So do the dangers some people are obliged and willing to take along the smuggler’s route into Europe. AIKINS: So if you think about the world through the eyes of a migrant, you know, there's all these different ways to get places illegally and where the shortest line is, let's say, the safest. You know, one of the things that this journey gave you was an intimate look at refugees, which most of us never see. The camp at Lesbos has been described by doctors as a “living hell”, with more than 12,000 people forced to compete with each other for food, housing, medical care and clean toilets.

AIKINS: They came up and rammed us amidships and were trying to sort of push the boat's bow around back toward Turkey while trying to lasso our engine or disable it, which set off sort of a melee between the passengers and these two Turks, who were unarmed as far as I could see. It wasn’t until we got out onto the airport highway, with its long stretch of cavernous wedding halls, that we could relax and catch up.

I'm wondering what you saw that surprised you that would surprise other people about these people fleeing for a new life. You were arrested, as you expected to be; people will get arrested and apply for asylum and hope to continue their journey.

There were (laughter) Turkish and Greek patrols and patrols funded by the European Union to try and send people back, right? And you spent so much time in circumstances where you weren't in control, where you handed your fate over to, as you put it, criminals, smugglers. This nuanced biography of Constance Baker Motley examines the paradoxes in the remarkable life of a “first”: the first Black woman elected to the New York State Senate, the first female Manhattan borough president, the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary. Some sort of modern-day “On the Road” meets “Down and Out in Paris and London,” but a work of nonfiction with a war and refugee crisis angle. I’d known Omar since I’d started working in Afghanistan, and he’d always dreamed of living in the West, but his aspiration had grown urgent as the civil war intensified and his city was torn apart by bombings.We were more worried about ISIS, who might want to kill a foreigner, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. 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. You want to get from there to Athens, from which there are other opportunities to try and make the leap to Europe. One of the most valuable sections of Losing Afghanistan deals with the future of liberal interventionism.

Graham Cundy, who served with the Royal Marines there, speaks with insight about British mistakes in Helmand Province. This book is Aikins’s profound act of love…A meticulously told story the world needs to hear now more than ever. One in 30 people on Earth is a migrant, meaning that more than 1 billion people are now on the move around the globe. His new book is about joining his longtime Afghan interpreter in that interpreter's effort to flee the country along smugglers' routes to Europe. But this wasn’t so much a failure of the men and women on the ground as of politicians back in Washington.Aikins was able to make this journey for some of the same reasons he was such an effective reporter in Afghanistan.

Presumably they expect this will form part of a long-term deal with western powers over the country’s frozen financial assets. AIKINS: Yeah, people were somewhat free to come and go from the camp itself but not to leave the island. For his first book, Aikins tells the story of joining his long-time Afghan interpreter and driver in his 2016 journey to flee the country along smugglers' routes and reach Europe. He got out and walked forward: taller than me, broad-shouldered, with a fleshy grin and crow’s-feet. And, of course, the vast majority of people who were just trying to live there in peace had to flee and had nothing to do with it but lost a lot of their belongings in the fire.It was really just, like, kind of, like, desperate scene when we arrived, the way people were living in the mud. Omar decides he's got to get to Turkey first and then, from there, make his way to the Greek islands. DAVIES: So you made it clear to the smuggler that you didn't want to go there, and the smuggler that you connected with said, no, you're not going there. 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.