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Posted on 03/13/2002 10:15:56 AM PST by ThePythonicCow
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For nearly two decades, National Geographic (news - web sites) has been flooded with requests for information about a beautiful Afghan teen-ager with piercing green eyes whose cover image became one of its most recognized photographs.
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"Every time I went there (to Afghanistan or Pakistan), I asked about her, but I never had any leads," freelance photographer Steve McCurry, who took the picture for National Geographic in 1984, told Reuters.
McCurry says hardly a day has gone by that people have not asked him about the young woman, whose name he did not take down when he took her picture for the January 1985 cover of National Geographic.
This January, he returned with a National Geographic team to the Nasir Bagh refugee camp in Pakistan where he took the picture and found someone who said he grew up with the woman's brother.
"The refugee camp was set to close and so I knew this was my only chance to find her," said McCurry. "I couldn't believe it when the brother finally turned up with his sister. I knew immediately it was her."
The woman, who is now about 30 years old, was identified as Sharbat Gula. She remembered McCurry taking the picture but had never seen a copy of it and was surprised and embarrassed by all the attention it attracted.
Gula got married shortly after McCurry first saw her and had four daughters, one of whom died in infancy. She was repatriated from the camp in 1992 and returned to Afghanistan with her family.
Her life had been tough in Afghanistan and McCurry said she had struggled to survive.
"What the second picture shows is that she is still alive and survived quite well in fact ... but that pain and hardship is still written in her face. It is not a face of joy," he added.
NEW PHOTOS TAKEN
A conservative Pashtun, Gula sought her husband's permission to lift her veil to show her face for the latest photographs, which appear in National Geographic's April edition.
McCurry said he saw Gula as a representative of the plight of the Afghan people, who endured an extended war with the Soviet Union and the rise and fall of the Taliban.
"She's really emblematic of the Afghan spirit," he said, adding that a education fund had been set up by National Geographic for young Afghan girls.
National Geographic used several scientific methods to ensure they had found the right woman, including iris recognition in which the colored portion of the eye is examined.
No two human irises are the same and a direct match holds a near 100 percent probability of authenticity, National Geographic said. The woman's eyes were found to be a perfect match.
At first I thought she'd received one of those "free nose jobs" courtesy of a stick-swinging Taliban thug. After looking at it a bit longer, I believe that the earlier picture simply has more dramatic shadows, whereas the recent picture looks like something the motor vehicle office would put on a driver's license. It's the same person, but the mileage is readily evident.
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Agreed. The women in countries such as Afghanistan are the biggest victims of Islamic fundamentalist savagery. The knuckle-draggers here should take that into consideration before they decide to post their bile again.
I don't feel any hatred or ill-will toward her at all.
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