Traditional dance at Hamid Karzai’s rally during the 2004 presidential election
A new period in Afghanistan’s history has opened up with the return of the Taliban to power and the hasty departure of US forces.
I reported from Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, during the 2004 and 2009 presidential elections and the 2005 legislative election.
Here are photos of some of the country’s long-suffering people taken during my assignements (my camera was stolen in 2001 during an unpleasant roadside incident, so none from then, sadly). Unfortunately, I don’t have easy access to my notes of the time and a link to a slideshow on RFI’s website in English appears to be broken, so I no longer have people’s names and am writing captions from memory. So here goes:
For a small fee this boy burns incense (span) in a can and waves it around your head to chase away evil spirits. His father is dead, leaving his mother to look after several children, the fate of many women after decades of war. His income, collected on the streets and in the parks of Kabul, is essential to feed the whole family.
His friends play table football in Kabul’s central parkThe daughters of better-off families on their way to school, following the end of Taliban rule when education for girls was bannedEvery morning labourers gather at key points of the city in the hope of being hired for the day. Many of them are Hazaras, a minority group who are mainly Shia Muslim and have often suffered discrimination or persecution, notably during the Taliban’s rule
Some of them stay until late in the day …
… in the hope that some employer may need an extra handThis man runs taxi-buses and employs boys to tout for business. He seemed quite proud of providing an income for their familiesA stallholder at the bus stationA cassette vendor. Before 2001 the Taliban banned music, so he sold tapes of religious speechesA timber merchant in the mainly Pashtun area of the cityAn Uzbek tradesman makes Astrakhan hats of the kind favoured by Hamid KarzaiBakers in KabulThe uncooked bread is placed in an underground oven, which is sprayed with water to prevent overheating … then brought out with the help of iron rods… and sold to an eager public. One series of the Danish TV showThe Killing took its heroine to Afghanistan, where she found the remains of a murder victim in a walk-in baker’s oven. So far as I know no such ovens exist in the country (please send a comment to correct me if I’m wrong)A vendor at Kabul’s bird market. Quails are popularButchers at a street market, hygiene not a top priorityThis restaurant-owner was once a professinal wrestler. Photos of his former triumphs decorate the walls of the establishmentA kebab sellerThe temple that served Kabul’s small Sikh communityAn election worker, handicapped like so many people who may have lost limbs in fighting, bombardment or to landminesElection workers are trained in 2005Women arrive at a polling station in 2009A pottery in KabulThe clay being workedPashtun villagers, camping in Kabul where they have come seeking workResidents of the camp wash in a spring nearbySelling light bulbs on a Kabul market, with proof that they workA photographer with a box camera in the Shah Shaheen neighbourhood of KabulThe caretaker of the British cemetery, where many foreigners, including participants in the 19th-century British forays into Afghanistan, are buried. He told me the leaders he most admired were Daoud Khan, who abolished the monarchy and was ousted by the Communists, and Najibullah, the Communist who was driven out by the Western-backed mojaheddin and murdered by the TalibanRecreation in the Bagh-e-Babur gardens, first laid out under Moghul emperor Babur, destroyed during the last century’s wars and rebuilt sincePolice leave the scene of a Taliban bank raid with the body of one of the assailants in the back of the vehicle in 2009
Photos of Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, Panjshir Valley and elsewhere to follow in a later post
