A Promise Kept in the Wakhan Corridor

*Some of the names in this story have been changed to protect the identities of the individuals.

I sit cross-legged, in the Afghan fashion, across from a representative of the Taliban Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is middle-aged, turbaned, and formal in his speech. We have been sharing a pot of green tea in a private booth at a restaurant in affluent Shahr-e-Naw, Kabul.

For six weeks, I have waited impatiently in Islamabad, hoping to secure a journalist visa for the Wakhan Corridor, the thin finger of land that stretches from northeastern Afghanistan toward China. At last, he organized this meeting, seemingly to get the measure of me, the persistent British man behind the barrage of WhatsApp messages.

“Your long hair — you look more Pashtun than I do,” he remarks.

Under Taliban rule, my hair has become more helpful than I anticipated.

“Yes, but this” — I point to my nose ring — “not so much.”

He shares a smirk with his accomplice, who looks to be in his teens — youthful for such a significant position in government, though the new regime is greatly populated with the very young and very old.

I have my own intention for meeting this man. I have old promises to keep.

~~

In the spring of 2019, I clutch the iron bars separating me from the clerk at the Afghan Consulate in Khorog, Tajikistan. My eyes are frantic.

“You are too young. I can’t give you a visa.” She returns the intensity of my gaze with maternal concern.

In other circumstances, her consideration might be touching, but I only find it inconvenient. The tedium that is post-Soviet Central Asian bureaucracy had been a mountain to summit just to get this far.

“I will write a letter accepting all the risk,” I respond. “I am not too young; I have been to many places. I will be safe.”

I have no reason to believe I will be safe. In fact, part of me hopes I won’t be. All I know of Afghanistan is the arid, harsh landscape and exciting volatility that has become the shared Western consensus.

I do not know how correct I am: Resource-poor and difficult to reach, the Wakhan Corridor — where I’m headed — has evaded the majority of the conflict over the last 30-plus years. Nor do I know that NATO occupation has largely suited the Ismaili Shia minority group, allowing them to practice their religion in relative security and cater to the smattering of tourists, like myself, who sporadically stick our noses in. I barely know why it looks as it does on a map, a narrow strip drawn by Russian and British cartographers as a neutral zone separating their empires.

I am only 19 and don’t know much. Afghanistan exists to me as a mythic place, beyond reach. It’s a shadow on the map that neither people nor aircraft can pass over. I have glimpsed it from the films of Roya Sadat and the cave tapes of Osama bin Laden. I have skirted its northern border along the Pamir Highway. I have felt its pull without knowing exactly what I am seeking.

Laden with my grandfather’s 1992 Hi-8 camcorder and my father’s 35mm Olympus, my desire to see the country for myself is insatiable. A year before, I had dropped out of university and left England to travel, without a clear goal. Maybe this journey would be difficult — or climactic — enough that afterward I might feel satisfied enough to return home, and to move forward.

~~

The jolt of the road to the Wakhan from Kabul has jarred my spine since the third hour. It is now the eighteenth hour. A motorcyclist careened through the window of my ride, a battered sky-blue Toyota Corolla, near the Salang Pass, and I am still picking glass off the right side of my shalwar kameez, the traditional tunic and trousers I wear to better fit in here.

Dust has been choking me through that broken window, kicked up by the cargo trucks whose momentum makes them the fastest and most dangerous vehicles on the road. When the dust dissipates, it reveals bullet-scarred outer walls to family compounds that are fortified like mini citadels.

The Wakhan was a short hop from the Tajik border in 2019. With that route sealed since 2021, I now have to take the route from the south.

I have old promises to keep.

This road is a hard one. During the war with the Soviets, and the civil war that followed, this route was a major strategic artery connecting northeastern Afghanistan with Kabul. Decades later, the road surface is still left an open wound.

My traveling companions have changed across the long journey. Presently, they are the driver, who is a friend of a friend who has grown notably tired of the time spent arguing through Taliban checkpoints; two sisters, silent in black hijabs; and now a Taliban soldier who has commandeered the empty seat at the last checkpoint. He is wide, swaggering, and armed.

While I have no major reason to worry, there is one source of unease hidden in the lining of my bag. A close inspection of my rucksack would surely reveal my botched sewing job, and I’m not sure I have an answer that would satisfy a suspicious Talib.

Slapping a large palm against the driver’s shoulder, the soldier orders him to stop beside a group of young girls selling cherries by the roadside.

As both men exit the car, I too feel a hand on my shoulder.

~~

“Are you a boy or a girl?” is the first question in my interrogation by the police chief, my next stop after the Tajikistani clerk. It’s a test of my pride, but in fairness, at 19, I haven’t even a hint of a beard yet.

After an afternoon spent getting documents, having them signed, then taken elsewhere to be replaced and signed and stamped again, I finally hold the paper I apparently need. They all look the same to me.

I follow the unfamiliar sand track leading away from the main bazaar in Ishkashim, Afghanistan, the town closest to the Tajik border, which serves as a gateway to the Wakhan Corridor.

I have managed to secure a lift with a local man into the mountainous region tomorrow. For now, I need a place to sleep and have been pointed in this direction. At least I think it is this way.

I round the corner shyly into an alleyway between two homes. I don’t want to intrude. I have been immediately struck by the difference in architecture from Tajikistan, a homogeneous sea of prefabricated concrete buildings with corrugated iron roofs. Here, the buildings are either concrete, often graffitied in bold Dari lettering, or made from the vernacular sandy adobe that helps camouflage them against the ground.

A young boy is startled to see me.

“Guesthouse?” I ask.

He nods cautiously. He has a baseball cap on at an angle. The eye that it shields is clouded over in pale blue; the other is dark brown.

As I follow him into the backyard of a house, I lock eyes with a tall and slender teenage girl, her dark hair in a ponytail and a headscarf around her shoulders, who is scrubbing clothes in the garden. After a short hesitation, she springs up and runs into the house.

An hour later, I have met the family: a rotund and beaming father; his deeply wrinkled 60-year-old mother, equally sweet-hearted, though complaining of a chronic headache; two daughters who tend to the fire; and two sons under 10.

They offer me my first taste of salty tea, sheer chai, and the tough bread made of mixed horsebean, lupin, and millet that I will come to learn is a staple. They are a warm and kind family; we relish trying to teach each other English words in Farsi, and vice versa. My camcorder is a point of fascination for the boys, and we mess around taking videos and photos of each other. The grandmother takes a shine to me, especially once I offer her the last of my ibuprofen, which clears up her headache for the first time in weeks. She falls fast asleep, and I make a mental note to buy whatever pens, sweets, or medication that could serve as gifts along my journey.

I retreat to my room, hoping for a moment alone. It is not to be. The two sons come bounding in. Tired of talking, I sit them in front of a compilation of Lionel Messi highlights I’d downloaded onto my phone. Then I notice the girl from the backyard peeking around the doorway with inquisitive eyes.

She is curious enough to enter the room, but every few minutes she retreats outside, as if remembering herself. The brothers ignore her and watch my phone in awe. I find her curiosity very interesting.

Eventually, she is brave enough to sit with us and even braver to speak with me in what is the best English of any of her family. We speak for some time.

I learn we are the same age and both hoping to go to university next year. Her name is Soraya.

“I have to take test in Kabul; it is very difficult. I hope very much I will pass,” she says.

I ask what she hopes to do as a job.

“I will want to become doctor,” she responds.

The Taliban’s ban on girls’ education between 1996 and 2001 galvanized a subsequent generation of Afghan women who viewed education as a hard-won right. Soraya would be the first woman in her family to attend university.

~~

Three days into my ascent, my steps are heavy though my mind is light. Each rounded corner offers a new combination of rock, river, village, crop, and mountaintop to accompany the next hour or so. Beside the path, an esoteric pictograph on a boulder reminds me that this is an ancient road. A hail of pink, sun-faded flags and a pile of rocks show I am standing near the resting place of somebody’s loved one.

I recognize where I am. This is only my second time here, but I feel at home in these mountains.

It is an arid glacial valley, so hard and firm from afar, the bare faces of mountains almost confrontational in their pincer grip on either side of the Wakhan River. At a finer scale, it is a much softer sight. On this June day, pockmarked herds of sheep and goats dot the grazing fields. Against the odds grow hawthorn branches, wild rose, and red willow. In the floodplains, the grass is saturated and soft underfoot.

The path of a Wakhi man crosses mine. He greets me with a toothy smile. A shovel is slung over his back, so I assume he is heading to a field where irrigation channels need to be maintained to keep the land arable: a primary focus of these months. The reward, besides bread, is yellow flax flowers and vibrant pastures.

He flicks his wrist to signify, “What are you doing here?”

It’s not the easiest question to answer. Four years after my first time walking the Wakhan Corridor, I am still finding my way in life.

In the intervening years, I had returned to my education, earning a degree in filmmaking and taking every opportunity to guide my studies toward ethnography and Afghanistan. But I was mostly making money by filming raves and concerts, a far cry from what inspired me. Eventually, I landed an internship at a wildlife film company, though after months sitting in an office logging footage of bears, I was restless to get back out in the world. Back in motion.

Perhaps I could settle for telling this Wakhi man that I am an “alpinist,” a word imported from the Soviets that he would understand, as there is no Wakhi word for this kind of wandering. I don’t fully relate to this word, implying as it does, that I’ve come for the mountains instead of the people.

Instead, I pull out the photos that remain in my pack. I’ve come to see the taking of images as a constant negotiation of ethics and power. This feels especially true when attempting to take on the mantle of documentarian. By giving back photographs to grateful hands, I feel I have found a method of reciprocity that I want to embed into my practice forever.

By this point of my journey, I’ve already given back many photos to families in joyful reunions, and watched them place the images on walls and windowsills. But the man takes delight in flicking through what I have left, pointing this way and that as he works out which friend or family member is in the photos and whether they live east or west of here.

He looks at me, concerned. I admit I must look depleted. In the “Roof of the World,” the sun is unhindered by the earth’s atmosphere. The temperature difference between light and shade is so severe that it causes rock to crack. He puzzles and asks me a question in the form of another imported word:

“Machina?” — meaning, why aren’t you traveling by car?

I slap my legs and repeat, “Machina.” My legs are my vehicle! He likes my joke.

My new friend pulls 10 afghanis from his pocket. I decline, gratefully, but obligingly take the nail clippers he insists upon me.

~~

Some time later — impossible to tell how long, as the days of walking have melted into one — I rest my legs by a hearth. In traditional Wakhi homes such as this one, a square of raised platforms, dukens, surround a lower central square. Wooden pillars, often engraved, hold up wattle-and-daub walls, stained by soot but scrawled with white chalk symbols for the Islamic New Year. 

Rays of sun beam down through an open skylight, performing alchemy with the billowing smoke from the tandoor to create a thickly rising plume of refracted light. I am told these skylights have historically been used as a sundial to indicate the time of day or season. If I could read them, they would tell me that it is summer.

To evade prying eyes, I have been ushered inside, where I will stay for two days as my legs recover. With so much more time spent indoors on this trip, I am glad to have traded in my old hand-me-down equipment for a digital camera that better captures details in low light.

I am sitting with three generations of the *Ashterup family and a camel who cranes her neck through the window, wetly huffing toward the makeshift opium pipe being passed among the men. The residue smells of metallic chocolate.

The talking is in Wakhi, so I am excluded by language. Nevertheless, I feel a sense of solace in their company, a sentiment that feels mutual. I have brought the family portraits I took on my last visit and spread the prints across the duken; the family discusses who is who and who is where. We have taken more photos in their home today, on the promise that I would make the trek once again to bring them these new images. We assume I will be able to return.

My friends begin to reflect on the four years that have passed. Life has taken one positive turn since 2019, in the form of the camel by our side. As villagers, they look after the large grazing herd of a richer clan. After years of good service, they have been gifted one of their own and have adorned it with a red neckerchief. It is the camel’s milk that today’s rice has been cooked in.

Before national borders were enforced around this corridor, and before trade started to bypass the Silk Road in favor of sea routes, Wakhi peasants could earn supplemental income by guiding camel caravans, pilgrims, and occasional armies through the corridor.

Now, there is no thoroughfare, and most people are reliant on their fields and animals, though the patriarch here works as a teacher. The sprawling charity network headed by the Ismaili Imam, His Highness the Aga Khan, provides healthcare, schooling, and other development that often supersedes the opportunities afforded in comparable villages in Afghanistan. The Taliban, however, do not appreciate this globalist NGO and have sought to diminish its reach.

The teacher tells me they have specifically instructed him not to teach English in classes in favor of Pashto. He defies them.

“Tell people what is happening.”

One of the daughters shoots across to the window, grabbing a pair of binoculars on the way through. It is Bibi, a giggling 7-year-old who I think vaguely remembers me. She must think me weak, defeated by tired legs. If she were allowed to go to school, she’d be making my three-day journey every school day.

In whispered Wakhi, she quiets her household. Crunching heavy tire tracks over the loose-rock road below signals the passing of a Taliban patrol, so it’s best not to draw attention to their home.

This patrol passed me by the previous day. The roar of its engine and the Pashtun or Quranic music the men play colonizes the soundscape as they pass. They own the roads now.

The patrol found me amusing, trudging onward covered in sweat and dust. A few times now, I have met their commander, who is largely playful, joking with and ribbing me.

He asked me, “Why do you always look so sad? Most people who come to the Wakhan are happy after.” His observation was correct: I was not happy in his company.

For some time, he tried to convince me to join them in the truck; they would take me the rest of the way.

Since that encounter, I have crossed the raging Wakhan River to the side of the valley that is less easily reached by vehicles. Talibs range here less frequently, and it feels slightly more autonomous. During one evening sitting for a post-Eid meal of tough mutton and rice, a bearded elder of the traditionally ruling Sayed clan assured me he was still in charge of his village.

Once the sound passes, Bibi returns to happily stoking the fire, keeping it hot for the metal wire used to ignite the men’s opium. In the corner of the room is a rabab, a lute-like wooden instrument.

Music is now banned. Eid this year had been a muted affair without the usual musical accompaniments. 

Opium, instruments, men and women sitting together — it dawns on me how many Taliban laws this family is breaking at once.

~~

*Nasrin and I are alone in her family’s house. She is 21 and speaks English well. We sit on a wide window ledge, shielded from the sun by hawthorn bent diagonally by the wind. Past the flax fields, her uncles and father strike their hoes into the ground.

She has brought me green tea. I feel awkward being served but am grateful for the hospitality. Beyond the field are the concrete walls of a military compound. A call to prayer emanates from it, making her grimace. This is not a Sunni valley, so she has yet to get used to the azan, which is foreign to her.

On my 2019 visit, the compound had stood mostly unused and obsolete. Four years later, it is overpopulated with soldiers.

When the dust dissipates, it reveals bullet-scarred outer walls to family compounds that are fortified like mini citadels.

Nasrin tells me that it was from this window in autumn 2023 that she watched the trucks roll in. Since then, she has felt imprisoned in her home.

Nasrin tells me she can never be happy when she can’t leave her home. She doesn’t bother to cover her hair; she says she doesn’t see the point — though I note she does when her father is home. I ask her about her dreams.

“I want to study business abroad so I can make a business selling traditional Wakhi textiles,” she says. “But to want is to be able.” 

She pauses before asking: “Do you think it is possible?”

I tell her about Soraya, the girl about her age I met in Ishkashim on my first visit, who had spoken of wanting to become a doctor. “I saw her family last week,” I tell Nasrin. “On the day the Taliban returned, she had been able to board a plane from Kabul to America. Now she is studying to be a nurse. They said she had sent them a picture of her driving a car.”

Nasrin smiles at the image in her head. She asks me to photograph her sitting on her windowsill. She wants to see herself.

“I like to look at the stars,” she tells me. “When I look at the stars at night, I know they are the same stars that you can see from free countries.”

~~

For a few moments, I am the only man left in the parked car.  The hand on my shoulder, it turns out, belongs to one of the sisters in the backseat.

“I want you to take my number,” comes her voice.

I had not expected to speak with these women, nor had I guessed that one of them knew English.

I oblige, aware that time is of the essence. As she dials her contact into my notes app, my attention shifts from the photos hidden in my bag and the trouble my Wakhi friends might find themselves in if the Taliban discovered the portraits of their wives, daughters, and sisters. For this reason, I also carry a decoy memory card, full of nature images, in case a Talib were to scroll through my photos.

The woman explains her situation as she hands back my phone. She is, or was, a prosecutor, university-educated and previously employed in Kabul.

I glance back briefly to see her face. She is in her mid-20s; her eyes are steely. I check outside the window too, confirming we have time. The Talib has gone behind a rock to relieve himself.

She continues. The Taliban have raided their office and demanded the women no longer come into work. Her superiors have, at great risk, continued to allow them to come in once a month, but this has become neither economically viable nor a risk worth taking. Visible protest on the streets of Kabul was bravely carried out immediately after the Taliban returned to power. By this point, protest has become subversive, taking place in secret schools for girls inside homes, in hidden employment in crafts and textiles. In this very conversation.

I ask what I can do to help.

“Tell people what is happening,” she answers.

~~

A few days later, farther up the valley, I am fumbling in my bag when I find a makeshift envelope. Inside are perfumed letters, with leaves stuck to the back and drawings along the margins, sneaked into my bag by Nasrin at some point after our teatime conversation. In the letters, she demands my secrecy.

“The situation gives me a hundred reasons to cry, to be sad, to lose hope,” she writes. “Every day I look at the blue sky of Qala-e-Panja, it gives me peace and makes me feel alive… Daydreaming is the best way to hide pain and remedy the heart…” 

~~

We have taken more photos in their home today, on the promise that I would make the trek once again to bring them these new images. We assume I will be able to return.

The turbaned Talib in front of me stands between me and the permit I would need to return to the Wakhan Corridor. It is December 2025, two and a half years after my last visit and six and a half years after my first. I am back in Afghanistan shooting a commissioned documentary on U.S. bombing campaigns in the eastern province of Nangarhar. Now, I hope to complete the trip with another walk through the northern mountains.

I imagine the snow is deep up the steep, tanned escarpment that flanks it to the north and south, hiding Tajikistan and Pakistan from view. Wakhi people, some of whom I hope I may call friends, are sheltered from vicious winds inside their adobe homes, sitting around their tandoors with salted tea on the boil. Though the chilled landscape would be mostly evacuated, with family returning from higher pastures and no work left to do in the fields until springtime, perhaps generations are gathering in the comforting heat of the fire and each other.

I don’t know. I can only imagine these scenes, having been there only twice, walking its length first in the spring of 2019 and then in the summer of 2023.

The official’s denial leaves me despondent.

“There is a diplomatic mission in Badakhshan…” says the official.

“Another journalist recently strayed too far…” says the accomplice.

“The snow is very deep…” etc.

I don’t believe a word. For whatever reason, the journalist visa that had granted me unprecedented access to one province was now blocking me from another. A province that has meant so much since I first trod there when I was barely older than the assistant before me.

With that decision, my promise to return more family photographs is left unrealized. The prints will stay in the lining of my bag, awaiting another opportunity. Until they are seen by their true owners, I feel they remain incomplete.

~~

Without internet access in most of the Wakhan Corridor, my only means of communicating with the Wakhi is to visit them face to face. In transitioning to my burner phone for my work in Nangarhar, the few contacts who had access to internet via Tajik SIM cards have been deleted.

Nasrin’s words take on new meaning: To want is to be able.

With the gradual efforts to cut a road through the Wakhan into China, maybe a new era of connectivity will eventually reach the corridor. A few Wakhi people had expressed enthusiasm for the opportunities that might open for them if their valley were once again a thoroughfare for trade and travel, as it had been centuries ago.

For now, I am locked out from the corridor in all but memory.

I still have a number for Soraya, the nursing student, though, from when I sent her a family photograph in 2023. Back then, she had replied to say she missed them. She was in Texas, safe but alone.

I send her a new message. I often think of her — but maybe she means more to me than I do to her. WhatsApp shows my text has been read, but no response ever comes.

~~

And still, I have a promise to keep — to the woman who asked me to share their stories.

~~

I am locked out from the corridor in all but memory.

Seated atop a rocky hillock, I watch the world go past. It is 2019, and I have made it to Sarhad, the final village in the Wakhan Corridor before it reaches the Little Pamir, where the nomadic Kyrgyz rule. These meadows surrounding Sarhad are expansive and heavenly, like a wide throne atop the valley at nearly 10,000 feet.

I sit among a handful of children who giggle as they scroll through my phone and fiddle with my tape camera. They crawl over each other to be involved in the fun. I spot a boy with a shaven head, in a gray fleece and camouflage trousers that make him blend into the scree perfectly.

Soon after I sit with him, the others emerge to join us.

“Nametan chi ast?” — What is your name?

One by one, I ask the children. It is the process of figuring each other out. Who are you, who am I, who are we in relation to each other? What are you not that I am, and vice versa?

I spot parents poking their heads out of their doorways, keeping tabs on us.

The valley is awash with animals. Horses graze, the most expensive and prestigious animals of the valley. Yaks feed alongside them. Children in the distance brave the shallow ponds of glacier meltwater. Cries of mothers summon families to dinner.

Though I don’t yet know this, the days and nights spent among these kind people and open pastures will redirect my life.

For now, it is good to sit. It has been a long walk up the valley over many days, and I overpacked. I feel it most in my hips and shoulders, where my rucksack has left sore imprints. I make a note to travel lighter next time.

I hope for a next time.