Afghan Girl is a photograph featured on the cover of National Geographic in June 1985. The photograph was taken by American photographer Steve MCurry who took the photo near Peshawar, Pakistan in a refugee camp. It became one of the most famous photographs of all-time.
The girl in the photograph remained a mystery, but she was aged 12-13 at the time of the photograph and was living in Nasir Bagh, Pakistan. MuCurry made several attempts during the 1990s to locate her, but failed.
The girl in the image wasn’t discovered again until 2002, her name is Sharbat Gula, who was an Afghan refugee in Pakistan during Soviet-Afghan War. The search for the Afghan Girl was featured in the documentary, ‘Search for the Afghan Girl’ (2002). Many women claimed it was them in the photograph and many men believed it was their wives. Her identity was helped with the use of iris recognition.
When she was discovered she was around 30-years old, married with three daughters, who had returned to Afghanistan in 1992 and was living in a remote region. When she was showed the photograph, she said she had never seen it before and that was the first time she had viewed it.
When she was aged 6, she, her grandmother, brother and three sisters walked across the mountains to Pakistan and ended up in the Nasir Bagh refugee camp, Pakistan, 1984 after her village was attacked by Soviet helicopters. She got married to Rahmat Gul when she was around 13-years old and had three daughters, her husband died in 2012.
She is Muslim and she wears a burka and was hesitant in meeting McCurry as he is a male who isn’t a relative. Gula said that she wishes her daughters end up with an education that she never had. In 2016, she was arrested by Pakistani authorities for living in Pakistan with forged documents; she was deported back to Afghanistan in 2017. When asked if she felt safe she said, ‘No, but life under the Taliban was better. At least there was peace and order.’ In 2021, at her request, she was granted asylum in Italy, three months after Taliban took over Afghanistan.
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