No one knew how long the miracle would last. Thousands of people were landing each day now in the little boats. A million would pass into Europe. AIKINS: Well, I was trying to leave choices up to Omar 'cause it was his trip, after all, and not mine. And there was a few options. You could try to go through the mountains of Bulgaria or cross over land to Greece, but he thought the best idea was still to go to the Greek islands. The problem was now the islands were kind of like prisons and you couldn't leave them but figured there'd be some way with smugglers. And so that's what we did. That's how we ended up in the little boats. Afghan youth from Kunduz bathe while waiting with other recently arrived migrants to board a ferry to Athens from Mytilene, Greece on October 16, 2015. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images AIKINS: Well, it was the Taliban who were going to kidnap you beforehand a lot of times. And now that they were the government and supposedly claimed to want to protect foreign journalists and NGO workers because they wanted to portray themselves as a responsible authority, there was actually less threat of kidnapping in the beginning, at least. We were more worried about ISIS, who might want to kill a foreigner, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was a lot of shooting around the airport.

DAVIES: Yeah. What were the opportunities? What were the options there for spiriting your way onto the ferry boat? DAVIES: It was interesting that - you wrote a 20,000-word piece that was on the cover of The New York Times magazine in December about the withdrawal of American forces and its aftermath. It's a really gripping tale of both kind of what happens among Afghan governmental elites as well as people on the street. I'm just wondering, you know, you spent a long time looking at this. What's your take on the American withdrawal? You know, it's gotten such criticism and you must know countless Afghans whose lives were turned upside down or, in some cases, lost in the course of all this. Should the Americans have stayed longer? Should they have had another surge to stay and fight the Taliban? No, sir,’ I’d say, scrambling around the belt with my passport before the cop could snatch the bottles. ‘Look at my name, I’m not even Muslim—sorry.’ AIKINS: Well, it was already clear by then that things were not going well, that the foreigners would eventually leave and that the Afghan government was, you know, becoming more and more dysfunctional and corrupt. The Taliban were on the march in the countryside. The Taliban briefly captured a provincial capital at the end of 2015. So there's that, and there's also the fact that Omar - you know, since he was a kid, he had dreamed of emigrating to the West. He used to watch a Canadian television show on - when he was a kid in Iran. And he had actually applied for a visa to emigrate here. He should have been eligible under this Special Immigrant Visa program for former Afghan and Iraqi employees of the U.S. government, but he was rejected because he didn't have all the paperwork. So after that happened, he decided to take the smugglers' road to Europe. Fitzcarraldo Editions has acquired Matthieu Aikins’ debut The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: A Journey Through the Refugee Underground, about Aikins’ journey undercover on the migrant trail from Kabul to Europe in 2016. Fitzcarraldo Editions will publish in February 2022, simultaneously with Harper in the US.DAVIES: Right. And he certainly would have qualified. I mean, he had done translating for coalition forces. He'd seen combat. He - but they wanted a lot of documentation that people, when they're in action, don't think to collect. So you decided you would go together and report on this, which meant you would be traveling as an Afghan. But, of course, you are, in fact, a Westerner. You're Canadian-born. What advantages or risks did that pose to the two of you, that you were there kind of looking like an Afghan refugee, but really a Western journalist? DAVIES: And you had a lot of conversations with other refugees because everybody was trying to accomplish this same thing. Did you know people who tried that and they succeed? AIKINS: I was the only reporter on the ground for a while, along with two photographers, Jim Huylebroek and Victor Blue. But because we were freelancers, we were able to choose to stay behind, whereas all the staff had to evacuate.

DAVIES: You know, when you were on the smugglers' roads, one of the things you said was, like, if you were known to be a Westerner, there was a risk of being kidnapped and being held for ransom. Did you have that fear in this period, when the Afghan government had collapsed and the Taliban were taking over?

AIKINS: It was the largest, most notorious, most violent prison that had just burned to the ground a week before in a riot. So it sounded terrible, and everyone warned us not to go there. By the time Omar left Kabul with Mr Aikins in 2016, his mother and father had already fled their war-torn country for a second time. Some of his siblings were already living in Europe; the rest of his close relatives were in Turkey, hoping to go west. His own trip had been delayed after he fell in love. He eventually sold his prized car, a gold Corolla, and steeled himself for the trials ahead. DAVIES: And that is journalist Matthew Aikins reading from his new book, "The Naked Don't Fear The Water: An Underground Journey Of Afghan Refugees." Yeah, putting yourself in the hands of criminals many times over the course of this journey. The man that you took this journey with, whom you call Omar - just tell us a bit about him and your relationship. AIKINS: No. A lot of times they're counterfeit, and they'll actually absorb water. And after an hour or so, they will take you down. You know, a lot of people drowned making that crossing. But I didn’t really know how brave Aikins was until, a third of the way through his debut book, he admits: “I was in danger of losing the plot.” I felt the same. It seemed as if “The Naked Don’t Fear the Water” (a title borrowed from a Dari proverb) might be going off the rails.

The book shines a humane spotlight on many of the people the author met along the way as well as on the role chance played in their fates, with particularly moving chapters on life within the Greek refugee camp. The narrative is scrupulous and often suspenseful. Sharp insider insights into a global dilemma.’ AIKINS: I think that the country is in survival mode right now. The state is on the verge of collapse because it's completely dependent on foreign funding, which has now been cut off. And there is a very uncertain political situation. I don't know if the Taliban is going to be able to unite the country under them and govern. And if they can't, then we could see a new round of civil war. So fortunately, I think that this is dependent on the actions of the United States and other regional countries. And if there's a way to stabilize the state and prevent a new outbreak of fighting, you know, it might not be as bad. But we're looking at a situation where millions of people are in danger of starvation. AIKINS: The mood had definitely changed. And it's difficult. You have some sympathy for especially the Greek islanders who are being made responsible for this crisis that has, you know, to do with an entire continent, and their islands are being turned into open-air prisons, basically, for migrants. But it was quite an ugly scene on the ground.AIKINS: Well, we were about 40 people. We were taken to the beach at night. Omar's forced to get down at gunpoint because he was angry we were going the wrong island. And then... AIKINS: Well, he sent us to the exact place that we had asked not to go to. He lied through his teeth to us, which is unfortunately a very common experience dealing with these people. DAVIES: He said, this is not what we paid for. And he saw a weapon and said, you're going now. So that's - you got into this little boat. There is much to admire about this book, its first-hand perspective being the most obvious. When Aikins writes of the ‘sense of vertigo in handing yourself over to criminals’ it’s because he himself has been in their clutches. This isn’t a reconstructed account, pasted together from secondhand sources; it is embedded journalism in the raw, a personal dispatch from behind the lines of Europe’s intractable migrant crisis.’ The most affecting book I have read about the iniquity of the refugee crisis since Exit West. The reporting is totally immersive, without ever losing its clarity, and gives a heartbreaking insight into the lives of normal people taking terrible risks to save themselves.’

AIKINS: Yeah, I didn't really sleep for two weeks, but there was so much adrenaline going that we were able to work every day. I normally write for magazines, long-form stories, a bit slower paced, but now I was kind of lent to the newspaper for a while. So that was a much faster pace, and there was a lot of attention coming from television and radio. And we were learning to navigate the new Taliban power structure while, at the same time, you know, trying to get to these areas around the airport where there was this massive suicide bombing or this drone strike. So it was completely tumultuous and a blur, but you felt like you were doing a job that was important, that you knew you had a responsibility to document what was happening because we were one of the few people on the ground. So you just had to do it. DAVIES: You would need a lot of money, both just for traveling and living expenses and to pay smugglers, who are not cheap. Where did the money come from? How did you hide it? DAVIES: So you decided you would go ahead. You could travel easily on your own, and you would meet Omar in Turkey. He could not easily travel (laughter) on his own. He managed to get into Iran and then make a very difficult crossing over - through some smugglers over the Zagros Mountains. You weren't with him then, but you were hoping he would make it. He eventually - you connect with him in Turkey where his mother and sister and, I think, a friend are there, right? What is your goal there? Now you're in Turkey, where do you have to go? How are you going to make it? AIKINS: Yeah, Jim and I lived on a street that had formerly been guarded by the police, and now there was Taliban outside our house. And, you know, we kind of got to know them, and they didn't give us any trouble. But it was a little bit sketchy, and the city changed. You know, it was a ghost town as soon as sunset came around. AIKINS: Well, the money came from the book advance. And there's a system for transferring money that Afghans use. It's called Hawala or saraf. And so you can actually just leave all your money with your mother in Kabul, and then she can go to money changers and have it sent to various spots along the route. And it's one of these many ingenious systems that migrants use that we discovered in the course of this book.DAVIES: And, of course, where there's a need, there are people to meet that need. So there were smugglers on Lesbos, as there are at any other point along this journey. You - I guess you decided you could go to Italy on your own, where your passport was there with a friend, but not Omar. He had to find a way off. How did he finally get off of Lesbos? Matthieu Aikins is that rarest of combinations – an intrepid journalist who writes beautifully. The Naked Don’t Fear the Water is a compellingly original piece of work, an unforgettable narrative about one of the great human epics of our day.’ In 2016, a young Afghan driver and translator named Omar makes the heart-wrenching choice to flee his war-torn country, saying goodbye to Laila, the love of his life, without knowing when they might be reunited again. He is one of millions of refugees who leave their homes that year. Aikins offers a kaleidoscopic view of fragmented families and dispossessed people trying and failing and scheming and planning and hoping and praying to complete the next leg of their journey... Unique, gripping, and beautifully written.’