You might like Left Right The future home of the Afghan Cash and Carry Superstore on the road between the foreign embassies and Kabul airport. Simon Norfolk 2011 The former home of Jangalak Industries, a metalworking factory that once had a workforce of 1,800 but was wrecked during the civil war in the 1990s. It is now used as a massive storage yard for scrap metal. This area is all discarded hospital beds and sch Simon Norfolk 2011 Wasteland at the back of shops used as stabling for draught horses. In the distance is the Bala Hissar citadel, now home to an Afghan army base and mooring for one of the American blimps that carry electronic surveillance gear and cameras. Simon Norfolk 2011 The Sham-e-Paris (‘Parisian Evenings’) wedding hall in the Taymani neighbourhood. Common in Pakistan, these huge wedding complexes have sprung up all over Kabul with dining and entertainment halls to seat a thousand on each floor and even an on-site honey Simon Norfolk 2011 A watchtower guarding a street of foreign embassies in central Kabul. For the British army these improvised fortifications are called ‘sangars’, although the term is Dari for ‘barricade’ and is one of the few words the British brought home form the Anglo- Simon Norfolk 2011 Entrance to the vast City Star Hall complex of wedding halls, on the new bypass out near Kabul Airport. Simon Norfolk 2011 The whole eastern side of Kabul, for miles along both sides of the Jalalabad Road is one huge logistics yard capable of supplying the foreign military and rapidly growing embassies with everything they might need from a single cup of coffee right through Simon Norfolk 2011 Historically, Kuchis were strongly pro-Taliban; feelings made more intense by being bombed by NATO off their traditional grazing lands in Helmand. They are allowed to set up camp here on Kabul’s periphery only because it is below a large, new Afghan Army Simon Norfolk 2011 A de-mining team from the Mine Detection Centre in Kabul with a member of the German Police who is mentoring them. Simon Norfolk 2011 At a music school on Kabul, boys are taught the traditional Afghan instrument the rubab. Difficult to play, it is a skill which nearly became extinct due to the Taliban prohibition on secular music. Simon Norfolk 2011 The districts of Wazir Akhbar Khan and Sherpur, home to all the NGOs and contractors, occupy the site of the former British fortress from the Second Anglo-Afghan War, ‘the Cantonment’. Glitzy, kitschy ‘poppy-palaces’, flung upon a hectic property boom aft Simon Norfolk 2011 There are 16,000 US Marines aboard Camp Leatherneck spread over 1,600 acres. Empty shipping containers are used as storage, wind breaks or blast walls. In May 2010 a mysterious fire, that may have been sabotage, destroyed 9 acres of containers. It burned Simon Norfolk 2011