From Our Own Correspondent
BBC Radio 4 · BBC World Service
Correspondent & Writer
First broadcast in 1955, From Our Own Correspondent is one of the BBC’s longest-running and most distinctive current affairs programmes, broadcast across BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service.
For more than seven decades, it has given correspondents around the world space to step beyond the daily news cycle — combining eyewitness reporting with personal observation, context and storytelling from the places and people behind the headlines.
Sahar contributed a series of first-person international dispatches drawn from her reporting around the world, spanning conflict, culture, belief and the human consequences of major events.
Herat’s Jihad Museum
On a hill above Herat stands a museum dedicated to Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet jihad. Sahar Zand enters a world of weapons, portraits of mujahideen commanders and graphic depictions of battle, where a brutal chapter of Afghan history is remembered through resistance and victory. Her dispatch reflects on war, memory and how Afghanistan tells the story of its turbulent past.
Face-to-Face with the Taliban
Two years before the Taliban retook Afghanistan, Sahar Zand travelled to Kabul to visit the home of the Deputy Director of its Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Elimination of Vice. Following the US withdrawal in 2021, she revisits that extraordinary encounter to ask what the movement’s return might mean for music, art, media and everyday freedoms — and whether the Taliban she met offered any clues to the government it would become.
When Death Doesn’t Mean Goodbye
On a hill above Herat stands a museum dedicated to Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet jihad. Sahar Zand enters a world of weapons, portraits of mujahideen commanders and graphic depictions of battle, where a brutal chapter of Afghan history is remembered through resistance and victory. Her dispatch reflects on war, memory and how Afghanistan tells the story of its turbulent past.
Invisible Scars
An image from Afghanistan had haunted Sahar Zand for two decades: children in Herat playing with amputated body parts after Taliban punishments at the city’s football stadium. Returning to Herat, she finds memories of violence still deeply embedded in everyday life — and asks what decades of conflict have done to a population with desperately limited access to mental-health care.
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