Type Media Center fellow Matthieu Aikins was part of the New York Times team, which included Azam Ahmed and Christina Goldbaum, that won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for an “authoritative examination of how the United States sowed the seeds of its own failure in Afghanistan, primarily by supporting murderous militia that drove civilians to the Taliban.” Aikins previously won a Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting as part of a New York Times team “for courageous and relentless reporting that exposed the vast civilian toll of U.S.-led airstrikes, challenging official accounts of American military engagements in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.”
Among the winning work is Aikins’ profile of Abdul Raziq, a U.S. ally who served as the police chief for the Kandahar Province and was responsible for hundreds of forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. “Raziq’s story complicates the comforting belief that brutality always backfires and undermines the U.S. military’s claim to have fought according to international law,” writes Aikins in the piece. “Raziq’s violence was effective because it had a logic particular to the kind of civil war that the United States found in Afghanistan, one where the people, and not the terrain, were the battlefield.”
Former Type Media Center fellow Anand Gopal, a contributing writer for The New Yorker, was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for “a deeply reported narrative of a woman’s life before and after she is imprisoned at an isolated detention camp in eastern Syria, illustrating how love and family intersect with larger geopolitical concerns.” You can read The New Yorker feature here.