Working in Afghanistan since January 2021, before and after the Taliban took over, Adnan has photographed life across the country including women at work and home, a Taliban graduation ceremony, victims of a suicide attack, dogs being given heroin, children playing in poppy fields, families taking time out in boats on lakes, the results of an earthquake and the Taliban playing volleyball. He has visited the major cities from Kabul to Kandahar to Mazar-e-Sharif to Herat to Jalalabad. And the remote areas including Gayan the site of the earthquake in 2022. His work has been published in the Financial Times and the BBC.
On the first day, I saw what an earthquake does to a building and what it does to people. There were crushed cars that looked like they’d been sitting under others in a scrapyard; traditional string-and-wood beds that we called manjees in Pakistan smashed and surrounded by rocks; dead livestock in pits; bright hangings on walls left standing in ruined houses; and surrounding us mountains with rocks the size of houses threatening to tumble if the ground shook again. It came in the night as the villagers slept. A man described how his house collapsed and his wife, trapped under the rubble, shouted for help. He tried lifting it with his hands and could not move it, so ran out to get a car jack. By the time he returned, she was dead. He told this story without crying.
From We may not agree with the Taliban but we should help Afghanistan in the Financial Times
We left for Kabul. The main threat in the capital today is Isis, locally known as Daesh. When Zabihullah Mujahid, the lead Taliban spokesman in Kabul, announced that his mother had passed away, people were invited to pray for her at the Eid Gah Mosque. Isis took advantage. At about 3.30pm local time on October 3, I heard the explosion, gunfire, sirens. I raced to the scene. At the mosque the Taliban would not let us through for fear of secondary explosions. So we went to the emergency hospital in Shahr-e Naw where blast victims tend to go. Outside, there were Taliban fighters with bloodstained shalwar kameez.
One had been thrown by the blast, visibly shocked, staring and shaking his head, saying he’d lost a friend. Blood was on his trainers and forearm as he dug into a black bin liner, removing the bloody and torn camouflage shirt of a comrade. He said the Taliban knew their enemies — the US and Daesh. A common theory across Afghanistan goes that the US is funding and supporting Daesh to fight the Taliban because it lost to them. How else, people ask, do you explain Muslims bombing mosques and killing other Muslims?
From Among the Taliban in the Financial Times