Italy takes in National Geographic’s green-eyed ‘Afghan Girl’

Italy has given safe haven to Sharbat Gula, the green-eyed “ Afghan Girl” whose 1985 print in National Geographic came a symbol of her country’s wars, Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s office said on Thursday.

The government interposed after Gula asked for help to leave Afghanistan following the Taliban preemption of the country in August, a statement said, adding that her appearance was part of a broader programme to void and integrate Afghan citizens. US photographer Steve McCurry took the picture of Gula when she was a youth, living in a exile camp on the Pakistan-Afghan border Her astounding green eyes, gaping out from a headscarf with a admixture of ferocity and pain, made her know internationally but her identity was only discovered in 2002 when McCurry returned to the region and tracked herdown.An FBI critic, forensic sculptor and the innovator of iris recognition all vindicated her identity, National Geographic said at the time.

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In 2016, Pakistan arrested Gula for forging a public identity card in an trouble to live in thecountry.The also Afghan chairman, Ashraf Ghani, ate her back and promised to give her an apartment to insure she “ lives with quality and security in her motherland”. Since seizing power, Taliban leaders have said they would admire women’s rights in agreement with sharia, or Islamic law. But under Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001, women couldn’t work and girls were banned from academy. Women had to cover their faces and be accompanied by a manly relative when they left home.