Lynzy Billing on Investigating Afghanistan’s Darkest Corners

When Lynzy Billing, steps into a story, she doesn’t just collect quotes and file copy — she inhabits the world she’s documenting. An investigative journalist and filmmaker with roots in Afghanistan and Pakistan, raised in the UK, she has spent years unravelling the hidden, uncomfortable truths of modern warfare.

Her work has taken her into CIA-backed night raids in Afghanistan, unmarked civilian graves, and the quiet environmental devastation left in the wake of military occupation. These are not quick turnaround assignments; her investigation into Afghanistan’s Zero Unit took four years, producing The Night Doctrine, an Emmy-winning animated short that forced global audiences to confront the cost of America’s covert wars.

Speaking on The Intelligence Spotlight podcast, Lynzy traced her path into journalism — a career built without a formal journalism degree. She began as a picture editor in London, frustrated by the walls between her and the stories she wanted to tell. A move to the Philippines at the height of President Duterte’s “war on drugs” became her baptism into frontline reporting, often waiting in funeral parlours for victims of extrajudicial killings.

Her investigative method is patient, immersive and meticulous. In Afghanistan, she sought a 360-degree view of the night raids — speaking not only to survivors and bereaved families, but also to the Afghan soldiers who took part. Trust took months to build. Survivors needed time and repeated visits to share fragmented memories shaped by trauma. For Lynzy, witness testimony alone was never enough; she cross-checked accounts with physical evidence, morgue records, doctors’ notes, and open-source intelligence (OSINT) such as satellite imagery.

This blend of digital forensics and human-centred storytelling is her signature. “It has to be OSINT, it has to be personal testimony, it has to be ground reporting — all of them corroborating each other,” she explained. Too much data without human connection risks losing the reader; too much narrative without verification risks losing the truth.

Lynzy’s current work turns to another overlooked cost of war — environmental damage. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, she says, US military bases left toxic legacies: burn pits belching smoke, waste dumped on farmland, rivers contaminated. For years, she pitched the story and was told it wasn’t “exciting” enough. Only after America’s withdrawal could she gain access to these sites, collect samples, and speak openly to residents. The harm is slow, insidious and under-researched, she argues, but no less urgent.

The emotional toll of such reporting is complex. One of the hardest moments came when the first Afghan woman she interviewed about a night raid died before the story was published. “I wanted to tell her somebody cared,” Lynzy said. That mix of satisfaction and loss is part of the job — along with the discipline to remain focused in the moment, saving emotional release for private spaces.

For aspiring journalists, her advice is simple: start. A phone call, an online lead, a conversation with someone already tracking a story can be enough to begin. Investigative work, she insists, is less about credentials than curiosity, persistence and the will to follow a story to the end.

And for those who follow her work, Lynzy has one message: your support matters. In a profession where trust is fragile and encouragement scarce, knowing that someone is reading and cares is not a small thing.

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Diplomacy Without a State With Mahmoud Saikal, Former Permanent Representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations