Helicopters from the Afghan Army buzzed overhead, and the families hid behind the shops, considering their next move. In the distance, the earth suddenly exploded in fountains of dirt. Now stray pillars jutted upward, and the air smelled of decaying animal remains and burning plastic. It had once been the most thriving bazaar in northern Helmand, with shopkeepers weighing saffron and cumin on scales, carts loaded with women’s gowns, and storefronts dedicated to selling opium. As she held the figures in the light of a match, the earth shook.Īround dawn, Shakira stepped outside, and saw that a few dozen families had taken shelter in the abandoned market. For the children, she produced a set of cloth dolls-one of a number of distractions that she’d cultivated during the years of fleeing battle. Shakira found a one-room shop with an intact roof, and her family settled in for the night. 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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