Description:
Poor Afghanistan. A historical crossroads far away from the world's centers of power, the country has alternately been conquered, fought over by one superpower after another, and ignored. In the 1920s, Afghanistan's rulers embarked on a sweeping program of modernization that, among other things, allowed for at least some measure of civil rights for women. A half century later, after the politically moderate king Nadir Shah was overthrown, a Marxist government drew Afghanistan into the Soviet sphere, provoking a civil war that widened with the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979. More than a million Afghanis died; millions of others fled the country to neighboring Iran and Pakistan. The civil war widened further after the exhausted Soviet forces left in 1989. Three years later, the Mujahedin resistance seized power and executed the Marxist dictator Mohammed Najibullah. The civil war continued, fueled by the rise of the conservative Taliban, a confederation of armed students that, at century's end, controls most of the country. Photographer and journalist Fazal Sheikh traveled to Afghanistan to document the ravages of this long war, recording ruined villages, desolate landscapes, and damaged people. These survivors tell stories of murdered family members (some of whom remained where they fell in battle or massacre for months before at last being buried), of nearly unimaginable terror and hardship, and of hope for a better future; as one refugee, a widow called only Roghul, remarks, "I have been told that my home has been completely destroyed in the civil war, but I still hold on to the hope that there will be a time when I can return to the land where I was born. I will return when the government gives its people jobs rather than Kalashnikovs." Sheikh's searing photographs and oral histories are a terrifying portrayal of the hell of war. --Gregory McNamee
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