1. Ruiz, Left Out in the Cold, 3.

2. At the end of the war, Wendy Batson, a consultant of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees stated, “Even those [Afghan] villages not directly affected by the conflict are often as devastated as those that were. The long years of war have left houses collapsed, roads and irrigation systems deteriorated to the point of uselessness, and fields long overgrown. The scale of destruction is enormous” (quoted in ibid., 5).

3. Sahari, Jehad in the Kunars, 22.

4. Not every village had as many Parchamis as Deva had. Deva was the only village throughout the land that had many Parchamis in proportion to the number of its educated elements of both sexes. School dropouts, high school graduates, and some college graduates had turned Parchami, while those holding higher degrees had not. (I myself am from Deva.)