Masooma has severe burns over 70% of her body. The 18-year-old is one of the many women who choose extreme pain or death rather than a forced marriage to a cruel husband.Two children smoke heroin while their mother, Sabera, lies slumped against a wall. Their home is a tiny storage room in Kabul. Zaher, 14, and Gulpari, 12, inhale the drug out of a canoe-shaped piece of foil, a skill learned from their widowed mother who has been an addict for four years.
Heroin is readily available and costs the equivalent of a dollar a hit.These photographs of an unpredictable and precarious existence are part of a powerful body of work by photojournalist Paula Bronstein; they bear out the verdict of international rights groups that Afghanistan is one of the worst places for women to live.
Second-class citizens
Many of the more than 2.5-million war widows in Afghanistan are penniless and powerless and are forced to beg on the streets. Widows are often seen as a bad omen by Afghan society. Violence against girls is pervasive and child marriage common. Anguish and desperation force many Afghan women to try to burn themselves alive to escape forced marriages and domestic abuse.
"It's a man's world; it's their domain," Bronstein said. "You even see it, how it starts out with the kids. How a boy of 12 behaves in middle school and high school. These boys think they own the world. They think they can do whatever they want. Unless the teacher says absolutely not and they get slapped for it. But then in their homes, women are not treated fairly.
"I was the only female who would be doing these kinds of stories, getting intimate access with a female signature and a different angle to it. Because when you work in a country like Afghanistan it makes a real difference."In 2001 Bronstein travelled to Afghanistan to document the US-led military operation "Occupation Enduring Freedom" in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
"Everywhere you looked there was destruction from the bombing. It was definitely a revenge attack," she told a British newspaper. "For the Americans it was seen as essential to do something. They had hit the heart of the US, they had attacked the Twin Towers. The death toll and the destruction ... the US had never felt anything like that."
Captivated by the indomitable resilience and spirit of the Afghan people and the rugged beauty of their country's landscape, Bronstein has made Afghanistan her mission ever since.
She has returned repeatedly over the past 14 years to document everyday lives against the backdrop of a brutal and protracted war. This peerless body of work has been gathered together for the first time in a powerful monograph, Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear.
Finding reasons to smile
Sixteen years after US-led forces invaded Afghanistan in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the country remains at war...