“We’ve been burning for twenty years and more”
A family sells beets, turnips, peas and beans, and potatoes and eggs on a morning in Kabul, 2002. Photograph by Jasem Ghazbanpour. The first time Mohammad Hossein Jafarian went to Afghanistan, he was a teenager, ambling around its shared border with his country of Iran the way kids are wont to wander. Then, in the mid 1980s, he was posted as a young combat soldier to the front lines of the war against Saddam Hussein, in the west of Iran. But he was also moonlighting in the east, joining Iranian border patrols on secret forays into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. For decades thereafter, as a journalist, documentarian, and occasional diplomat, he made countless trips through Afghanistan. He has seen, from the inside, every face external powers have tried to impose on Afghanistan – communist, Taliban, American. He has seen the civil war that followed the Soviets, two Taliban takeovers, and the twenty-year American occupation.
He is also the journalist with the best access to and greatest understanding of the Northern Alliance in the Panjshir Valley – a place the Taliban has
