Selfie sticks and AK-47s

Nolan Saumure, a 28-year-old Canadian YouTuber, walked into Afghanistan from Pakistan last summer. He spent a week traveling through the Taliban-controlled country with a local guide and a camera in an attempt to show what he called “the other side of Afghanistan” — the natural beauty, warm hospitality, and rip-roaring good times he says aren’t depicted in Western media.

Saumure, whose YouTube channel, Seal on Tour, has 650,000 subscribers, is something of a shock-jock Zoomer Anthony Bourdain: His popular videos include “48 Hours Living in India’s Biggest Slum,” “Trying the Most Addictive Substance in the Philippines,” and “White Boy Becomes Jamaican in Downtown Kingston.” For his Afghanistan trip, he played up the unique travel experience of hanging out with exclusively men, titling one 35-minute video “Afghanistan Has Too Much Testosterone.” Since 2021, women have been effectively barred from many aspects of public life under the Taliban’s modesty laws. All day, it’s “all dudes, bro-ing the fuck down,” Saumure says to the camera. “It’s a complete sausage fest in here,” he adds as he spins the camera around to show the crowd of men around him.

At one point he meets some girls playing outside. He narrates that after childhood, “everything is taken away from them,” which he says makes him sad. But in the bulk of his YouTube videos, he presents the “sausage fest” as a blast, as he and Afghan men go to parks, ride a pedal boat in a crystal blue lake in Band-e-Amir, eat ice cream, and watch the slaughter of a goat.

Along the way, he bumps into men he and other travel vloggers call the “Talibros,” who patrol the streets with rifles strapped over their shoulders. Saumure chats it up with several men he says are Taliban members, showing one of them how to download Duolingo so he can practice his English.

Saumure is one of several travel content creators who have gone to Afghanistan since the United States ended its longest war and evacuated the country. They’re mostly men — sometimes traveling in groups on boys’ trips. For a certain kind of manosphere influencer eager for an edge in the attention economy, Jalalabad is the new Nashville.

In the summer of 2021, a 21-year-old British student named Miles Routledge visited Afghanistan after seeing it on a list of the world’s most dangerous places. (He had previously visited Chernobyl.) Notably, Routledge was stranded during the fall of Kabul that August and had to be evacuated by the British army. When he returned in 2023, he was imprisoned by the Taliban for several months. He claims he was treated well, watching movies and playing Xbox with members. “It was a good setup,” he says in a video. “Basically, I was chilling.” Routledge didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The predominating sentiment in these videos is that Afghanistan is misunderstood, portrayed by the West as hostile and dangerous while it’s actually warm and welcoming. “F*@K the Media: I Went to AFGHANISTAN!” one traveler titled his video; another clip is called “Afghanistan is NOT What You Think!” Some show beautiful mountains and mosques and detail warm interactions with locals. There’s more shocking fare, such as “I Went Shooting with the Taliban,” or videos about exploring decades-old abandoned Russian tanks. A YouTuber called Arab who runs a channel with 1.8 million subscribers calls himself an adventure traveler but says in a disclaimer that he’s going for journalistic purposes. His goofy, spirited hourlong videos include “The Young Taliban Train Me For War,” where he plays with children dressed in camo and holding toy guns, and “I Spent 7 Days Living with the Taliban.” He didn’t respond to a request for an interview.

These creators are also wading into a country that many Western governments warn against traveling to, one that has been ravaged by war and is now under an oppressive unelected government. Freedom of expression and religious practices that don’t conform to sharia, or Islamic law, are restricted; girls must leave school at 12; and Taliban members have attacked queer people. In 2024, three Spanish tourists and three Afghans were killed in a shooting in a bazaar — the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack. In January, two Americans were freed in a prisoner swap for a Taliban member. In late February, the Taliban arrested a British couple in their 70s, though the Taliban described their detention as a “misunderstanding.” The US Department of State advises citizens not to travel to Afghanistan, citing “civil unrest, crime, terrorism, risk of wrongful detention, kidnapping, and limited health facilities.”

You kind of start to disengage from all the level four warnings that your government might say about traveling to these places and just not trust your own government.
Nolan Saumure, travel YouTuber

Many of these travelers aren’t strangers to some sense of danger. Afghanistan offers the kind of exclusive content certain to lure eyes, especially if the vloggers can interact and bro out with a notorious extremist group.

Saumure tells me that after traveling to several “dangerous” countries, including Iraq and Pakistan, “you kind of start to disengage from all the level-four warnings that your government might say about traveling to these places and just not trust your own government and go based on what other travelers are saying.”

But he still witnessed the country’s deep-rooted issues. “Even if the west is maybe selling a very sensational narrative, I still saw the oppression firsthand as far as women not being allowed in certain parks and modesty laws,” he says. “It’s a delicate subject. I just wanted to be like, ‘this is how it is here,’ instead of driving into my beliefs.”

The growing interest to experience places firsthand — or at least watch some other amateur do it — underscores a growing distrust of institutions and authority. In a 2024 survey by the Pew Research Center, about one in five Americans said they got their news from influencers on social media. That figure jumped to 37% for respondents under 30.

As dangerous as Western governments say Afghanistan is, the country wants tourists, particularly those who show a different side of the country than news reports show, and it advertises tourism on its websites. Afghanistan’s Ministry of Information and Culture didn’t respond to my request for comment. Taliban officials told The New York Times last year that some 14,500 foreigners had visited Afghanistan since 2021, most of them men. Several tourism companies and travel agencies have popped up to help eager travelers navigate the country. The rebrand of Afghanistan has been underway for years — shortly after the fall of Kabul, videos of Taliban fighters became memeified, showing them doing silly activities like riding a carousel. Some researchers worried at the time that the content could help soften the group’s image.

Carrie Patsalis, a 48-year-old British travel vlogger, toured Afghanistan with a guide for 10 days in May. “The world has a really funny narrative and a really funny idea about which countries you should shun based on unelected regimes,” she says. She argues that staying away hurts the country’s economy — UN officials have estimated that about 85% of Afghans live on less than $1 a day — and the Afghan people who may not support the Taliban rule.

She thinks travel vloggers should show both the country’s beauty and its oppression. Patsalis tells me she made a point to seek out women on her trip. She tells me that while the women could not be seen on camera, she wanted to let them know that “I see you, I know you’re here, and it matters to me how you live.”

Ultimately, going to Afghanistan is good business for travel content creators competing for eyes in an online world full of travel recommendations. Harry Jaggard, a British 27-year-old who has been making videos for three years, says his series in Afghanistan in 2023 was his most successful. He tells me he’s traveling to North Korea next month. “To be the best, you sometimes have to push the boundaries,” he says. “Everyone wants to see it, and not many people go there.”

In his series, Jaggard travels with a guide and meets men who he says are members of the Taliban in the street. (He says he learned to tell by looking at their clothing and asking his guide.) He says that while he was apprehensive, he found the Taliban members to be shockingly friendly. “They’re outwardly very kind — that’s how they gain your trust,” he tells me. But he didn’t want to highlight too much of the Taliban in his videos; he says he focused on meeting citizens, whom he described as among the most hospitable people he’s encountered in the dozens of countries he has traveled to. He says it’s a reminder that “a government and its people are two different things.”

The videos also fill a gap in traditional travel journalism. “Frommer’s would never cover travel to a place that is as dangerous as this one is,” says Pauline Frommer, the publisher of Frommer’s Guidebooks, the popular guidebook series that has been around since the 1950s. While encouraging other people to travel to places like Afghanistan despite government warnings is dangerous, there are insights to be gleaned from watching travel vloggers have first-hand experiences there, and many people can learn from watching them. “I see nothing wrong with videos about less visited parts of the world,” Frommer tells me. “I find value in looking at what daily life is like.”

For now, Afghanistan isn’t overrun with selfie sticks at landmarks and TikTokers crowding local restaurants. But the need to keep content interesting is pushing these creators to more controversial and dangerous places, as curious viewers want to see more of the worlds they aren’t a part of. But then how many eager backpackers will follow in their footsteps to make their own content?

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.