As Afghanistan continues to receive the brunt of US military attention in the post-September 11th world, the first Afghan Loya Jirga in decades will meet for six days in June 2002. AWM Co-Directors Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls recently published this analysis of what’s expected.
Rise: Revolutionary Women Reenvisioning Afghanistan
June 3, 2002
Made in partnership with RAWA, this short documentary was one of the few early Western films about the struggles of Afghan women. In the weeks following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the USA and Britain began launching air strikes against Afghanistan, after the Taliban refused to discloseRead More…
Sept. 11 made punk rock put its militancy where its mouth is: after America entered a permanent yellow alert, criticizing the government wasn’t quite so simple. Heela Naqshband even remembers punk kids wondering if they should turn their flag patches upside-down—which for every not-punk American means right-side up.
But Afghan-born Naqshband and her husband, Shahab Zargari, think progressive kids need to stick to their politics now more than ever. So Naqshband and Zargari—who, with about a half-dozen friends, run a punk label called Geykido Comet Records out of a Fullerton apartment—stepped in to help the sometimes-overlooked victims of the war on terrorism. Their recent compilation CD, Dropping Food on Their Heads Is Not Enough, is a fund-raiser for both the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) and the Afghan Women’s Mission (AWM).