© Anne Holmes
While I was waiting for my Afghan visa in Delhi, a friend of mine mentioned in passing something about a widow’s village in Herat province in western Afghanistan. As soon as I arrived in Kabul I began asking around if anyone knew where it was. It took me nearly two weeks to finally […]

© Anne Holmes
Amine, pictured above, is 16 years old. She was forced to marry at the age of 14 but has many problems with her husband and his family. She doused herself with oil and set herself on fire to protest her unwanted marriage but her father says that she must return to her husband […]

© Anne Holmes
I spent the day at the border with Iran near Herat in Western Afghanistan, observing the constant trickle of deportees arriving empty-handed. They were all men, mostly in their twenties and thirties, who had been arrested and jailed before being forced to board a bus headed for their country of origin. All the […]

The Taliban abducted 23 South Korean aid workers, 18 of whom are women, last Thursday. The group reportedly boarded a local bus in Kandahar headed for Kabul, and were kidnapped at gunpoint in Ghazni province, just south of their final destination. Independent travel in the southern provinces is highly discouraged since a series of kidnappings […]

© Anne Holmes
I spent the last few days in hospitals around Kabul taking a visual survey of the types of war injuries the capital city treats. Many of them come from neighboring provinces with gunshot wounds and mine injuries. This young boy arrived with 4 other children and one adult late in the evening at […]

I spent my evening at a watering hole in Kabul known as “L’Atmo,” best pronounced with an elongated English oooooh, short for “l’atmosphère,” but by no stretch of the imagination, lacking in the latter; that is, if you think that atmosphere requires an entire tribe of posers to prove its existence. It’s an overpriced, pseudo-French […]

The national Afghan football team practices at the infamous stadium where Taliban performed executions in Kabul. © Anne Holmes
I arrived in Kabul two days ago. My first impressions are nothing like what I expected. The city is calm, the people are extremely friendly, and it’s easy to forget that at any moment anything could happen. […]