Stories from Afghanistan and India
It was just after 7am when the car carrying Colonel Saba Sahar, one of Afghanistan’s most senior female police officers, came under fire from armed insurgents. In the back seat, Sahar’s four-year-old daughter began screaming as bullets shattered the windscreen […]
KABUL—For a woman in the last few weeks of her pregnancy, 24-year-old Sohaila walks surprisingly quickly as she invites us into the first-floor guest room of her traditional Afghan house in the outskirts of Kabul in October. The large yet […]
Three years ago, Salima Mazari knew very little about the violence that has plagued her country for decades. Born and raised as a refugee in Iran, she was sheltered from the worst of the conflict, despite enduring other hardships familiar […]
Since he was a child, 60-year-old Nidan Singh Sachdeva has never missed a single Saavan mela, an annual religious gathering celebrated by the Sikh community in Afghanistan’s Paktya province to mark the monsoon season. The dry mountainous terrains of Afghanistan […]
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 […]
LAM GUL ALAM’S symptoms had been steadily worsening for weeks when he decided to visit an herbalist named Haji Mohammad Alkozai. The 30-year-old civil servant from Kabul had intently watched a video clip making the rounds on Afghan social media, in which […]
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 […]