The night before he died, Aliyas Dayee was up late working. This was not unusual for Dayee, who didn't mind going to bed late or getting up early for a story. That night, he was finishing a radio report about an attack on an Afghan military checkpoint near Lashkargah in Helmand province, Afghanistan, where he lived. Dayee, who was 33, was born and raised in Helmand and spent his working life covering the ebb and flow of violence between the military and the Taliban. In the months leading up to his death, the violence had been flowing. Even as peace talks got under way thousands of miles away in Qatar, with the aim of ending the war, Afghanistan was experiencing a surge in assassinations of people in public life. Dayee eventually closed his laptop and went to bed, and in the morning he and his brother Mujtaba set off early to collect a Danish journalist he was helping with a radio report. Dayee had recently purchased a new car so he could drive his elderly mother to the hospital in greater comfort. He was diligent about checking its undercarriage for explosives - getting down on all fours no matter how short a time the car had been left unattended. His friends would joke to him that he was like a mouse - always alert, ready at any moment to dart away from danger. The shopkeepers opposite Dayee's house said that he checked the car as usual that morning. But a magnetic "sticky bomb" had been placed inside the wheel arch, police told the family, where it was hard to spot, and it detonated shortly after the two brothers left the house, killing Dayee and wounding Mujtaba. Dayee's wife heard the explosion from the house and went running. The blast did not come out of the blue. Dayee had received shadowy threats over the years from the Taliban, often by way of the security services - enough for his employers at Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) to fly him several times to Kabul for his safety. Recently, his family had tried to persuade him to move to the capital. For months, the Taliban had been pushing towards Lashkargah from surrounding districts and in October the militants were closing in on the city. The day before he died, Dayee texted his friend Aziz Tassal, a Washington Post journalist he had known for 15 years, to say he was worried and thought he should go to Kabul. Tassal had often urged him to leave Helmand. "Three or four times he went to Europe for work, and every time I begged him to ask his managers if he could stay," Tassal said. But Dayee resisted. "Helmand is my soul," he told his friend. He did not want to leave his mother, wife and their young daughter, or his sister and her children who he had taken in when her husband was killed in the line of duty for the police. He had also recently pitched a large tent in his garden to offer shelter to four other related families displaced by the fighting, and they had to be thought of too. Dayee's younger brother, Mudassir Dawat, was not in Helmand the day his brother died. He had followed Dayee into journalism and was in Kabul for a conference. It was too dangerous to return to Helmand by road, so Dawat could not get back in time to see Dayee laid to rest. A few days later, he sat down and opened the laptop his brother had been working on the night before the bombing. On the screen was Dayee's audio editing software, open on his final report. Dawat pressed play, and heard once more his brother's warm voice, speaking to an elderly man displaced by an attack that day. "My body was shaking when I played it," Dawat said. "It was his last work. His last voice." When it was over, he carefully paused the recording and left the software open. Dayee had been working for RFE/RL - known as Radio Azadi in Afghanistan - for 12 years before his death on 12 November. His rich, made-for-radio voice was known around Helmand, it reached into homes and told stories of war; stories of the ever-present drug trade; stories of society and culture. "Everybody knew his voice," said Tassal. "A lot of places in Helmand there are no TVs, only radio. I used to tell him, Dayee you are like bread, you are in every home." Dayee was also an indispensable resource for many of the international reporters and researchers who travelled in and out of the province as the news came and went. Photojournalist Andrew Quilty began working with him in 2016 and kept working with him on and off for four years, developing a friendship. The two met in Lashkargah last month to conduct interviews for Quilty's podcast, Afghanistan after America. "I would say 95% of stories, documentaries, media of any kind that came out of Lashkargah in the past four or five years had his fingerprints on them," Quilty said. "I find it hard to imagine how his absence will be filled." Ashley Jackson travelled with Dayee while researching a PhD in the region in 2017. He was "dangerously funny" she said. 'He would say things no-one else would say".