then I lived alone,” she told me. “Completely alone.” 

When Nazira Khairzad, former goalkeeper of the Afghan Women’s National Soccer Team, flew out of Germany, she risked never being allowed back in. On October 31st, she and her sister, Nazima, were three days out from the Ultra-Trail du Mont-blanc, a technical 26-kilometer race through Mallorca’s Serra de Tramuntana mountains. Nazira’s legs were still sore from the marathon she’d run the week before. But as she waited to display her refugee travel document to the security officer at Frankfurt am Main, Nazira had bigger concerns on her mind. 

Nazira’s status in Germany is tenuous. After the Taliban took over Afghanistan, she fled to Italy, where she obtained asylum. In 2023, she moved to Frankfurt, reuniting with her family after nearly two years of separation. After over a year of waiting, her asylum application was processed–and then, rejected. By EU law, refugees can’t apply for asylum in two countries. A non-resident, Nazira now straddles a bureaucratic contradiction. “Exclusion of deportation (Duldung),” it says in German on her ID. And under that: “No residence permit! The holder is required to leave the country!” 

Nazira is not alone. According to the Federal Statistics Office, over 177,000 others have duldung, which means something like “toleration.” Similar to the U.S.’s Temporary Protected Status, Germany’s duldung shields holders from deportation while denying them residency. Duldung may be issued to people without passports or documents, people who are too sick to travel, or people who face danger at home. As soon as the grounds for duldung go away, the German government may revoke its protections. In other words, duldung offers some safety–but only for as long as Germany deems it necessary. 

On the day of her flight, Nazira took little comfort in her tolerated status. She turned to her sister in line for security and said, “What about if the police catch me?”

Nazira is used to hiding. As a young girl, she and her sister started the first girls’ soccer team in their native Bamiyan, a city in central Afghanistan. They snuck off to early morning practices multiple times a week, telling their parents they were going to an English class that met before school. Mostly in secret, Nazira’s love for sports took hold. At 11, she won a 10k, crossing the finish line in a long dress and tattered sandals. Her parents only discovered she ran when, after a race, she was broadcast on their home TV. 

Born in 2004, Nazira came of age after U.S.-led coalition forces ousted the Taliban regime. In the two decades that followed, women ran, swam, and biked in triathlons abroad. Powerlifters won gold medals in India and Kazakhstan. The Afghan Women’s National Team formed in 2007, and won its first international match in 2012. By 2013, female Afghan athletes had accumulated some 100 medals. Through running, soccer, and skiing, Nazira added to that tally. As a female athlete, she was a minority in a conservative culture. But for most of her life, she was safe. 

That changed in early 2021, when the Taliban started to gain control of the provinces surrounding Kabul. One night, Nazira woke up to her phone ringing. It was a driver from Free to Run, the organization that sponsored Nazira’s first race, offering to help her escape. Talib soldiers had entered Bamiyan, he said while calling from the city center.

In recent months, violence had escalated in Bamiyan for the first time since the Taliban’s regime. In September of 1998, Taliban soldiers first entered Bamiyan and killed an estimated 500 people. Three years later, the group exploded the towering Buddhas of Bamiyan, hollowing out a cliff the height of a ten-story building. This history fresh in her mind, Nazira pushed a desk in front of her door. She changed into a long black dress, threw clothes into a small suitcase, and gathered the trophies, medals, and certificates that adorned her room, tying them up in a tapestry. 

For hours, Nazira paced the room, scared that Taliban soldiers were waiting outside her door. Her soccer teammates, many of whom ended up escaping into the mountains surrounding the valley city of Bamiyan, called to ask where she would flee. At around 4:30 in the morning, her father called to tell her their neighbors were driving to Kabul. “You should go with them,” she recalls him saying. 

When Nazira got to Kabul, she joined her sister Nazima, who’d left home months earlier, in the basement room she was renting with several other women. For months, they shared a twin bed, their heads resting on opposite ends of a top-bunk mattress. It was around this time that Nazima–an athlete with a unique hunger for adventure–ventured into the black market. She’d won a scholarship to study in Malaysia, and needed a visa so she could travel to Pakistan for her appointment at the embassy (there is no Malaysian embassy in Afghanistan). Between odd meetings with a network of fixers, she traveled around the country, giving tours to English-speaking tourists. In May of 2021 she moved to Pakistan, narrowly escaping her country’s fall to the Taliban. Meanwhile, Nazira joined the Afghan Women’s National Team as a goalkeeper and started training for a match in Tajikistan, set for the end of August. 

These plans were upended on August 15th, 2021, when the Taliban reached Kabul. As a high-profile female athlete, Nazira was especially at risk. During this time, photos were circulating online of Mahjabin Hakimi, a volleyball player, her head severed from her body. The message was clear: women in sports should fear for their lives.   

Nazira took refuge with her ski coach, Gul Hussain Baizada. Through his work as a tour guide, Baizada had contacts outside the country who he said could help them flee. Nazira called her parents from the airport. “If you stay in Afghanistan,” she recalls them telling her on the phone, “the Taliban will kill you.” 

It was family, not escape, that brought Nazira to Germany. After the Taliban took over Afghanistan, she fled to Italy with her ski coach. In a matter of months, she obtained asylum and made plans to take college courses, and in February of 2023, earned a spot on AC Milan. “I see football like a member of my parents, like my brother or sister,” she said in her introductory video for the team. “I cannot live without football.” 

But just when she started gaining a sense of stability in Italy, everything changed. Her sister, Nazima–who went to Germany on a short-term Schengen visa, after her visa to Malaysia was denied–had been dizzy for months. She blamed her symptoms–vomitting, fatigue, and short, acute headaches–on stress. But soon, her illness became impossible to ignore. On July 27th, 2023, Nazira left her new team, her asylum status, and her college career in Italy to reunite with her family after nearly two years of separation. On August 21st, Nazima underwent an emergency operation to remove a brain tumor. Nazira stayed in the hospital for three months as her sister recovered, sleeping in a small chair in the room or a supplies closet. 

As her relatives obtained asylum one by one, Nazira adapted as best she could to her second country of refuge. As she had in Italy, she started to learn the language and joined a team, FC Mittelbuchen. In August, the opportunity arose for her to play at the professional level, for FIFA’s newly inaugurated refugee team. Selection camps would be held in Australia and England. By duldung rules, Nazira was supposed to stay in Germany. But for Nazira, the risks of leaving Germany–a country that seemed to want her gone–were worth it. 

Next steps: 

• Context section about the shifting relationship between German government and Taliban 
• Scene: Nazira’s selection as goalie 
• What’s next? Italian asylum expires in a year 
• Conclusion: race in Mallorca

On October 31st, Nazira Khairzad, a 21-year old woman from Afghanistan, turned to her older sister, Nazima, as they waited to board a flight from Frankfurt, Germany to Palma de Mallorca, Spain. “What about if the police catch me and send me back to Italy?” Nazima recalls her sister saying. 

They were the only Afghans in sight. Around them, Spaniards on their way home crowded the gate. Nazima and Nazira were three days away from the Ultra-Trail du Mont-blanc, a technical 26-kilometer race through the Serra de Tramuntana mountains of Mallorca. Nazira’s legs still ached from the Frankfurt marathon, which she’d run a week before, finishing with a positive split. If all went as planned, the rapid turnaround would be worth it. The Ultra-Trail du Mont-blanc would bring staggering views of the Mediterranean–and more opportunities to race abroad. One hiccup threatened to upend these dreams. In Germany, Nazira is a non-resident. For her, international travel is illegal. 

“It’s legal,” Nazima recalls telling her sister. “You already have the documents.” When Nazira went through security in Frankfurt am Main, she showed the guard the refugee travel document she obtained in Italy, where she obtained asylum in 2021. Not her German ID with its red slash across the biometric page. Nazima, who has German asylum, worries about Nazira’s ability to stay in Germany, where her whole family now lives. But as her sister–marathoner, goalkeeper, and woman caught in a web of bureaucratic contradictions–approached the gate agent, Nazima kept her concerns quiet.

“I have duldung,” Nazira told me. “It’s worse than deport,” her older sister, Nazima, added. At a café along the Main River, the three of us peered over Nazira’s ID. “Exclusion of deportation (Duldung),” it read in German. And under that: “No residence permit! The holder is required to leave the country!”

Hundreds of thousands of people in Germany hold ID’s that look like Nazira’s. Duldung, which denies an asylum seeker residency but protects her from deportation, is one way Germany has tried to accommodate–without too warm a welcome–the staggering amount of refugees entering the country. The number of asylum seekers in Germany has skyrocketed in recent years, multiplying seven-fold from 2007 to 2024, according to the Federal Statistical Office. Germany has stamped approvals at an impressive clip. As of late 2024, there were 2,706,320 refugees with an approved asylum case, just 170,970, with rejections. 

Nazira and 177,609 others hang in a peculiar in-between, their cases denied, but their presence sanctioned under “duldung,” or “toleration.” Her deportation order, by duldung standards, is on hold. But as anti-immigrant sentiment swells in Germany, Nazira is skeptical of this temporary protection. “They can send police and they can send me back to Italy,” she told me. “It happened for some people I know.” 

TIME’s article about Israel’s Use of AI in Gaza is heavy on quotes. The piece relies on experts to explain Israel’s mounting reliance on AI to locate and suggest targets, and the humanitarian implication of this trend. While the article lacks a central character, expert opinions coalesce to form a daunting picture of warfare’s future. The author writes that, according to experts, drones “are not yet fully autonomous,” suggesting that soon, if international law doesn’t implement guardrails, drones may target and kill with no human in the loop. 

Though Serhan relies more on expert opinion than narrative detail, she manages to connect to readers through a deft balance of familiarity and distance. From the start, she implores readers to recall images they’ve seen (“AI warfare may conjure up images of killer robots and autonomous drones”), creating a target of contradiction for what’s to follow (“a different reality is unfolding in the Gaza strip”). Not only does this set-up allow readers to feel grounded in their imaginations, but it also creates suspense. Serhan primes readers to anticipate surprise. In this piece, what McPhee defines as “frame of reference” is the summation of images and news items covering the war in Gaza, and the role of drones in this conflict, that the reader has consumed. 

In both Robert Worth’s feature about Aleppo after the rebels’ siege of the city and Dan Barry’s piece on Song Yang, setting is a central frame of reference. Both writers contribute their own observations of place to a broader story which, in each case, is largely about a set of characters’ evolving relationship with that setting, the passage of time, and death. 

Barry and Singer’s piece is, no doubt, immersive. I was moved by the story behind it: Barry read a headline, it made him mad, so he decided to learn more. The story he and Singer follow is an investigation into the dead woman’s life, circumstances, neighborhood, and the women who continue to toil under the exploitative conditions she underwent. 

This story is most successful when its frame of reference is consistent. About halfway through the narrative, Barry zeroes in on 40th road. Readers learn more about the aftermath of Song Yang’s death. Her mother’s grief and brother’s conspiracies are central plot lines. This focus–on the family’s and neighborhood’s reaction to Song Yang’s death in Flushing–recreated a textured world, making Song Yang’s absence all the more apparent. 

When the narrative jumped around, in time and setting, I lost interest. Song Yang is nowhere near as multidimensional a character in the story as her brother. The ongoing action of her brother’s investigation into her death draws the reader in. And the reporter benefits from observing him in action. While the history of Song Yang is compelling, it lacks depth in writing. Further, anecdotes from her childhood are interwoven with details about her life in Flushing, and I found these transitions disorienting. If anything, the successes and shortcomings of this piece underscored the reliability of chronology as an immersive tool.

At a cafe in Frankfurt on October 12th, 2025, Nazira Khairzad, former goalkeeper for Afghanistan’s national women’s team, put her provisional ID on the table and flipped to the portrait page. A red line ran diagonal through her biometric data. Across the top, “Exclusion of deportation (Duldung)” was written in German, and under that, “No residence permit! The holder is required to leave the country!” Since joining her sister in Germany in 2023, Nazira has been searching for a way to stay. Under “duldung” or “toleration,” a status unique to Germany, her deportation order is on hold–but only for as long as the German government deems it necessary. 

“It was not my choice to come to Germany,” Nazira had told me a week earlier, calling from her home in Neuberg, where she lives with her parents and two brothers. When the Taliban took over her country in August of 2021, she fled to Italy, risking persecution as a female athlete. When her sister, Nazima Khairzad, who made a name for herself summiting mountains and dominating ski challenges, was hospitalized with a brain tumor in Frankfurt, Nazira packed up her life again. Today, Nazira is the only one in her family without asylum in Germany. “They can send police and they can send me back to Italy,” she told me. “It happened for some people I know.” 

I plan to write a 2500-word feature story following Nazira’s relentless efforts to play sports professionally, learn German, and adjust to a new culture, despite her precarious legal status. Nazira’s path fits into a broader narrative about the German government’s recent attempts to block the arrival and integration of Afghans. After the German government set up a program to admit vulnerable Afghans in late 2022, Chancellor Merz has reversed his country’s course, putting Afghan men convicted of crimes on flights back to Afghanistan and announcing plans to deport many others. Meanwhile, Merz has offered Taliban officials consular positions, threatening to legitimize the very regime that forced Nazira to flee. 

This piece, which I am still reporting, will foreground Nazira’s search for stability in Germany against the broader context of the country’s mounting rejection of Afghans. I will speak to asylum lawyers in Germany, scholars familiar with the specifics of duldung, and people relevant to Nazira’s story, including her lawyer, sister, parents, and teammates on FC Mittelbuchen. 

John McPhee is known as a master of story structure. He emphasizes that a set structure eases the process of writing a story–and reading it. To me, his process for organizing a story is less intelligible than this principle. McPhee describes writing out scenes on index cards, shuffling them around, and designating points for transitions, digressions, and section breaks. I read this more as an artefact of one writer’s brain than a guide for organizing structure, which, for me, only emerges after some writing is done. 

Based on McPhee’s description, structuring a piece is a demanding but methodical task. With practice, it seems, McPhee developed a consistent approach to organize stories. But how does one organize a story with only partial reporting done? McPhee structures stories only after gathering copious notes, recordings, documents, and memos, but does the projected structure not guide his reporting? I am stuck on this point of tension: to plan a structure, the writer must have already reported, but the writer’s idea for her structure guides the information she seeks. 

Stewart, like McPhee, sidesteps this question. Still, his chapter on structure offers practices I can and will implement in my own process. He instructs writers to get comfortable with chronology. To organize a story in a straightforward way, a writer might start by listing scenes in chronological order and associating them with settings and characters present. Stewart recommends that writers minimize shifts in chronology, setting, and POV. 

The napkin drawings of structure pair well with the principles Stewart describes. I particularly liked the organization of This American Life stories, which link scenes chronologically, interrupting them at times with a moment of reflection or realization. A balance between interiority and plot forms the skeleton of this structure. 

I suspect that structure is never as simple as these models make it out to be. If structuring stories were easy, there wouldn’t be so many guides for structure. In my experience, the process of structuring stories is always messy. My first structure has never stuck. That said, writing a lede first has always helped me guide the sequence of scenes. 

I was struck by Stewart’s note that “the enemy of chronology is analysis.” I wonder how chronology functions as an organizing principle, if at all, in analysis pieces that include narrative elements, or vice versa. Sometimes, writing guides simplify different forms of writing, as if genres didn’t often intersect.

Nazira Khairzad was asleep in her bedroom in Bamyan, Afghanistan, where she lived with her family, when her phone rang. It was a driver she knew from Free to Run, a non-profit, offering to help her and her family escape the city, where the Taliban had just entered. From where he was calling downtown, residents were scrambling for refuge.

Nazira stayed inside. She was afraid Taliban soldiers were on the other side of her door, which opened to an outside staircase. With no more cell credit, she could not call her family downstairs. Her phone rang again. Nazira’s soccer teammates, many of whom ended up escaping into the mountains surrounding the valley-city of Bamyan, asked where she would flee. She changed into a burqa, packed a suitcase, and began clearing the walls, which were adorned with certificates she and her sister had won from soccer matches, ski competitions, and races. She piled them into a tapestry, along with the trophies that lined the mantel, and tied everything up. At around 4:30 in the morning, her father called to tell her their neighbors were driving to Kabul. “You should go with them,” she recalls him saying.

In Kabul, Nazira joined her older sister in the basement room she shared with several other women, the pair sharing a twin bed.

“It was not my choice to come to Germany,” Nazira told me, calling from her home in Neuberg, where she lives with her parents and two brothers. On August 15^th, when the Taliban reached Kabul, Nazira took refuge with her ski coach, Gul Hussain Baizada. Through his work as a tour guide, Baizada had contacts outside the country who he said could help them flee. Nazira had called her parents from the airport. “If you stay in Afghanistan,” she recalls them telling her on the phone, “the Taliban will kill you.”

Nazira was born in 2004, just three years after U.S.-allied forces overtook the Taliban. In the years that followed, Afghan society liberalized. Young women returned to school in droves. In 2007, a group of women formed the Afghan Women’s National Team. Still, women in sports met backlash. When Nazira and Nazima, at 11 and 13, started their city’s first girls’ soccer team, they did so in private, telling their parents they were heading to math class before sneaking off to early-morning practice. Undeterred by the stigma they faced, the sisters were soon winning matches, outrunning male peers, and dominating ski challenges. In 2015, shortly after Nazira started playing soccer, she ran a 10k race and finished first, crossing the finish line in tattered sandals and a long dress. By the time the Taliban took over, she was keeping goal for the Afghan Women’s National Team in Kabul, preparing for a match in Tajikistan.

In August 2021, as the Taliban neared the capital, photos circulated online of Mahjabin Hakimi, a volleyball player, her head severed from her body. The message was clear: women in sports should fear for their lives.

On August 21^st, 2021, Nazira flew to Italy with Baizada, his family, and two other athletes. Within her first few days there, Nazira received a message from the Afghanistan Football Federation, instructing her to go to the airport with her parents. Her teammates on the Afghan Women’s National Team flew to Australia—too late for her to join them. She found her own team in Ferrara, where she was placed in a house with other refugees. In February of 2023, she was selected to play on AC Milan. Meanwhile, she struggled to find a way for her parents to join her in Europe. Given her background in sports, Nazira worried the Taliban would target her family. Her sister, Nazima, who was waiting for a European visa in Pakistan, harbored the same concerns. Headaches often debilitated her. At the time, she dismissed them as symptoms of stress.

By the time Nazima reached Germany—after visiting her sister in Italy and a doctor in France—her health had worsened even more. She often vomited. Several times, she fainted. Drained and confused, she visited the doctor and left with no conclusive diagnosis. On August 21^st, 2023, she underwent an emergency MRI. Nazira, in Italy, got a call from her sister’s roommate, who said Nazima was in the hospital. At this time, Nazira’s parents were with her in Italy (Nazira’s coach on FC Milan, along with several journalists she knew, helped them get there). Nazira and Nazima’s mother, shocked, insisted they visit Nazima in the Frankfurt hospital where she was recovering. The MRI had revealed a tumor at the base of Nazima’s brain, next to her cervical spine.

After an emergency operation to remove the tumor, Nazima went into a coma for several days. When she woke up, the right side of her body was paralyzed. The operation had damaged her nerves. When Nazira saw her sister—soon after surgery—she lay supine and swollen on the hospital bed. Oxygen tubes formed a web around her. The doctor said she would never stand or walk again. The family decided to stay in Germany.

For four months, Nazira stayed in the hospital with Nazima, sleeping on a chair or in a small closet. She accompanied her sister through persistent nightmares, incessant requests for pain killers, and a second surgery. Visitors were not allowed past midnight. When nurses signaled to Nazira it was time to leave, she nodded and waited for them to exit the room before falling asleep.

By the time Nazima was discharged in early 2024, she weighed less than 82 pounds—down from 119 when she arrived. She still struggles to eat properly, run, and do what she most enjoys: ski. Even today, it feels like heavy stones weigh down her right arm. Between appointments with an occupational therapist and a psychologist, she and Nazira train. They plan to run a race in Spain at the end of the month. Both will move through airport security unsure Nazira will make it back. Nazima, her two brothers, and her parents were all granted asylum. Nazira was not.

“I have duldung,” Nazira said. “It’s worse than deport,” Nazima added. At a café along the Main River, the three of us peered over Nazira’s ID. “Exclusion of deportation (Duldung),” it read in German. And under that: “No residence permit! The holder is required to leave the country!” A red diagonal line slashed through the page. By EU law, foreign nationals cannot apply to asylum in two countries. Since Nazira has asylum in Italy, her application was rejected in Germany. Duldung, which translates roughly to “toleration,” allows her to stay.

“This is rejection, but they say due to humanitarian you can stay here for a while,” said Asef Hossaini, founder of Abad, a Berlin-based support organization for Afghans. Duldung may be issued to people without passports or documents, people who are too sick to travel, or people like Nazira, who could be killed at home. Duldung has been described as a state of “indefinite waiting” and “legal limbo.” “It’s just humiliating,” said Qaiz Alamdar, an Afghan living in Berlin.

Nazira’s status puts her in a precarious situation. Duldung does not make a deportation order go away; it just delays the process. The fear of being deported—and being separated from her family, her soccer team, and her investment in adjusting to German language and life—looms. News stories fan fear among many immigrants living in Germany, whose fate blurs as the country’s politics shift right. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has pledged to curb irregular migration and increase deportations, a move some say is a reaction to the anti-immigrant party AfD’s rise in popularity.

Afghans, who make up the second-largest group of migrants in Germany, are especially at risk. In July, Germany sent 81 Afghan men convicted of crimes back to Afghanistan, the second such flight from the country since the Taliban took over. So far, criminals have been the only Afghan deportees, but the government may soon target people residing illegally in Germany. Merz’s recent collaboration with the Taliban signals a future of quid pro quo negotiations, by which the Taliban cooperates with Germany’s deportation goals in exchange for a hand in the country’s consulates. In July, Germany allowed two Taliban officials to work in the Afghan consulate. This means the Taliban now has access to biometric data and personal information about Afghans in over twenty countries.

These shifting conditions of protection for Afghans jeopardize any sense of stability Nazira has found in Germany. Today, though, she is focused on herself. On Sunday, she ran the Frankfurt marathon, finishing with a negative split. Under constraining circumstances, sports give her hope. “When I play football,” she told me, “I feel free.”

In episode 1 of “In the Dark,” we learn about the killing of 24 civilians in Haditha at the hands of U.S. Marines, told as a neighbor, Khaled, remembers the event. Madeleine Baran, along with a team of journalists, follows the story over the course of four years through interviewing people connected to the case and analyzing archival materials.

As part of this project, Baran “embeds” herself with subjects through accompanying them on an investigation. Khaled, her primary subject, is searching for answers about the Haditha killing, and Baran’s reporting informs this search. In this respect, embedment is a collaborative effort, in which journalists chase stories along with their subjects. 

In some contexts, embedment requires journalists to risk their lives. Through her reporting in Ukraine, Cailin Doornbos put herself in danger to help American readers understand what happens on the front lines. Caitlin Dickerson’s chronicles through the Darién Gap offer another example of the dangers embedded reporting can involve. In both these contexts, immersive reporting is impossible without risks. Journalists must put themselves in danger to understand the dynamics of migration and war. 

Some information can only be uncovered through embedment. For instance, Dickerson verifies that some death counts of migrants in the Darién gap are underestimated through talking to people living along the crossing and seeing mass graves herself. Embedment also gives journalists access to otherwise inaccessible sources. Migrants likely trusted Dickerson more because she made herself “one of them.” 

On that note, embedment raises ethical challenges about the responsibility of journalists to maintain some level of distance with their sources. I question the ability of journalists to become “one of them.” Embedment risks providing journalists with a false sense of familiarity with a subject. Clearly, Dickerson gained a deeper understanding of the experience of crossing the Darién Gap through making the journey herself, rather than just speaking to migrants about it. At the same time, as a journalist, she is in a more secure position than many migrants crossing the gap. The experience of crossing, for Dickerson, might obscure the difference in privilege between her and migrants on the same path. 

At the same time, embedment might emphasize these differences. The process of accompanying subjects on their journeys–whether through the Darián Gap or through an investigation–might allow journalists to better understand the challenges their subjects face and, at the same time, their own position as observers. 

These readings led me to consider how we might practice embedment as students. Some of us, while in Berlin, embedded ourselves in stories. Raphi and Miriam embedded themselves in a Ukrainian church, traveling to the site and spending a day with the group organizing it. Most of us stuck to interviews. In some cases, interviews are all we can do, especially under the constraints of time. That said, I am curious about how we might expand the idea of embedment beyond spending time physically with a subject. What are other ways–through videocalls, shared routines, or social media–we might embed ourselves in stories from afar?

10/14/2025

Justus Wilhoit

 BERLIN –  “Ard fussball rechts”, “Babelsburg 03”, “Neonazis in stadion,” and “Berlin dynamo – BFC.” These are not just random phrases you’d hear from an everyday football fan in Germany. They’re the names of various football clubs around Berlin, and perhaps more interestingly, the names of Youtube videos recommended to me by Nabil Rayk, a server who became our cross-cultural host. He explained how neo-Nazism and far-right rhetoric have seeped into a sport so deeply loved across the country.

During our nearly four-hour dinner at Ebn Tamshah, a small, lively Palestinian restaurant named after Nabil’s great-grandmother, each student took turns sharing their ideas for our final reporting project. As we did, our special guests, journalists Joshua Yaffa and Barbara Demick, offered thoughts on how each story could take shape.

When I presented my idea about far-right rhetoric in German soccer, Yaffa and Demick shared their opinions, but so did Nabil. Between serving plates of hummus and sweet potatoes, he urged me to pay attention to the symbolism behind club colors and recalled his own childhood playing football in Berlin when he was 10 years old. It was often the parents, he said, not the players, who fueled hostility. They would tell their kids to “kick that Arab, kick that N-word,” he recalled. 

After dinner, I stayed behind to keep talking with Nabil, eager to learn more about Germany’s soccer culture. When I asked why he thought parents so often perpetuate conflict, he didn’t hesitate. “Sport is a replacement for war,” he said.

Nabil isn’t surprised that racism and xenophobia have found a foothold in soccer through the rhetoric of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. “This sh** was there before,” he said. He told me he sees the party’s influence most clearly at smaller, amateur clubs, where public scrutiny is minimal. “‘We can’t kick them out of the country, it’s too complicated, but we can f*** them today,’” he said, mimicking what he’s heard shouted on the sidelines.

He also noticed how players of color are treated differently depending on their performance. “When a Black player does well, it’s like, [clapping] ‘nice’… But if he plays bad, it’s [imitating monkey noises], ‘you ape!’” he said. “They throw bananas and stuff.”

When I asked why sport so often becomes a stage for hate, Nabil claimed that people “need a reason to get drunk, … to get this inner demon out.” 

After years of being targeted for his skin color and Palestinian background, Nabil has developed what he calls an “I never get hit by racism” mindset, and hopes players at larger clubs can do the same. 

Still, he’s aware of the contradictions: those who harbor resentment toward immigrants and people of color also depend on them. “They need us, they need African players,” he said.

By 5 p.m. on September 29^th, Afghanistan became a black box. Flights were canceled. Banks closed. Business slowed. Thousands of women and girls reliant on online education wondered what their alternatives might be. The Taliban, like the rest of the country, was silent. Forty-eight hours later, as Afghans welcomed the Internet’s return, many of them wondered why their country had gone dark.

“One of the big reasons that the Internet was cut off was those online lessons,” said Abdul Farid Salangi, founder of Woman Online University. After the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021, the regime barred women from secondary school and college. Many turned to online classes to continue their education. For these students, the Internet is a singular link to the outside world. As rumors swirled of an imminent Internet shutdown, female students worried about losing the opportunity to study. “Most of them said their option would be suicide,” said Salangi, founder of Woman Online University.

On October 1^st, Afghans took to the streets to celebrate the return of the Internet. People connected to relatives abroad. Media coverage resumed. Salangi’s students reconnected to classes, their relief mixed with fear. “I am scared right now. It can happen again and again. I have no trust in the government,” said a student at Woman Online University, who requested anonymity to protect her safety. To her and many of her classmates, the Internet shutdown represented a direct attack on female education.

In the two weeks leading up to the nationwide shutdown, disruptions crept across the country. At first, Taliban leaders were clear about their motives for cutting off connection. On September 16^th, the Taliban cut off fiber-optic cable in the northern Balkh province “for the purpose of preventing immoral acts,” a spokesperson said on X. Two days later, the shutdown spread to five more provinces in the north and east. Residents of the capital doubted the shutdown would reach them. Once it did, they worried it would never lift. At this point, the Taliban, like the rest of the country, was silent.

“The speculation is that this is not just about morality. This is about control,” said Lyse Doucet, chief international correspondent for the BBC, on that publication’s Newshour. The Taliban denied responsibility in the nationwide shutdown, blaming tired fiber-optic cables in need of replacement.

The earlier disruptions left mobile internet, an expensive and patchy alternative to fiber-optic, (Wi-Fi) intact. But streaming packages exceed the budgets of most Afghans, a vast majority of whom live in poverty, according to a 2023 report by the UNDP. Cheap alternatives for getting online sustain essential services in the country. But recently, the Taliban has restricted telecommunications, citing concerns about vice. Taliban leaders have expressed concern about flirting online and watching pornography. Critics see this as a veil for the regime’s campaign to silence dissent.

In the future, the Taliban may develop techniques to block specific types of media from entering Afghanistan’s online world, said Amanda Meng, an analyst at IODA, an Internet connectivity tracker. Today, the country lacks the hardware required for this level of censorship.

Still, the Taliban is censoring citizens in overt ways. In late August, the Taliban ordered universities to stop assigning books by women. Last year, women were banned from the only two courses of study still available to them at the time—midwifery and nursing. On Saturday, the Taliban banned cellphones on university campuses. Meanwhile, journalists are at risk. A joint report by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and the UN Human Rights Office documented over 300 human rights violations against media professionals from August 2021 to September 2024. Last year, a journalist told DW that the Taliban prevents coverage of crime and violence.

Not all Talibs endorse such restrictions. The Internet shutdown and its aftermath exposed ideological differences between the traditional faction in Kandahar, led by Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, and more progressive officials. On October 1^st, the Taliban’s chief minister and minister of telecommunications ordered the Internet’s restoration. Akhundzada endorses the shutdown. Younger Talibs understand how a shutdown of such magnitude could backfire.

“There are many in the Taliban who say, we simply have to be part of the modern world. We want Afghanistan to develop. Could this be a moment of reckoning?” said Lyse Doucet, chief international correspondent for the BBC on that publication’s Newshour podcast. The vast majority of Talibs, she said, oppose the regime’s hardline edicts. Orders out of Kandahar, where the most traditional faction resides, eclipse the regime’s more moderate crop.

In recent months, top officials have faced consequences for opposing Akhundzada, the hardline leader, and his restrictions on women. On January 20^th, senior Taliban official Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai criticized bans on female education in his speech at a graduation ceremony in the Khost province. “We are being unjust to 20 million people,” he said. Soon after, Akhundzada ordered Stanikzai’s arrest and exile. The senior official left for the UAE, citing health concerns to  local media. In December, a suicide bomber killed the Taliban’s refugee Minister Khalil Haqqani, spurring rumors that a rival Taliban official ordered the assassination.

The Taliban’s mounting restrictions on freedom have spurred international outrage. On Monday, the UN Rights Council created an Afghanistan Accountability Body. The EU-led resolution passed with consensus, signaling a moment of unity against the Taliban’s violations of human rights. There is a growing recognition of “gender apartheid,” the systematic suppression of women’s rights, said Kimmy Coseteng, from Right to Learn Afghanistan, a Canadian group.

At the same time, some doubt the power of international pressure to sway the Taliban. Doucet said on the BBC that criticism from the outside can even compel the Taliban to double down on restrictions. But the recent Internet shutdown may have exacerbated internal divisions that may threaten the regime’s stability. Change, Doucet said, “has to come from within the Taliban.”