American photojournalist, Steve McCurry, took this picture of Sharbat Gula in 1984 when she was 12 years old, in Nasir Baghrefugee camp in Pakistan, while covering the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
The image of the Afghan woman has risen to the discussion of social networking sites recently, after tightening Taleban Its control over the country, as tweeters circulated the image, considering that “it always says everything about Afghanistan”, in reference to the charm and beauty it represents, and the misery of reality at the same time.
Searching for the Mona Lisa
The photo first appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine, June 1985 issue. No information was known about the owner of the photo at the time, except that she appeared to be a green-eyed teenage girl wearing a red veil, while staring sharply at the camera.
After the picture spread in the West, it was likened to the Mona Lisa by “Leonardo da Vinci”, and he called it “the Mona Lisa of the first world in the third world.”
Despite the fame that Jolas image achieved, her owner was out of the equation, as she did not know anything about her, until journalist Steve McCurry decided to search for Jola, and made several attempts during the nineties to find her, all of which were unsuccessful.
In 2002, the National Geographic team traveled to Afghanistan to search for the woman in the picture, and after an exhaustive search, the team finally found Sharbat Gula, in a remote area of Afghanistan, where she was about 30 years old at the time.
Gullas identity was confirmed by Cambridge University professor John Daugman using iris recognition technology, by running iris recognition algorithms on enlarged images of eye regions in her old photograph taken in 1984 and a recent image taken in 2002.
After Gula was found, more recent photos of her were featured as part of a cover story about her life in the April 2002 issue of National Geographic, and were also the subject of a television documentary, Searching for the Afghan Girl, which aired in March 2002.
In recognition of Gula, National Geographic created the Afghan Girls’ Fund, a charitable organization aimed at educating Afghan girls and young women. In 2008, the fund was expanded to include boys, and the name was changed to the Afghan Children’s Fund.
National Geographic also covered the costs of medical treatment for Golas family, and the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Suffering and government support
Sharbat Gula lived a difficult life, as she was born in 1972, and fled with her family from their village in eastern Nangarharprovince during the Soviet Union’s bombing of Afghanistan at the end of the seventies, where she walked with her family through the mountains to Pakistan, towards the Nasir Baghrefugee camp in 1984.
Gula married between the ages of 13 and 16, and returned to her village in Afghanistan in 1992. She is a widow, has three daughters, and her husband died of hepatitis C in 2012.
On October 26, 2016, the Pakistani authorities arrested SharbatGula, for living in Pakistan with false documents, and sentenced her to fifteen days in prison and deported her to Afghanistan, at which time Amnesty International criticized the decision.
In Kabul, President Ashraf Ghani and former President Hamid Karzai received at the presidential palace Sharbat Gula and her children, with promises of financial support.
In December 2017, Gula and her three daughters were given a 3,000-square-foot (280-square-meter) home in Kabul.
Sharbat Gula is still witness to the tragedies of her country to this day, as her old image regurgitates the painful old memories of the past.