
Afghanistan is meant to be dry and hot. But when we arrived in Musa Qala in early January, a town which had been seized back from the Taliban just a month earlier, the place was a mud bath. And it was snowing.
It was the coldest Afghan winter on record, and we were sleeping on the floor of an unheated concrete cell that the locals had previously used as a toilet. This was how the ITV News headcam project started.
We’d noticed how snippets of headcam footage filmed by soldiers were appearing on YouTube – sneaked out, because soldiers aren’t meant to film themselves fighting. With a week of coverage from Afghanistan planned, we approached the MoD to see if we could equip soldiers with our own headcams for a series of reports, over which we would have total editorial control. We agreed that we would not compromise operational security, as is usual with military embeds, but we would have the right to show whatever else was filmed.
You've reached your limit of free articles
Please register now to continue reading