Reporter's notebook: I abandoned my dreams in Afghanistan to save my life Zahra Nader worked for many years as a reporter in Kabul.

In another tragic day in Kabul, terrorists attacked two police headquarters, killing seven and wounding 17.

Ten journalists were killed in blasts in this Afghan city on April 30. A week earlier 57 people were killed in a voter registration center.

I learned about the twin April 30 attacks in Kabul on a TV screen in a coffee shop in Toronto, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the victims and their families. How might they hear the news of the deaths of their loved ones? My mother is relieved that she does not need to worry about me anymore after each attack in Kabul. Frightened, I rushed home to call friends who usually cover these kinds of incidents.

My immediate friends were lucky this time and were safe. Zahra Joya, my friend who works for a newspaper in Kabul, wrote in a message to me: "I am scared; I feel my turn is next, believe me."

I tried to comfort her by saying nothing is going to happen to you. I wanted to tell her everything is going to be fine, but I couldn’t.

We lost 10 journalists. Nine of them were killed by the attack in Kabul, and one journalist was shot in Khost province, marking the bloodiest day for Afghan journalists in the past two decades.

The stories of these journalists have been published worldwide. We know about their lives and dreams. It pains me when people who are killed are reduced to just numbers: 29 killed, 70 killed, 88 killed. No one really knows who they were, what dreams they had and what they were looking forward to in life.

I hope the world can hear the stories of people like Shah Marai, the chief photographer of Agence France-Press who spent decades documenting the lives and deaths of his people, and Mahram Durani, a young girl who fought against family traditions to attend school and attain the right to work.

The majority of the journalists who lost their lives were the first generation of educated children of poor peasants or working class families. Often, they are the sole breadwinners for their families, responsible for pulling their families out of the misery of poverty. Without them, entire families are devastated.

Journalists in Afghanistan do not have immunity from terrorist groups or, sometimes, government forces.

Terrorists groups have often targeted reporters as legitimate military targets because they see the media as promoting democracy and the rule of law. Government authorities have also been intimidating journalists by beating them and denying them access to information.

The media was not a direct target for Taliban for years. They often claimed to respect the neutrality of journalists, but perhaps one event in particular changed this.

After local media reported that the Taliban had raped female students in Kunduz University during the collapse of the city in northern Afghanistan on September 2015, the Taliban began deliberately targeting journalists.

Taliban, in an official statement, denied the rape allegations, and threatened two local TV channels as military targets. However, the rape reports turned out to be false. In January 2016, a mini bus carrying media workers was targeted and seven journalists and employees of MOBY, an Afghan media company, were killed, and 25 others were wounded. Taliban took responsibility for the attack.

For Monday’s attacks, which killed 29 people, including 9 journalists, ISIS has taken responsibility, but they have not clarified why journalists were targeted.

Afghan journalists face many dangers. In Afghanistan, journalists who cover war and terrorist attacks are poorly equipped, and most don’t even have flak jackets. Moreover, journalists do not have any kind of health and life insurance, retirement plan or job security.

Many journalists have left the country to find a safe place for themselves and their families. I am among those who left.

I left Afghanistan to find peace, at least for my children; the peace that our parents and their parents never found. I used to work for The New York Times in Kabul, being among the first female journalists to work for a prestigious mainstream English newspaper, where I had a well-paying job with benefits and a supportive team. So it wasn’t an easy choice for me. I have a 4-year-old son who had the opportunity to live in Canada; I decided to give him the peaceful life I never experienced in my childhood in Afghanistan. Finally, I made the decision to leave.

For months I found myself depressed in our apartment in Toronto. I was hopeless. I had worked as a journalist for almost seven years and suddenly I was apart from the profession I loved. For many of my friends, it was surprising; I should have enjoyed the luxury life in Canada, a dream destination for many in Afghanistan. I have that, but why wasn’t I happy? I felt like I had left my heart back in Kabul, where I was dedicated to working for a brighter future for my homeland. I abandoned my dreams, in hope for finding peace, especially for my son. For now, the ultimate result of my decision is that I am alive.

Shah Marai and many others decided to stay and continue their work, and now we’ve lost them forever.

Mahram Durani, 22, had dreams of becoming a leader for social change. Maryam Barakzai, her friend and former colleague, could barely stop crying when I spoke to her on the phone.

She said most of Mahram’s relatives did not know that she was working as a journalist. In their family, girls were not even allowed to go to school.

“She loved her father, because he supported her to work and study,” Barakzai. “We never knew that she had financial difficulty and was the sole breadwinner for her family since she never complained about it.”

In Afghanistan, journalists are risking their lives on a daily basis to cover stories of ongoing war and violence. It is quite an understatement to say that it is not easy to be a journalist in Afghanistan, where I, like every other journalist, always feared that I would be the next story instead of the one telling it.