America’s Longest War Takes a Deadly New Turn

The rush of incoming aircraft roused Waheeda and her sleeping family. It was long after dark on a cool spring night in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, a Taliban stronghold of fertile valleys and stark mountains that borders Pakistan. The sound of warplanes is a familiar echo across the skies here, but it had never come so close to Waheeda’s mud-brick home. Her father, a village doctor named Nazar Gul, got up to see what was going on when the first bomb struck the family compound, killing five of her cousins. Her father was moving toward the blast site when a second bomb exploded, she says. In an instant, both of her parents and five of her sisters vanished. “It was dark and dusty, and nothing was visible,” the 14-year-old remembers. “I just knew they were all martyred.” Two of Waheeda’s little sisters, one of them just five days old, lay crying on the ground as helicopter gunships began strafing what remained of the compound. Waheeda was hit in the leg. She wanted to flee, but it was impossible to discern a clear path out in the darkness, so she swept up her sisters and took cover under an eave of the… Read full this story

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