Three women walk by an ancient site in Bamyan, a city in central Afghanistan with a Hazara and Shi’a majority. The rock-cavity in the background contained one of two 1,500-year old Buddha statues that the Taliban destroyed in 2001. Photo by the author.
To offer our readers an inside look at contemporary Afghanistan, we have conducted an interview with Ali Abdi, a researcher who has been living there since 2015 and working with a queer community in Kabul.