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Kiana Hayeri

Football players compete in a semi-final game on a field built on the edge of a mountain peak in Shahristan district, Daykundi, Afghanistan.

Mirdil Rahmati, who owns several bakeries in Kabul, distributes free bread to those who gather in front of his bakery in the Khair Khana neighbourhood.

Mursal serves lunch – cooked potatoes in tomato paste, served with rice. With the rising prices of food items and Sharif being out of a job, the family has been mostly feeding themselves on potatoes, bread and rice.

Mursal (21) receives a kiss from her 2 year old son, Nabi, inside the small kitchen that also functions as a shower. Mursal, who is 7 months pregnant, and her husband, Sharif (25) have rented a house in Kolula Poshta. Sharif is a day labourer, and has been mostly out of job since the collapse of the previous government.

Prices for food, gas, and firewood have risen dramatically since U.S. forces left Afghanistan and the Taliban took over in August 2021. Poverty and hunger are growing even in the cities where the middle class has traditionally been large.

Nadia, one of the hosts of the talent quest TV show Afghan Star, interviews masked young women at a taping on February 18, 2021. As the Taliban moved to retake national control, Afghan Star’s cast and crew came under serious threat—judges and participants had to stay at a safe house with armed security guards and blast walls until the end of the season. Kabul fell to the Taliban six months after this photograph was taken, leaving an uncertain future for Afghan women.

Hafiza, 70, gazes out the window of the small home near Faizabad where she took refuge after the Taliban seized her village in 2019. When one of her four sons joined the Taliban, Hafiza begged his commander to let him come home. “You’ve given two sons to the government and one to [anti-Taliban] militia,” she says he replied. “This one will be ours.”

Afghan girls and women gained rights to study, vote, and work after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. In March 2021, a university student from northern Daykundi Province, said she dreamed of someday working in Kabul at the Afghan Agriculture Ministry and bringing her knowledge home to her province.

Night falls over the site of an explosion in west of Kabul.

In an unfinished basement of the Qamar Bani Hashim mosque, neighbors and relatives of two girls killed in a Kabul high school bombing gather to support the victims' mothers.