This was published 1 year ago
Shattered lives: The beauty and horror of day-to-day existence in Afghanistan
7 ImagesPhotojournalist Andrew Quilty was based in Afghanistan from 2013 until the return of the Taliban in 2021. His new book, This is Afghanistan 2014-2021 (The Miegunyah Press, $90), is out October 24. Pre-order now at mup.com.au.
1/7
A pigeon circles its master who conducts his flock from the roof of his home in Qala-i Musa, Kabul. Kaftar bazi – the play of pigeons – is a national sport in Afghanistan and particularly popular in the capital in spring. Each flock is led in several orbits by an alluring female. She is entrusted with protecting her charges from the temptation of other flocks and piloting them safely home upon their master’s call. 29.1.2014.Credit:Andrew Quilty
2/7
After a night of fighting between the Afghan National Army and Taliban fighters in early 2018, an unexploded rocket-propelled grenade was found by a child walking to school. When the RPG was carried home and accidentally dropped, the explosion killed four members of the extended family. Seven other children were injured and required leg amputations, including those pictured here months later, making their way to school in Nangarhar. 23.7.2018.Credit:Andrew Quilty
3/7
After nearly 20 years of war, as the end of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan neared, a family hurries to join a group awaiting access to Kabul’s international airport. They are among the hundreds of thousands who attempted to enter the airport and board evacuation flights (120,000 succeeded) after the Taliban took control of the Afghan capital just over a week earlier. 24.8.2021.Credit:Andrew Quilty
4/7
In Kabul’s Sherpur neighbourhood, four-year-old Bareen waits in a car outside a beauty salon with her recently engaged brother and his close friends before the engagement party. Before the Taliban took control of Kabul in August 2021, the street in Sherpur was a beauty salon hub. Since then, the businesses, which were run almost entirely by women, have been shuttered in line with ultra-conservative Taliban social policies virtually banishing women from public life. 11.10.2017Credit:Andrew Quilty
5/7
Young boys climb a broken-down ferris wheel in order to give a friend a quarter-revolution ride in a dilapidated playground in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province. After US forces withdrew from the southern province in 2013, their Afghan understudies had struggled to maintain security. The Taliban capitalised, making rapid territorial gains in the province and threatening the city in late 2015, leaving little incentive for investment. 28.4.2016Credit:Andrew Quilty
6/7
Afghan policemen rest and smoke cigarettes inside an isolated checkpoint less than 100 metres from territory under Taliban control in the village of Chah-e Anjir, in Afghanistan’s south. Three men had been killed at the checkpoint and several more wounded in the three months prior. Two weeks later, two more were killed in a night-time Taliban assault. The checkpoint commander (not pictured here) was stoned on opium and slept through the attack. 23.4.2016Credit:Andrew Quilty
7/7
Ehsanullah, 14, is among 13 injured women and children from an extended family who arrived at a hospital in Lashkar Gah one afternoon in early summer 2018. Ehsanullah had been at home with his family, an hour outside the city, when two Taliban fighters entered the home and fired on a passing convoy of US and Afghan special forces soldiers. In response, a US A-10 war plane was called upon, raining hundreds of carrot-sized rounds into the compound. The Taliban fighters had long since fled. Ehsanullah’s father and older brother were killed instantly. Ehsanullah lost both his eyes and, like two of his younger brothers, required surgery to repair damaged internal organs; the others all sustained shrapnel injuries. In the official US account of the air strike, four civilians were marked as injured, zero as killed. 24.11.2018Credit:Andrew Quilty
