The government intervened after Sharbat Gula had asked for help to leave Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover of the country in August, a statement said, adding her arrival was part of a broader programme to evacuate and integrate Afghan citizens. Her face is the only image ever in its long illustrious history to appear three times on the covers of National Geographic.
The government of Italy .has given safe haven to Sharbat Gula (45), the green-eyed “Afghan Girl” whose 1985 cover photo in National Geographic became a symbol of her country’s wars, according to a statement issued from the office of Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s . on Thursday.
Without giving any specific date of her arrival, the statement simply said: “Afghan citizen Sharbat Gula has arrived in Rome”.
Rome’s initiative is part of the government’s response to pleas from non-profit organisations working in Afghanistan to help her leave the Taliban-controlled country, “organising for her to travel to Italy as part of the wider evacuation programme in place for Afghan citizens and the government’s plan for their reception and integration”.
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Sharbat’s iconic photo was taken as a 12-year-old by US photographer Steve McCurry. At that time she was living as an orphaned refugee along with her sisters, brothers and grandmother in Nasir Bagh, a Pakistani regfugee camp along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Her face is the only image ever in its long, illustrious history to appear three times on the covers of National Geographic.
In 1992 at 13 she was married to an Afghani baker Rahmat Gula and returned to Afghanistan forthwith. After her husband’s death in 2012, she was back again as a refugee in a Pakistani camp until she was deported in 2016.
During her 20 years of marriage, she had 4 daughters (the last was (stillborn) and a son.
Sharbat said she had first arrived in Pakistan as an orphan, some four or five years after the Soviet invasion of 1979, one of millions of Afghans who have sought refuge over the border since. .
In 2016, Pakistan arrested Gula for forging a national identity card in an effort to live in the country and sent her back to Afghanistan.
As the National Geographic’s ‘cover girl’, Gula, became internationally recognised as the face of war, a searing image of what the word “refugee” hascommme to symbolise globally; of innocent people unwittingly trapped in a vortex of unending devastation and displacement, brought on as a result of it.
But after all said and done, she was to remain a nobody for the next 17 years: An unknown face – without a name, an identity or a country.
After 17 years In 2002, the National Geographic photographer McCurry, whose searing portrait of Sharbat had moved the world, travelled back to that region and managed to track her down. An FBI analyst, forensic sculptor and the inventor of iris recognition John Daugman verified her identity. These findings were corroborated by National Geographic at the time.
Over the years “The Girl with Green Eyes”, has inspired volumes of writings in the form of news, commentary, literature, poetry, documentaries and music. .
In 2015, the Finnish metal band dedicated a song to her titled “Nightwish”. The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz ensemble had composed a piece of stirring music “Here be Dragons” as a tribute to her in 2009.
The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz was a dark jazz Dutch band formed in Utrecht, Netherlands, in 2000. The group is composed of Jason Kohnen, Gideon Kiers, trombonist Hilary Jeffery, cellist Nina Hitz, singer Charlotte Cegarra, guitarist Eelco Bosman, and violinist Sadie Anderson.
A poem titled “Afghan Girl” by Gertrud Schnakenberg was published in the New England Review in 2017. The poet starte writing the poem in 2012.
In Urdu her name means a refreshing cool drink made from the extract of flower petals, mainly rose petals – ‘Sharbat’ meaning refreshing, cool drink, and ‘Gula’ meaning petals, or more appropriately rose petals. But it could just as well mean something else in her native language, Pashtun.
In early September this year, Rome said it had evacuated almost 5,000 Afghans from Afghanistan after the Taliban seized power in August.
Earlier this month the government .said it had granted citizenship to Afghanistan’s first woman chief prosecutor, Maria Bashir, after she had arrived in the European country on September 9.
Italy was one of five countries most involved with NATO’s US-led mission in Afghanistan along with Germany, Britain and Turkey.
Scarred irreversibly by the ravages of time and circumstances, Sharbat has aged far beyond her years, so different from that 1985 portrait of “startling green eyes, peering out from a headscarf with a mixture of ferocity and pain”. But the independence and courage of her unbending spirit still remains – as strong as ever.
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