“This is like begging. Sometimes you wait all day for this bag of flour,” the former member of Afghanistan’s vanquished U.S.-backed army said bitterly. The aid package will last him, his wife, his sister and his mother for a month, he said; after that, he doesn’t know what he’ll do.
“Before, I made enough money I could help other poor people,” said Shafiullah, 27, who gave only his first name for privacy reasons. “Now I’m the one who needs help.”
On the other side of Kabul, past dilapidated houses and drug addicts clustered in a graveyard, worshipers held their collective breath as they met for Friday prayers on the upper floor of the Abu Bakr Al-Siddique Mosque. Praying downstairs was impossible: Days earlier, an Islamic State bomb ripped through the ground floor with enough strength to blow out the door and shatter the windows of nearby houses, killing 21 people.
Now, the congregants pray under the watchful eyes of eight Kalashnikov-toting Taliban fighters, with a Humvee and machine-gun-equipped truck nearby for extra security.
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