Photo Credit:
Santiago Lyon
 
Photo Caption:
A young girl peers out from a group of Afghan women wearing the Burqa at a Red Cross distribution centre in Kabul Wednesday, Nov. 13, 1996. The Red Cross was distributing flour, coal, stoves, soap, candles and matches to needy people as winter approaches and temperatures drop in the Afghan capital.
 
Photographer's Note:
“I had been assigned by The Associated Press to cover the 1996 Taliban takeover of Kabul, and by extension most of the country.
It was a challenging assignment – the Taliban didn’t much care for Americans (check), non-Muslims (check) or photographers (check), but by that time I’d covered a few wars around the world and had figured out how to photograph pretty much anybody. 
Towards the end of my 6-week stay there I came across the scene in the photo, where women were gathering to receive winter supplies from the Red Crescent/Cross. 
The young woman in the photo had raised her burqa to better see what was happening and I made a half a dozen or so frames of color negative film. 
At about that time a Taliban patrol showed up and some of the women told them that I had made a picture of the uncovered women.
I quickly removed the film from my camera and hid the roll deep inside my clothes, substituting it for an unexposed roll. The Taliban demanded my film, so I gave them the unexposed roll and went on my way. 
That afternoon I developed the film at the AP office in Kabul and sent the photo out by satellite phone to AP’s thousands of media subscribers around the world.
The image was very well used by newspapers and magazines around the world to illustrate the plight of Afghan women under Taliban rule.
A couple of years later I was living in Madrid and went to some gatherings to mark International Women’s Day where lo and behold, the image had been reproduced poster and banner size. I watched thousands of women marching through the streets chanting for women’s rights while holding posters of my image above their heads. Very heartening to see. 
It turned out that an Italian politician and European Parliamentarian, Emma Bonino had seen the image and decided to make it the centerpiece of an EU campaign supporting women’s rights in Afghanistan under the slogan “A flower for the women of Kabul”. (I later briefly met Ms. Bonino in Madrid and was able to thank her for using my image.)
Some years later, after 9/11, an Iranian photographer friend set up a photography school in Kabul and I asked if he could help find the woman in the image. He printed it in a local language pamphlet and distributed it in the Kabul neighborhood where it was taken, but we never ultimately found her.”