Drawing Afghanistan (part 2)
A sketchbook tour of a country in war while hoping for peace (2/2)
This is the second of two posts featuring some of my drawings from Afghanistan. If you missed that one, covering the 20 years of the US-led occupation, here it is:
Most of the drawings in this post come from the period after the Taliban’s takeover in 2021, when I was reporting on their first steps back in power and how people were reacting.
The Taliban had won its war with the West. But even as they re-imposed their strict Islamic codes, they were under attack from the Afghan branch of the Islamic State, which said the Taliban were not conservative enough. And IS was turning the Taliban’s old tactics against it, using suicide bombers to attack its soldiers and mosques across the country. Friday prayers at Herat’s Great Mosque was a nervous affair, with Taliban guards posted at every entrance.
The legacy of forever war. This was a scene in a village in Helmand province in late 2021, but one that was repeated across the southern provinces, where the heaviest fighting between the Taliban and the US and its allies took place.
Thanks for being here and supporting my work. This one is free to read, but for just $6 a month you get all my writing and sketchbook reporting. Your generosity keeps this going.
Leo Tolstoy’s ‘War & Peace’. I often used to see Farsi editions of the novel like this in bookstores in Kabul and other cities. And Farzana, one of the main personalities in my book, talks about the impact it had on her when she first read it in the late-2000s. As her story helped inspire the title of my book, I thought I’d draw ‘War & Peace’ as well.
Dystopia in a ditch: the approach to the so-called Abbey Gate to Kabul airport and in August 2021, thousands of Afghans filled that sewage drain, hoping to make it inside and onto a Western evacuation flight. And then, just days before the evacuation ended, a suicide bomber detonated in their midst, leaving nearly 200 people dead.
Much of Kabul was a ruin when the Taliban first took over in 1996, the legacy of the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal. When they marched back in in 2021, they inherited a new city, rebuilt with multi-storey tower blocks.
‘With the help of God, we defeated America’ read these words that I saw being painted on the outer wall of the US embassy in Kabul In late-2021, at the direction of Taliban leaders. I snapped a picture through the window of my taxi and drew this later. Today, the US embassy complex behind this wall remains empty, but the Taliban have painted over the mural. And there is speculation that under the Trump administration, relations may start to thaw.
War & Peace & War: Twenty Years in Afghanistan is in US bookstores from late March, or it is available online now or from UK bookstores.