New Delhi: According to international media reports, the ‘green-eyed girl’, who became the face of the Afghan war after a National Geographic cover in 1985, has been evacuated to a safe haven in Italy after fleeing the Taliban.
She was only 12 years old, living in a refugee camp in Pakistan, when American photographer Steve McCurry photographed her.
The Italian government said in a statement on Thursday, “Afghan citizens have arrived in Rome with syrup.”
A statement issued by Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s office did not specify when she arrived in the country.
In September, Italy said it had evacuated some 5,000 Afghans from the troubled country after it came under Taliban control in August.
According to reports, Rome responded to requests from non-profit organizations in Afghanistan to help him leave the country now under Taliban control, and for him to reach Italy “as part of a wider evacuation program for Afghan civilians”. Organized.
Italy was among the five countries most involved in the US-led NATO mission in Afghanistan for nearly two decades, along with Germany, Britain and Turkey.
Earlier this month, Rome said it had granted citizenship to Maria Bashir, Afghanistan’s first female chief prosecutor, who arrived there on September 9.
Who is Sharbat Gula?
The photograph of a green-eyed Afghan girl peeping through her headscarf made her an internationally known face, but it was not before 2002 that the world knew her name.
Photographer McCurry had successfully found him in a remote Afghan village after 17 years of searching. She was then the mother of three children and married a local baker.
National Geographic then published another version with Sharbat Gula on the cover, this time with her full identity verified by an FBI analyst, a forensic sculptor and inventor of iris recognition.
Quoting Gula, an AFP report said she came to Pakistan as an orphan for the first time, nearly four years after the 1979 Soviet invasion.
While McCurry found her in Afghanistan in 2002, Gula later resurfaced in Pakistan.
In 2016, Pakistan deported him back to Afghanistan after he was arrested and held on fake identity documents. By then Gula had become a widowed mother of four children.
A Reuters report said that welcoming her back, then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani promised her a home to ensure that she “lives with honor and security in her homeland”.
According to a report in DailyMail, Ghani said of Gullah at the time, “As a child, she captured the hearts of millions because she was a symbol of displacement.”
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