"My heart is beating with fear"

The Taliban in recent days overran Kunduz, one of a succession of provincial capitals to fall to the Islamist militant group as it swiftly encircles the nation’s capital, Kabul. For Nooria, who did not want her family name used, the fighting announced itself when a rocket crashed into her home, badly injuring one of her sons.

The temporary haven they found is far from a safe one: a Kabul park, Hasa-e-Awal, which has become a sprawling makeshift camp for war-displaced people from across Afghanistan. But with Taliban fighters only a few dozen miles from the city by nightfall Saturday, Kabul itself is in peril.

“My heart is beating with fear at the thought of the Taliban,” said Nooria, 35, who ekes out a living as a house cleaner. When the militant movement last ruled Afghanistan, a five-year reign that ended in 2001, widows like her faced a brutal fate, banned from supporting themselves except by begging, burqa-clad, in the street.