Stories from Afghanistan and India
Farahnaz Forotan was three when the Taliban had arrived in Kabul. It was 1996. “I have this memory of a snowy day, I was sitting on my mother’s lap, in a minibus, and she was crying. I didn’t understand why she was […]
An assembly of prominent Afghans on Sunday approved the release of hundreds of Taliban prisoners accused of serious crimes, a decision that clears the way for peace talks with the insurgent group but evokes mixed emotions among victims of their […]
When Afghan President Ashraf Ghani recommended the first-ever ceasefire with the Taliban in 2018, many Taliban fighters and Afghans did not know what to expect. Few seemed to know or remember what it was like to live in a peaceful Afghanistan in […]
KABUL, Afghanistan—There were few things that scared Fatima Khalil, a 24-year-old human rights activist who torpedoed her way across an increasingly volatile and patriarchal landscape of Afghanistan. One of them, Lima Ahmad, her older sister, told me in July, was […]
Kabul’s pediatric surgeons face a perverse challenge in determining the best way to treat newborns for war wounds.
Freshta had spent months building up a franchise business to help to feed her family – and break a few taboos on women at the same time – when coronavirus hit Afghanistan. In November, the engineering student, (who has asked to […]
When Aziz Amir was deported from the UK back to his native Afghanistan in 2011, he faced a choice: defy the Taliban and risk being murdered, or join them. Mr Amir, not his real name, chose the latter, not just […]
Sitting in a dimly lit cell, Mariyam described her journey from growing up as a Catholic in the south Indian state of Kerala to languishing in an Afghan prison as a member of the ISIS affiliate known as Islamic State […]
Dr. Bina Najeeb grew up during the civil war in Afghanistan, a period of extreme bloodshed and destruction in his country. He graduated from medical school when the fundamentalist Taliban regime was in charge, in the late 1990s. He has […]
Firoza Omar was nursing her four-month-old son at her home in Kabul when she heard of reports of an attack on a maternity hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders in the Afghan capital. In one of the most brutal incidents […]