Omar was one of the first friends I made in Afghanistan, not long after I arrived there in late 2008. We worked on my first magazine story there, a piece about a drug-smuggling U.S. ally that ran in Harper’s. Over the years, I became close to him and his family, and when they decided to escape their country, it was our relationship that drew me along.

Going undercover was the only way to travel on the smuggler’s road with him, given the danger of arrest or kidnapping. I was able to pull it off because I learned Dari while living in Afghanistan, and because I look Afghan—my mother is of Japanese descent.

Jim and I were housemates and when the New York Times, along with most Western media organizations, decided to evacuate their staff in August, we had to decide whether to stay, since we were freelancers. It was a choice that we very much made together. We were at each other’s side throughout the chaos that followed, reporting for the newspaper since we were the only ones the Times had on the ground, along with Victor Blue, another friend. This magazine story is the culmination of our time together.

There was a remarkable amount of rumors and disinformation on social media during the crisis in Afghanistan this summer, so I was trying to share first-hand reporting that people could trust. Twitter and social media can offer an incredible amount of useful information, but it needs to be verified, and I think that because most journalists reporting on Afghanistan were stuck outside the country when it was hot news, they were more vulnerable to reporting on false information.

I hope the book will help readers realize how much violence our deeply unequal world’s borders inflict on the people forced to cross them—and that radical change is necessary if we want to end that violence.