'Memory boxes': Remembering Afghanistan's dead

Kabul: Nargis's husband wrote beautiful letters, even from a Taliban prison. But after the insurgents tortured and killed him, those pieces of paper became painful reminders of loss until a Kabul museum asked her to share them.

The modest space in the basement of an Afghan non-profit has exhibited dozens of "memory boxes" filled with mementos ranging from photographs and journals to perfume and plastic toys - all belonging to victims of conflict.

Now 48, Nargis was a penniless mother of five - her youngest was just seven months old - when her husband was murdered two decades ago. Eleven years later, one of her sons, an Afghan soldier, went missing and has never resurfaced.

The Afghanistan Center for Memory and Dialogue is the first museum devoted to victims of conflict in the war-torn country.

The museum, which is temporarily closed during the coronavirus crisis, aims to do just that, featuring narratives in English and Dari, accompanied by images of the victims - blurry photographs, sharp studio portraits and, in the case of some who perhaps never saw a camera in their lives, faded identity papers.

Many of the exhibits feature the very old mourning the very young, underlining the catastrophic losses faced by a country that has been at war for generations. | A 'memory box' with a pile of belongings of victims collected from sites of several suicide attacks in Afghanistan.

A pink toy dressing table, a doll wearing red plastic shoes and a sweater covered in tiny black hearts: the life of a little girl killed in a Kabul bombing is distilled into a heartbreaking vignette pieced together by her grandfather.

Nik Mohammad Sharif, whose brother Dawood was jailed and executed by Soviet-backed Communists in 1979, told AFP he struggled to convince members of his family to participate in the project. "These are the only things left of my brother," Sharif, 57, said, referring to Dawood's photographs and the letters he smuggled out in empty toothpaste tubes.