The Sewing Circles of Herat: My Afghan Years

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Christina Lamb. The Sewing Circles of Herat: My Afghan Years

The Sewing Circles of Herat. MY AFGHAN YEARS

COPYRIGHT

PRAISE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MAP

FAMILY TREE

Beginnings

1 The Taliban Torturer

2 Mullahs on Motorbikes

3 Inside the House of Knowledge

4 The Royal Court in Exile

5 The Sewing Circles of Herat

6 The Secret of Glass

7 Unpainting the Peacocks

8 The Story of Abdullah

9 Face to Face with the Taliban

10 A Letter from Kabul

If you enjoyed The Sewing Circles of Herat, check out these other great Christina Lamb titles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

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CHRISTINA LAMB

‘Award-winning foreign correspondent Christina Lamb has written an inspiring and moving account of Afghanistan’s plight … Lamb shows that, despite attempts to destroy the country and its culture, its soul remains uncrushed.’

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This was probably not an exaggeration. The details took a long while to come out in the world, only when the first refugees started to arrive in Pakistan, but testimony collected by human rights organizations suggests that between four thousand and six thousand people were massacred in Bamiyan after its surrender that August of 1998.

Another woman called Peri Gul with eyes like black olive pits tugged at my arm. ‘There were 300 killed in my village,’ she said. ‘They locked my husband in our house and set fire to it and beat me when I tried to run inside. Afterwards I had to beg bread for my three sons and daughters. Every house was burnt and they sprayed the fields with chemicals and set fire to them so no one had food. Mostly we just scraped moss from rocks. I even thought about selling one of my children but who would buy? Nobody had anything.’ I guessed she was in her mid-20s, ten years younger than me, but she looked old enough to be my mother. Clutching my hand with her calloused dirt-encrusted fingers, she sobbed, ‘We were innocent people just trying to survive. First they starved us then they murdered us. Why didn’t anyone do anything?’

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