Hazara Nation

Local leaders got permission to bury the bodies. The frozen corpses had to be separated with boiling water. Two weeks later, the fighting started anew. According to Human Rights Watch, Taliban forces burned down more than 4,000 homes, shops, and public buildings. They destroyed entire towns in western Bamian Province. Villagers fled into the mountains, then looked down and watched their homes burn.Many took sanctuary in Waras, where Shafaq's family—mother, father, and seven siblings—were struggling to find food. Shafaq stopped studying and started teaching—Hazarajat schools today are full of teachers who didn't finish grade school. But his dreams were fading. "I was not very hopeful because I was thinking the Taliban will stay for another 10 or 20 years," he says.

The Taliban's onslaught was at its peak when planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It was a deus ex machina, says Michael Semple, who documented, at great personal risk, the 2001 Yakawlang massacre. After U.S. forces drove the Taliban from power, expectations rose. The Hazaras, in particular, thought deliverance was at hand. "I've operated in the days when Hazaras felt they were virtually faced with an apartheid system," Semple says. "Now it's a totally different kettle of fish."

But it is hard for Hazaras like Shafaq to trust this moment. "I would like to see a place where the dreams of young people are attainable," he says, "where there is a church and a Hindu temple, where other religions can exist. That is the aim of pluralism." He dreams of the teaching job at Kabul University and of marrying a woman back home. She is the daughter of family friends, a Sayed Shiite who traces her lineage to the prophet Muhammad. Sayed families do not customarily let their daughters marry Hazara men. But in this new era, maybe it is possible.

From the sky, Hazarajat is a slide show of stunning landscapes: The purple-hued canyonlands around Bamian, the deep blue waters of Band-e Amir Lake, cloud-piercing peaks rising from mountain passes near Waras. On the ground, it's a different story. For those who live here, this is a hard land with a hard history, from which they must wring a life.
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