Nick fell in love with Afghanistan approximately twenty years ago. Alison fell in love with the country over the course of writing this book.
Since we started working on this series, Afghanistan has been overtaken by the most horrifying humanitarian crisis in its history. It’s heart-breaking to watch the events that are unfolding there.
There is little practical we can do to help, but we are pledging to donate ten per cent of the author royalties of Death in Helmand to Afghanaid.
Afghanaid is a British humanitarian and development organisation that has worked in Afghanistan for nearly forty years, building basic services, improving livelihoods, strengthening the rights of woman and children, helping communities and responding to humanitarian emergencies. With years of experience, their majority-Afghan team has a deep understanding of local, cultural and ethnic issues, and they have earned trust and respect among the communities they serve. Their work is now more critical than ever before.
The starting point for Death in Helmand is the ambush on the Well Diggers convoy in Marja District. Although what follows is entirely fiction, this attack is based on a real incident that took place in Babaji near Lashkar Gah in May 2005. Three engineers from the Alternative Incomes Programme (carrying out similar projects to Well Diggers in the book) were out on a field trip, accompanied by a driver and a single member of the Bolan police. They were attacked by a group of men on motorcycles and all five were murdered. The attack is thought to have been the work of a disgruntled narco lord who was angry that AIP wouldn’t clear canals to irrigate his opium fields.
Night letters have been used for hundreds of years to make threats and convey messages to people all over Asia. Many people think they are a thing of the past, a footnote in history, but the one that appears in Death in Helmand is the translation of a real night letter, scattered in the streets of Lashkar Gah by the Taliban in 2005. We’ve reproduced it verbatim, as Nick’s translator at the time gave it to him.
We chose to make one of our main Afghan characters, Nagpal, a Sikh because few people realise that there has always been a minority of Sikhs in Afghanistan. They are small in number, probably fewer than 50,000 now, and generally concentrated in Kabul, Ghazni and Nangarhar.
The Sikh community in Lashkar Gah was already shrinking in 2003, and now it has virtually gone – families have either relocated to other parts of the country or have emigrated to India after suffering continued harassment at the hands of both the Taliban and the local population. Although the Sikhs in Lashkar Gah are native Afghans, they have been effectively forced out in ways similar to those we detail in the story, and through economic ostracization. Life in India is no easier, where they are viewed as foreign refugees.