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  • Shah-do-Shamshira Mosque is known as the Mosque of the King with Two Swords. It was built in the 1920s on the order of King Amanullah’s mother on the site of one of Kabul’s first mosques named in honour of an early Muslim king who died fighting Hindu inva

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • The former home of Jangalak Industries, a metalworking factory that once had a workforce of 1,800 but was wrecked during the civil war in the 1990s. It is now used as a massive storage yard for scrap metal. This area is all discarded hospital beds and sch

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • The Sham-e-Paris (‘Parisian Evenings’) wedding hall in the Taymani neighbourhood. Common in Pakistan, these huge wedding complexes have sprung up all over Kabul with dining and entertainment halls to seat a thousand on each floor and even an on-site honey

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • Jaw Aka Faisal Nahman and his daughter Nono from Bamiyan province, now living in an improvised plastic shelter in the ruined gardens of Darulaman Palace. Built in the 1920s to house an Afghan parliament, ‘Darul Aman’ translates as ‘abode of peace’.

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • The swimming pool that crowns Tepe Wazir Akhbar Khan, built by the Soviets in the 1970s and restored in recent times at great expense by USAID. It is uncertain if it will ever be used.

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • The seemingly endless number of helicopter pads and hangars at Camp Bastion.

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
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  • ‘Radio TV Mountain’ in the centre of Kabul seen from where the Kabul River cuts through the mountains creating the Deh Mazang gorge. In the first Anglo-Afghan War it was the site of a crucial skirmish and hasty retreat by badly outnumbered British cavalry

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • The districts of Wazir Akhbar Khan and Sherpur, home to all the NGOs and contractors, occupy the site of the former British fortress from the Second Anglo-Afghan War, ‘the Cantonment’. Glitzy, kitschy ‘poppy-palaces’, flung upon a hectic property boom aft

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • The peripheries of the city of Kabul, especially to the north and east are endless building sites. Since most of the documentation concerning land title was lost during the war, much of this speculative and illegal construction is concerned more with esta

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • At Waisalabad high above West Kabul. It has taken 26 men from the Mine Detection Centre and four de-mining dogs more than three months to clear mines from an area the size of a few soccer pitches. Kabul’s rapid expansion has increased pressure for buildin

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • Pakistani ‘Jingle Trucks’ end their long journey up from Karachi at the gates of Kandahar Air Field where they wait to be scanned, x-rayed and searched. Only people, ammunition and emergency requirements come by aircraft. Warlord-owned security companies

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • One of the huge logistics compounds at Camp Leatherneck. A modern, technological army needs hundreds of thousands of different kinds of objects in order to keep it working. A $100m warplane can be grounded for the want of a $1 part. Supplying these things

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
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