Thomas James Hurst

International: Afghanistan

In 1996 in the capital city of Kabul, government forces waged a failed defense against the Taliban. Surrounded and compromised by warring factions, the city could no longer provide services for the innocents, among them the women and children.

Afghan Government soldiers battle to hold their positions around Kabul against advancing Taliban forces.©Thomas James Hurst
   
A young girl walks through the rubble and destruction that years of fighting have brought to the neighborhoods of Kabul in Afghanistan.©Thomas James Hurst
   
Doctors inside Kabul’s main hospital work to clean the boy’s partially severed hand.©Thomas James Hurst
     
  
A young boy and his mother wait for doctors at the main hospital inside Kabul.©Thomas James Hurst
   
Billboards from the Organization for Mine Clearance & Afghan Rehabilitation or OMAR are painted on walls to help the citizens of Kabul identify the hidden threats in and around the Afghan capital. After years of war and conflict millions of the landmines, booby-traps, and unexploded ammunitions lay strewn around the country.©Thomas James Hurst
   
A man waits to be fitted with a prosthetic after losing his leg to a landmine while walking in a field.©Thomas James Hurst
     
  
Afghan Government soldiers battle to hold their positions around Kabul against advancing Taliban forces.©Thomas James Hurst
   
A boy lays unconscious in Kabul’s main hospital.©Thomas James Hurst
   
Almost as though she is part of the mud and earth landscape surrounding her, an Afghan woman in her burka walks through a crumbling and destroyed neighborhood inside the capital of Kabul.©Thomas James Hurst
     
  
An orhpan's eyes are captured in a piece of broken mirror as he looks up from his reading. The mirror is a toy he uses to reflect sunlight while he and other children are out at play.©Thomas James Hurst
   
In a Kabul orphanage, young orphans are gathered together for a photograph. The orphanage works to feed, educate, and teach trades or crafts to the more than 700 children they care for.©Thomas James Hurst
   
Cooks in Kabul’s orphanage stoke the fires and boil water so that they can finish preparing lunch for the more than 700 children the institution cares for.©Thomas James Hurst
     
  
Women in burkas wait with their children at a food distribution center in Kabul. Many women, having lost their husbands to the wars and conflicts raging in Afghanistan, cannot legally work or earn a living and are left begging on the streets or fighting long lines at aid organizations, to keep their family together. Many women must give up their children to the orphanage so that they can keep themselves and their children from starving to death.©Thomas James Hurst
   
Three men take shelter from the rain under the metal roof a family members gravesite at Kabul’s largest cemetery.©Thomas James Hurst
   
An old Afghani man trudges up the road running through Kabul’s largest cemetery and into the hills overlooking the capital city.©Thomas James Hurst