You might like Left Right Shah-do-Shamshira Mosque is known as the Mosque of the King with Two Swords. It was built in the 1920s on the order of King Amanullah’s mother on the site of one of Kabul’s first mosques named in honour of an early Muslim king who died fighting Hindu inva 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 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 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 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 crew and ground staff of the new independent operator, ‘Safi Airways’. Simon Norfolk 2011 ‘Radio TV Mountain’ in the centre of Kabul seen from where the Kabul River cuts through the mountains creating the Deh Mazang gorge. In the first Anglo-Afghan War it was the site of a crucial skirmish and hasty retreat by badly outnumbered British cavalry Simon Norfolk 2011 Some of the nonsensical property development taking place in Kabul. The district of the city, Karte Char Chateh, is remembered by Kabulis as part of the bazaar which was burned by the British in 1842 as collective punishment for the killing of the British 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 At Waisalabad high above West Kabul. It has taken 26 men from the Mine Detection Centre and four de-mining dogs more than three months to clear mines from an area the size of a few soccer pitches. Kabul’s rapid expansion has increased pressure for buildin Simon Norfolk 2011 One of the huge logistics compounds at Camp Leatherneck. A modern, technological army needs hundreds of thousands of different kinds of objects in order to keep it working. A $100m warplane can be grounded for the want of a $1 part. Supplying these things 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