Stories from Afghanistan and India
For five days after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban insurgency, Mariam (not her real name) didn’t leave her house. As a professional athlete, this was very unusual. However, 23-year-old Mariam is also one of the city’s up and […]
It is a warm spring afternoon in Herat Province in western Afghanistan. The winter was unseasonably short, and Mohammad Salehi is concerned that might have affected the sun-loving crops. Salehi closely inspects each deep-orange strand in the palm of his hand. […]
Last year, at only 21 years, Sofiea Sakhi Karimi was forced to retire from her brief but celebrated career in the Afghan media owing to growing threats and violence against media workers in her country. “Working in Afghanistan as a […]
Ahmad Wali Rashidi was five-year-old when he lost his left leg to a rocket attack on his house in Kabul. “I remember hearing a zooming sound, Rashidi,now 29, told VICE World News.“When I turned my head, I saw a green metal […]
At first glance, the decrepit building hardly registers as a historic structure. The peach paint on the exteriors has cracked with age. The concrete patterns on the walls have long crumbled; all that remains is covered in grime. Set in […]
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 […]