What I know about the Taliban

Sippi Azarbaijani Moghaddam spent 20 years observing the Taliban. She argues that we can learn to engage with them more effectively if we look at their violence as performative

An evening cuppa while searching for a lost convoy of medical supplies in the remote Zibok district (Sippi Azarbaijani Moghaddam)

It was April 1995, and I was preparing to travel to Afghanistan for my first volunteer post with a UK charity. I had travelled to London to meet the Afghanistan director for the NGO I was going to be working for and was sat in their tiny office facing him. My father had travelled to Afghanistan in the 1970s and loved it. His stories had mesmerised me. After years of dreaming about going to Afghanistan, I would finally be on my way.

I was nervous and had no idea what to expect; whether I would find the war-torn nation I had read about in the newspapers, or the beautiful country photographed by Roland and Sabrina Michaud – photographers who roamed Afghanistan in the 1970s and captured a wealth of faces and landscapes in their incredible photobooks. I asked the director about the threat of the Taliban. He said: “Sippi, by the time the Taliban take Afghanistan, I’ll be dead and you’ll be an old lady.”

How wrong he was.