Children are dying falling into abandoned Afghan wells - this is how one five-year-old was rescued
A little boy huddled in a corner, 70 metres (230ft) down a deep, damp hole. Water lapped at his feet and dripped on his head. He was scared and cold.
Above, a group of men watched him on a screen as images were relayed by a camera lowered down by rescuers. Five-year-old Zainullah had fallen down a narrow, dried-up well while playing with friends in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar two days earlier.
Warning: This page contains distressing content.
Remarkably, he survived the drop, which was as deep as a football pitch is wide.
But at only 30cm (12 inches) across, the shaft was too tight for any adult to follow him down - and Zainullah was too little, and too frightened, to understand how to tie himself to the rope that had been dropped down to get him out.
Everything the rescuers tried had failed. Three other children tried to go down the well, but it was so narrow that, struggling to breathe, they begged to be brought up.
That was when the rescuers called on 11-year-old Hazrat Omar, who had apparently been sent underground before, on another successful mission.
With the consent of his uncle, Hazrat agreed, despite warnings from worried adults not to go down.
On his first attempt, when lowered with a rope tied around his hands, "my shoulder and thigh got stuck," he recalls.
"I shouted that I was hurt. They pulled me back up."
They tried again and this time, he reached the bottom.
Above ground, hundreds of adults waited with bated breath.
Eventually, men surrounding the hole began pulling the rope, metre by metre, until the boys emerged.
Across Afghanistan, a desperate search for water has resulted in the drilling of hundreds of thousands of deep, narrow and hard-to-spot holes, turning farmers' fields into death traps.
The borewell Zainullah fell into had dried up two years earlier. The local farmers who drilled it had covered its opening with wood and soil, but over time the wood had decayed and the soil became loose.
A small opening in the parched earth - easily missed - masked a steep drop beneath the surface.
In the past five years, rescuers say hundreds of Afghans like Zainullah have fallen down borewells not properly capped after being emptied of water.
The BBC has confirmed more than 100 such incidents since 2021, primarily in the south of the country. Most involve children under 10 and nearly half of them died.
People falling into abandoned wells is not uncommon in South Asia. Between 2009 and 2023, more than 40 children were reported to have fallen down borewells in India.
But in Afghanistan, it has been exacerbated by a combination of events, says Najibullah Sadid, one of the country's leading water experts, who is based in Germany.
When US forces withdrew after 20 years in 2021, a fragile economy based on construction, trade and foreign aid collapsed. More jobs disappeared as the Taliban's return to power brought severe restrictions on women and deep cuts to international aid.
As opportunities shrank, people returned to farmland, which was safe to work in now it was no longer part of a war zone.
The key problem was a dwindling water supply driven by climate change and prolonged drought, leaving farmers increasingly dependent on water buried deep underground.
Add to this the abundance of cheap Chinese solar panels, which Sadid says meant farmers could "pump water all day", and the result was grim: more and more dangerous holes in the ground.
The number of wells increased "enormously" after 2020, Sadid says, and satellite imagery suggests there are now half a million. Most are in the Helmand River Basin, particularly in Helmand, Kandahar, Farah and Ghazni provinces.
But the capacity to respond when people fall down these wells remains severely constrained, with only about five trained individuals currently engaged in rescue efforts on a voluntary basis.
That's why a 28-year-old mobile phone salesman from southern Helmand province decided to take matters into his own hands.
The first time Mirajan Abdullah heard about anyone falling into a well was April 2021, when a five-year-old boy fell down an abandoned hole in his village in Sangin district in Helmand province.
"The child cried a lot," Mirajan recalls. "He said, 'I am cold. I am hungry. I am thirsty. It is dark. Pull me out.'"
It took the villagers 48 hours to work out how to free him. But the boy died in hospital shortly afterwards.
Mirajan thought it was a one-off tragedy, until a year later when he heard about another boy - Haidar - falling into a well. To him, it seemed clear they needed a way to rescue children from deep wells.
He created a device that connected a camera to a computer, allowing people on the surface to see where the trapped person was. They could then lower a rope to the right spot, which the person could attach to themselves before being pulled to safety.
To test it, he sent his own son, just five years old at the time, down a 25m (82ft) well.
It worked.
In the four years since, he has been involved in 113 rescues, saving nearly 70 people.
One such operation unfolded in Helmand Province, where Mirajan put his device to work to reach five-year-old Noor Agha, who had been trapped 140 metres underground for four hours.
Tragically others didn't make it. Some of them, Mirajan says, drowned in the water inside the wells.
In addition to the immediate physical dangers of Afghanistan's borewells, they also raise sustainability concerns.
Over the years, droughts mean they are being dug deeper and deeper - no longer just 80m (260ft) but reportedly extending up to 200m (660ft).
Agriculture in Afghanistan depends on groundwater and extracting water from very deep reserves, but it is a finite resource.
The risk is "some areas will be completely emptied of residents, people will be forced to migrate and regions will turn into barren plains and deserts", Sadid says.
The impact of the failing water table can be seen already, says Mirajan, adding it isn't uncommon to see "two to three borewells… within just a few metres of each other".
Despite all this, the farmers make barely any money.
"Generally, between 100-300 litres of water are used for 1kg of tomatoes. But at harvest time, that same 1kg of tomatoes is sold in the market for five or 10 Afghanis [$0.08-$0.16; £0.06-£0.12]," explains Sadid.
"You are essentially consuming water worth 300 Afghanis to produce a product worth 10 Afghanis. It is completely unsustainable."
And when they dry up, the wells are abandoned and new ones are built, leaving a trail of hazards for those who walk across the land.
Covering them is simply too expensive for many Afghans, who live in severe poverty, and residents tell the BBC that public safety is not a top concern.
There is no law against drilling your own borehole in Afghanistan.
When the BBC contacted the Taliban authorities to ask what was being done to address the risks posed by borewells, they said they were trying to procure specialised rescue equipment in order to strengthen emergency response capabilities.
The Taliban ministry of water and energy told the BBC it planned to ban the use of underground water, without an official permit, for any purpose other than drinking. It gave no date for when this would happen.
The Taliban interior ministry had earlier issued a warning to owners of wells that they must cover them properly. It said legal action would be taken against those who failed to do so.
Still, five-year-old Zainullah fell into the well in Maiwand.
When Mirajan was called to rescue Zainullah, he quickly realised it was the most complicated mission he had ever faced.
His camera device couldn't reach the boy, as it was only designed to go straight down a vertical shaft, and Zainullah was sitting at the edge of a four-by-four-metre (13ft x 13ft) empty cavity at the bottom of the hole.
Villagers had first tried to pull Zainullah out using hooks, his father says. But "some parts of his body had already been hurt", so he became frightened and moved to one side of the well.
Mirajan's device could not be angled into the required position, at least not without a human hand directing it.
So he needed to figure out another way to save the boy.
Hazrat was tasked with going down to rescue him, despite the risks. When he reached the base, he saw Zainullah for the first time.
Hazrat managed to tie Zainullah's hands together to a second piece of rope.
The adults gathered above started to pull the ropes.
Over a loudspeaker, the crowd was asked to keep quiet.
Mirajan called out to Hazrat saying: "We've almost pulled you up; don't look at us, look down."
People urged the rope haulers to "pull him slowly, slowly" as the crowd was urged to step back so the final moments of the rescue could be filmed.
Two ambulances were standing by.
There was a scream when the crowd caught sight of Hazrat. "Well done, lion, well done," they cheered.
Then through the tiny hole, Hazrat emerged, dangling from the rope's end, covered in mud.
"Move him back. Well done, my champion!" shouted Mirajan, as the young rescuer was taken to safety.
Minutes later Zainullah was hauled up and the celebrations went wild.
Zainullah was taken to hospital but discharged the next day.
His father feels like Hazrat helped his son come back from the dead.
"It is difficult to describe that feeling. You remember the person you have lost and grieve for them, and then suddenly he is alive again in front of you."
Had it not been for Hazrat, he worries villagers would have eventually pulled Zainullah out using hooks - badly injured or dead.
He wants wells to be safely covered. The hole his son fell down has since been blocked by a large rock that villagers placed on top.
Hazrat's uncle Azizullah is overjoyed the rescue was successful, but says he worried about sending his nephew down the well.
"I was hesitant but then I put my trust in God, and said one of us must sacrifice for another. I warned my nephew if he got stuck it would be dangerous - but he still wanted to go," he tells the BBC.
"If you had seen the mouth of that well, you would have thought it was impossible to bring anyone out from there."
For Mirajan, Zainullah's rescue is one in a list which keeps getting longer.
He is all too aware of the scale of the problem he's facing. Things are often made worse when people with no training attempt a rescue before he arrives at the scene.
"Even a small mistake can put the life of the trapped person at serious risk," he says. Mirajan recalls another rescue in Ghazni, where three people died trying to save a child who was eventually pulled out of a deep well alive.
He wants to train more people so they can reach accident sites more quickly in the future.
The two boys meet again eight months later, on 2 February, near Zainullah's home and the fateful well.
It's the first chance Zainullah's parents get to thank Hazrat in person and give him gifts.
Hazrat is a local hero.
"In the village, whenever children see me, they tell me I did a brave and remarkable thing," he says.
Additional reporting: Mariam Aman, Simon Fraser, Phelan Chatterjee
Images and video: Mirajan Abdullah
