Ruhullah Khapalwak, a student at the University of British Columbia, was a teenager in Kandahar, Afghanistan when he first fell into journalism.

He has since spent more than a decade covering the war, writing for publications like the New York Times, Al Jazeera, National Geographic and CNN.

“To be honest, I became an accidental reporter,” said Khapalwak, who is currently pursuing a masters of journalism at UBC.

It was 2001 and the Taliban had just fallen.

Foreign journalists poured into