These Haunting Photos Reveal Today’s Afghanistan
A photographer shares his dedication to telling the story of a country that has slipped from the headlines.10 November 2017
A mother waits with her daughter in the emergency waiting room of the MSF-administered Boost Hospital in the capital of Helmand Province, Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan.
Villagers watch as an army helicopter flies over the site of two landslides in Badakhshan Province in May 2014. The first landslide buried some 300 homes and those who had been inside or on the streets at the time. The second struck as villagers attempted to rescue those trapped, digging with shovels and their bare hands.
Children in a small village in Bamian Province
A baby girl lies in an observation room of Helmand’s provincial hospital after suffering burns from an oil heater at home. The burns were found to be less severe than first thought, and the girl was expected to make a full recovery.
During a game of buzkashi, the chapandaz, or horsemen, vie for possession of the game’s central focus—a calf carcass—during a match in the Panjshir Valley.
Jamshid lies on pillows and plays with a partridge at home in his village of Qualander Khel, about two hours north of Kabul. Jamshid and his two friends were seriously injured, and his 18-year-old brother killed, when a suicide bomber attacked a NATO convoy near their home in August 2014.
Dawn in Warzuds, a village in the Wakhan Corridor, one of the most remote regions in Afghanistan
“There doesn’t seem to be a precise season for kaftar bazi, or play of the pigeons, but in the mid-afternoon as spring approaches, flocks of the tamed birds circle around the rooftops of Kabul more than ever,” says Quilty. “Their master, like the conductor of an orchestra, controls their orbit with a flag or net attached to a long stick, with the goal of tempting birds from other flocks to join his.”
The body of a patient, later identified as Baynazar Mohammad Nazar, a 43-year-old husband and father of four, lies on an operating table in the destroyed Doctors Without Borders (MSF) Kunduz Trauma Center on October 10, 2015. One week before this photo was taken, a U.S. AC-130 aircraft mistakenly attacked the hospital, ultimately killing 42 patients, patient carers and MSF staff. Quilty was on assignment for Foreign Policy magazine when he captured this and other photographs from the hospital.