Shakira, who is in her early forties, corralled her family: her husband, an opium merchant, who was fast asleep, having succumbed to the temptations of his product, and her eight children, including her oldest, twenty-year-old Nilofar-as old as the war itself-whom Shakira called her “deputy,” because she helped care for the younger ones.
One of the men warned, “If you don’t leave immediately, everyone is going to die.” They were members of the Taliban, who were waging an offensive to wrest the countryside back from the Afghan National Army. Outside were two men in bandoliers and black turbans, carrying rifles. In the Sangin Valley, which is in Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, women must not be seen by men who aren’t related to them, and so her nineteen-year-old son, Ahmed, went to the gate.
Late one afternoon this past August, Shakira heard banging on her front gate.
