May Jeong is a visiting scholar at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
On the morning of 25 September 2006, Safia, the first head of the women’s affairs department in Kandahar, was climbing into a rickshaw to go to work when two men on a motorcycle drove by and shot her three times. Safia’s death was the first I heard about, but I soon learned of twelve other women who had been murdered since the Nato invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. It was...
The Dari word qachaqbar means ‘the one with illicit goods’, but when I hear it in Kabul I don’t think of drugs or arms but people. Afghans have been leaving since the Soviet invasion in the 1970s, but after 2014, when foreign troops pulled out, the leaving changed pace: in 2015, more than 200,000 Afghans left for Europe alone. Every Afghan friend I had in Kabul...
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