The Naked Don’t Fear the Water is a work of great empathy and humanity: a must-read for anyone looking to understand our increasingly fractured age.’ AIKINS: Well, it was already clear by then that things were not going well, that the foreigners would eventually leave and that the Afghan government was, you know, becoming more and more dysfunctional and corrupt. The Taliban were on the march in the countryside. The Taliban briefly captured a provincial capital at the end of 2015. So there's that, and there's also the fact that Omar - you know, since he was a kid, he had dreamed of emigrating to the West. He used to watch a Canadian television show on - when he was a kid in Iran. And he had actually applied for a visa to emigrate here. He should have been eligible under this Special Immigrant Visa program for former Afghan and Iraqi employees of the U.S. government, but he was rejected because he didn't have all the paperwork. So after that happened, he decided to take the smugglers' road to Europe. AIKINS: Yeah, people were somewhat free to come and go from the camp itself but not to leave the island.

Matthieu Aikins is a contributing writer for The New York Times and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His reporting has won numerous honors, including the George Polk and Livingston Awards. His new book is "The Naked Don't Fear The Water: An Underground Journey With Afghan Refugees." DAVIES: You know, when you were on the smugglers' roads, one of the things you said was, like, if you were known to be a Westerner, there was a risk of being kidnapped and being held for ransom. Did you have that fear in this period, when the Afghan government had collapsed and the Taliban were taking over?Aikins offers a kaleidoscopic view of fragmented families and dispossessed people trying and failing and scheming and planning and hoping and praying to complete the next leg of their journey... Unique, gripping, and beautifully written.’ DAVIES: So you decided you would go ahead. You could travel easily on your own, and you would meet Omar in Turkey. He could not easily travel (laughter) on his own. He managed to get into Iran and then make a very difficult crossing over - through some smugglers over the Zagros Mountains. You weren't with him then, but you were hoping he would make it. He eventually - you connect with him in Turkey where his mother and sister and, I think, a friend are there, right? What is your goal there? Now you're in Turkey, where do you have to go? How are you going to make it? DAVIES: And is the Taliban - I mean, are they refraining from, you know, the mass imprisonment and executions and hard oppression of women that people feared? AIKINS: The mood had definitely changed. And it's difficult. You have some sympathy for especially the Greek islanders who are being made responsible for this crisis that has, you know, to do with an entire continent, and their islands are being turned into open-air prisons, basically, for migrants. But it was quite an ugly scene on the ground.

AIKINS: Well, it was the Taliban who were going to kidnap you beforehand a lot of times. And now that they were the government and supposedly claimed to want to protect foreign journalists and NGO workers because they wanted to portray themselves as a responsible authority, there was actually less threat of kidnapping in the beginning, at least. We were more worried about ISIS, who might want to kill a foreigner, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was a lot of shooting around the airport. The book shines a humane spotlight on many of the people the author met along the way as well as on the role chance played in their fates, with particularly moving chapters on life within the Greek refugee camp. The narrative is scrupulous and often suspenseful. Sharp insider insights into a global dilemma.’ The most affecting book I have read about the iniquity of the refugee crisis since Exit West. The reporting is totally immersive, without ever losing its clarity, and gives a heartbreaking insight into the lives of normal people taking terrible risks to save themselves.’For its dedication to documenting such desperate journeys, shining a light on conditions for migrants, The Naked Don’t Fear the Water is an incredible achievement.’ Aikins is an effective storyteller: the momentum of the narrative is never overwhelmed by all the post-trip reading and research he brings in. And yet the reader can’t help but feel that Omar’s ordeal is his alone. Aikins can at any point have his second passport mailed to him, or reveal his true identity to camp officials and leave the island. Omar, on the other hand, procures a fake passport and risks being caught at the airport in Lesbos. He ends up in Athens, where he shares a room with Aikins in a makeshift refugee squat.

No one knew how long the miracle would last. Thousands of people were landing each day now in the little boats. A million would pass into Europe. AIKINS: Well, I was trying to leave choices up to Omar 'cause it was his trip, after all, and not mine. And there was a few options. You could try to go through the mountains of Bulgaria or cross over land to Greece, but he thought the best idea was still to go to the Greek islands. The problem was now the islands were kind of like prisons and you couldn't leave them but figured there'd be some way with smugglers. And so that's what we did. That's how we ended up in the little boats. Journalist Aikins debuts with a powerful account of the “long and dangerous journey” many Afghans take out of their war-torn country…The result is a heart-wrenching portrait of resilience and ingenuity under the most trying of circumstances.’ AIKINS: I was the only reporter on the ground for a while, along with two photographers, Jim Huylebroek and Victor Blue. But because we were freelancers, we were able to choose to stay behind, whereas all the staff had to evacuate.

The Naked Don’t Fear The Water

Afghan youth from Kunduz bathe while waiting with other recently arrived migrants to board a ferry to Athens from Mytilene, Greece on October 16, 2015. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images There is much to admire about this book, its first-hand perspective being the most obvious. When Aikins writes of the ‘sense of vertigo in handing yourself over to criminals’ it’s because he himself has been in their clutches. This isn’t a reconstructed account, pasted together from secondhand sources; it is embedded journalism in the raw, a personal dispatch from behind the lines of Europe’s intractable migrant crisis.’