Category Archives: General

General information about Afghan rugs and carpets.

Rug Fire

Several days ago I heard that three “lorries” of carpets burnt at Torkham, Afghanistan. A Loya Jirga was held in Torkham today to get to the bottom of the fire. The burnt carpets were reportedly fine quality Turkmen, including silks, from Mazar I’ Sharif bound for Peshawar.

Torkham is 225 km from Kabul and 55 km from Peshawar


Female Anti-Narcotics Officers in Afghanistan

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TO NEIGHBOURS, Sheima looks like a kindergarten teacher. The diminutive 26-year-old Afghan sets off from her mud-brick house in west Kabul each morning in a headscarf, long shirt and baggy pants. She even tucks textbooks under her arm to keep up the illusion.

But Sheima’s job is far from elementary. She is part of a new counter-narcotics force fighting on the front line of Afghanistan’s war on drugs. Once she has made her way through the dusty chaos of Kabul’s streets, she swaps her traditional garb for khaki fatigues, combat boots, dark sunglasses and an AK-47 Kalashnikov.

“I have to live a double life,” said Sheima, who — unusually for an Afghan woman — wears her hair short and chews gum.

“Only my immediate family know what I do. I haven’t even told my other relatives because the heroin traders have spies everywhere. If they found out, they’d probably kill me.”

2 Women Catch 2 Al Qaeda Terrorists

An intelligence official said one of the suspects had identified himself as Ahmed and said he came from Egypt. “He is in his 60s and has been living in the area for about two years,” the official said, on condition of anonymity.

“Two female undercover agents posing as village women visited the home and then intelligence agents conducted the raid,” another security official said.

“He is an old Arab claiming to be Egyptian and married to a local ethnic Pashtun girl.”

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Small Part of Afghanistan’s Pilfered Cultural Heritage Returned

Investigators for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency tracked down the two stolen coins in the United States a few months ago, after they had surfaced earlier in Pakistan.

The Indo-Greek coins, dating to between 171 and 160 B.C. — soon after the time of Alexander the Great – had originally been discovered by a 1971 French-led archeological expedition near the Oxus River in northeastern Afghanistan.

Handing the coins over to Karzai after a brief signing ceremony, Michael Garcia, Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for immigration and customs enforcement, said the effort to help Afghans to recover their rich cultural heritage reflected “that great spirit of respect and cooperation that exists between our two countries.”

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“What’s another name for pirate treasure?”


Heinrich Schliemann’s famous “Gold of Troy” at the Pushkin Museum’s “booty” exhibition.

NY Times’

None have been seen in public in more than 60 years. All are spoils of war, seized by Soviet troops from the ruins of Berlin in 1945 and carted back to Moscow. The exhibition – especially because of its timing – could easily be viewed as either a memorial to the ravages of war or as the taunt of a boastful victor.
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The most famous is a collection of gold known as Priam’s Treasure, recovered by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1873 in what he believed to be ancient Troy. The Pushkin displayed the treasures in 1996 and has since dropped any question of its return. The gold is back in storage.

Afghan Music Project

Adam Gouttierre and Chris Becherer, both MBA students at UC Berkeley, blogging about their trip to Afghanistan as a part of the Afghan Music Project (AMP). “The Afghan Music Project (AMP) is a social venture with the goal of raising the awareness of the beauty of traditional Afghan music and the tragic, but uplifting, story of Afghan women through a professionally recorded album. Proceeds from the AMP album will go towards funding educational scholarships for Afghan women.” Their blog entries have been extremely interesting so far (Link) – particularly as they talk about the impact of the Newsweek article (Link) and the rumored kidnapping of another westerner (Link).

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From boingboing.net