Habib Zahori is a former New York Times journalist from Afghanistan who now lives in Ottawa.

On April 30, I read the first tweets about the initial bombing in downtown Kabul as I was going to bed. In Ottawa, the place I have called home for the past four years, news of an attack in Afghanistan always triggers a flurry of text messages to my mother. She assured me that everyone in my family was fine. I woke up an hour later to her texting me about a second blast. A suicide bomber, carrying a camera to blend in, had detonated explosives that killed 25 people, including nine journalists. She wanted to know if I knew any of them. I did.

Among those killed was the chief photographer for Agence France-Presse in Kabul, my friend Shah Marai. I met him during the presidential campaign of 2009 at Ghazi sports stadium in Kabul. He was known among the Afghan press corps as one of the kohna pekh ha, or the Old Stocks, referring to the group of Afghan journalists who started working for foreign media during the Taliban regime. Newcomers like me looked up to them for professional guidance. Marai began his work as a driver and worked his way up. For over two decades, he bore witness to everything that was happening in Afghanistan and took haunting pictures, until he himself became a picture.

[Shah Marai was A.F.P.’s chief photographer in Kabul. Read about the legacy of images he left behind.]

As soon as I saw his smiling face circulating on my Twitter feed, I felt the darkness outside my window grow thicker and come down on me like a weighted blanket. I had a flashback to the moment in 2014 when I found out about the death of another friend, Sardar Ahmad, who also worked for A.F.P. He was shot and killed along with members of his young family while celebrating the Persian New Year at a restaurant in Kabul. Just one of Ahmad’s three young children survived.