In a dusty slum, life is too grim to care about war

War on Terrorism: Refugees

"My father was driving to the office," says Dr Jamila Sultani, "when a missile landed on his car and killed him."

Her father was a judge in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan; her family, six sisters and one brother, lived comfortable, privileged lives in a city that was "as beautiful as Moscow" as she puts it.

"We had a peaceful, pleasant life. We had our own house and car, there were plenty of shops, plenty of things to buy, we had lots of nice things, we all went to school. We were happy then," she admits.

Now, Dr Sultani shares one unfurnished room with her husband and daughters and works in a tiny, primitive clinic on the outskirts of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. On a good day, she is paid 100 rupees, a little more than £1. She has not been able to afford to send her two daughters, Anita, 11, and Sunita, 10, to school.

"Every afternoon they go to the markets in town, touting potato chips," she says. "They don't get home before midnight."

Islamabad is an orderly, planned city, built on a grid, with the comfortable homes of Pakistan's professional classes set on pleasant leafy avenues. But drive to the edge of the city, to the Sector I/11, and you come to something completely different: a shanty town built by Afghan migrants which is as squalid and congested as any slum in South Asia.

The first settlers moved in as long ago as 1967 and built themselves mud hovels. The township has been growing ever since. Islamabad has 150,000 Afghans, and all the poor ones live here.

There is no electricity, gas, piped water or sewage. A perpetual dust haze hangs in the air. The mud lane into the colony has potholes full of plastic bags and stinking, stagnant water. In a large army tent inside the colony, idle youths kill time playing pool. Next to the tent is a patch of wasteland used as a defecating area. Next to that is the graveyard.

Three hours' drive away, tens of thousands of Afghans gather near the long and porous border, trying to find a way into Pakistan to escape the looming war. But no sense of crisis or emergency excites the stagnant air of Kuccha Abadi, as the slum is known.

The residents have been there too long and too hopelessly to take much interest in anything. "We have no opinion about any American attack," says Abdul Rahman, a tall, bearded figure who runs a miniature grocery store inside a mud hut at the entrance of the colony.

"We don't care whether they attack or not, the only thing that concerns us is our miserable conditions here."

A crowd of fellow Afghans who are listening in, both young and old, concur noisily. "I've been living here for 25 years," Abdul goes on. "Sometimes the Pakistanis come and ask for bribes not to knock the place down. There is no school for our children, they start working at the age of six or seven, touting things on the market."

Fifty yards along the lane, Dr Sultani and her colleague, Dr Zainab Qureshi, are sitting in the crude, bare clinic where they work, waiting for patients. The life of a refugee is a great equaliser: both Jamila and Zainab come from Kabul's Westernised upper-middle class, but now they are down in the dust with everyone else, trying to make a difference.

Jamila has strong eyebrows, large, intense brown eyes and a dimple in her chin. She covers her hair with a polka dot scarf. Zainab, some years older than Jamila, who is 34, is swathed in tangerine chiffon. Despite the heat and dust, she has retained her ivory complexion and has a look of quizzical bemusement deep in her pale blue eyes.

"My father was a government minister," she explains, "Minister of Trade and Commerce in the time of King Zahir Shah. My brother was killed during the rule of President Najibullah and my daughter in the Taliban's time – killed by a missile fired by the Northern Alliance. She was 17. And my son, who was 16, simply disappeared.

"I still don't know where he is or what has happened to him. We never found my daughter's body – the situation was awful, we were terrified, we just fled."

Both women grew up during Afghanistan's liberal interlude, when girls had the same educational opportunities as boys. "I studied medicine in Leningrad," says Jamila. "I was there for six years. When I came back to Kabul, the Taliban had taken control of the city. I worked in a hospital there for eight months, but they didn't pay my salary. After that they banned me from working altogether, so we came here."

Jamila has six children, two still live with her. The four of them, including her husband, who is disabled, share a single room. "My children want to have an education – they know their sums and how to read and write but we can't afford school," she explains.

The situation is desperate, and there is no way out. "There is no place for us to go," says Zainab. "All countries are closed to us, so we are bound to stay here.

If things improved I would be glad to go back to Afghanistan," says Jamila. "But the whole situation is the will of Allah, and we can only accept it."