Matthieu Aikins

After graduating from Queen's University in 2006, Aikins' spent several years traveling North America and Eastern Europe.[3][4] During that period, he contributed to Canadian newspapers and alt-weeklies, winning several journalism awards. One of his articles, "Adam's Fall," about suicides from the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge in the coastal city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, won two major prizes and was followed by the construction of suicide-prevention barriers on the bridge in question.[5][6][7]

In 2008, Aikins traveled overland from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan, where he began his career reporting from the region.[4] His half-Asian features and command of Persian allowed him to blend in as an Afghan, and Aikins began filing stories while traveling in local transportation and sleeping in roadside tea houses.[3] His breakthrough article came in late 2009, with the story "The Master of Spin Boldak," published in Harper's Magazine, which exposed drug-trafficking by the Afghan Border Police in the town of Spin Boldak.[3][4] The article was later used to train US military intelligence analysts on the region's history.[8][9]

Subsequently, Aikins has written mainly for American monthly magazines, including Harper's, the Atlantic, Wired, and GQ, and has expanded his coverage to include countries such as Syria and Pakistan.[10][11] In 2010, he won a National Magazine Award in Canada for his story "Last Stand in Kandahar," published in the Walrus. His 2011 article "Our Man in Kandahar," which exposed a massacre by the Afghan Border Police commander, Brigadier General Abdul Raziq, was a finalist in the reporting category for the American Society of Magazine Editors' National Magazine Awards. Aikins has been an outspoken critic of human rights abuses by US allies in Afghanistan.[12]

Aikins' piece in Rolling Stone entitled "The A-Team Killings," which investigated allegations of war crimes against a US Special Forces unit in Wardak Province, Afghanistan, received the 2013 George Polk Award for magazine reporting, and the 2014 Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism.[13][14]

In 2012, Aikins graduated from New York University with a master's degree in Near Eastern Studies. He currently lives in New York City.[11]

• Aikins, Matthieu (Dec 2013). "The surge". Wired. 21 (12): 218–227, 248.[15]
• — (May 2015). "Baghdad on the brink". Rolling Stone (Australia). 762: 80–87, 105.
• — (2011-10-12). "How Long Can the U.S. Ignore Systemic Torture in Afghanistan?". Global. The Atlantic.CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
• — (March 7, 2016). "The bidding war : how a young Afghan military contractor became spectacularly rich". A Reporter at Large. The New Yorker. 92 (4): 46–55.[16]

• Maikins.com
• Appearances on C-SPAN