Mapping the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan
Entry for Sigma Awards
The BBC Afghan Service gathered original data on the Taliban advance across Afghanistan and the Visual Journalism team mapped it as the story developed from 9 July to 16 August, showing how districts and cities fell to the insurgents.
The mapping was widely used on the BBC’s UK and world news channels, news online,
social media, WS language sites and services.
BBC_News_Channel-2021-08-11_22-07-05 (1)
BBC_News_Channel-2021-08-11_22-07-05 (1)
This project demonstrated how journalistic and technical skills can be combined to create original and compelling content that is woven into coverage across all our visual platforms. It was also a great piece of collaboration between teams in different countries and a remarkable achievement from Afghan staff, working in extraordinary circumstances.
When we considered how to tell the story of Afghanistan in early July - as the US and Nato forces left and the Taliban immediately started to take over parts of the country - we wanted a reliable and timely source for mapping control because it was a crucial part of the story.
The challenge we faced was that other sources which were widely used by other news orgs, were updated less frequently than we would wish. The head of the BBC Afghan service was also keen for her team to give an accurate picture of the changing state of control using their expertise and journalism.
Their commitment enabled us to show a changing national picture over several weeks and also to focus on specific areas flipping back and forth, as the government battled for control.
In Afghanistan a group of journalists took on the task of keeping across all the 398 districts and verifying reports of fighting a Taliban advance. The data was collated and input by a senior journalist in Kabul.
The Afghan service set out the criteria for each control category. In the first phase, regional reporters sent information, and that was supplemented with additional info from Taliban and government contacts, as well as a variety of local sources.
In the UK we set up a spreadsheet for our Kabul colleagues, which they could update using agreed protocols, so we would know when changes had been made to each district.
We then used a downloaded CSV to create a map in QGIS using a 2005 Afghanistan government boundaries shapefile that divided Afghanistan into 398 districts.
The svg we output from QGIS was then passed to a designer to style and output the final png file in English and multiple other languages for publication online or use on TV output.
We used the data to create single maps, side by side comparisons, zoomed in maps to show change detail and an animated sequence to show change over time. We shared files with TV and language service colleagues.
Screen Recording 2021-10-16 at 12.10.21
Screen Recording 2021-10-16 at 12.10.21
The maps we made were used widely in news stories and live pages on the website and in our Mapping the Taliban feature, which got 3.2m page views, as well as by World TV and the News channel. They also featured on News at Ten and were published on social media. Pretty much all 40 World Service Languages used at least one version of the maps in their coverage.
BBC Persian
BBC Mundo
BBC Turkish
The last map we did was on 16 August - the day after Kabul fell and President Ghani had fled - by this time the only area left free of Taliban control was a small part of the Panjshir valley.
Throughout the project our Afghan team delivered timely information which was used to tell the story across online, TV, social media and many WS language sites, despite the huge political and social upheavals were taking place in their country.