The corrugated-iron storefronts had largely been destroyed during the war. By nightfall, they had come upon the valley’s central market. Shakira balanced her youngest child, a two-year-old daughter, on her hip as the sky flashed and thundered. The pounding of artillery filled the air, announcing the start of a Taliban assault on an Afghan Army outpost. She started to feel the rattle of distant thuds, and saw people streaming from riverside villages: men bending low beneath bundles stuffed with all that they could not bear to leave behind, women walking as quickly as their burqas allowed. Shakira’s family walked for hours under a blazing sun.
Their neighbors had been warned, too, and, except for wandering chickens and orphaned cattle, the village was empty. The family crossed an old footbridge spanning a canal, then snaked their way through reeds and irregular plots of beans and onions, past dark and vacant houses. Shakira, who is in her early forties, corralled her family: her husband, an opium merchant, who was fast asleep, having succumbed to the temptations of his product, and her eight children, including her oldest, twenty-year-old Nilofar-as old as the war itself-whom Shakira called her “deputy,” because she helped care for the younger ones. One of the men warned, “If you don’t leave immediately, everyone is going to die.” They were members of the Taliban, who were waging an offensive to wrest the countryside back from the Afghan National Army. Outside were two men in bandoliers and black turbans, carrying rifles. In the Sangin Valley, which is in Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, women must not be seen by men who aren’t related to them, and so her nineteen-year-old son, Ahmed, went to the gate.
Late one afternoon this past August, Shakira heard banging on her front gate. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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