The Human Cost of War

Sultan herself had lost 19 members of her extended family in a U.S. air attack on a village near the Afghan city of Kandahar last October. And from what she could gather from news reports about the July 1 attack on the Deh Rawud village in the central Uruzgan province, the events seemed chillingly familiar.
"It was almost like playing out what happened to my family," says the 24-year-old Afghan-American. "At first, my deepest fear was that something had happened to my family. And then after a while I found I couldn't help thinking about what these people must be going through."

It was the sort of empathy that comes from having been there and done that.

Nineteen years after her family fled the fighting in her native Afghanistan for the United States, Sultan returned to the region with a U.S. documentary crew last December to find out how some of her family members who had stayed on in Kandahar were doing.

She wasn't exactly expecting an exuberant family reunion, but she had no idea it would be quite so grim. As the camera rolled inside a modest dwelling in the Pakistani border city of Quetta, where her family had taken refuge from the bombing, Sultan learned that many of them had been killed by U.S. AC-130 gunships in the village of Chowkar-Karez on October 22.

Pouring over the photographs of the victims — a smiling couple at their wedding ceremony, an impish nephew, a cousin's new bride — as her family recounted what happened that frightening night, Sultan was forced to confront the human face of war.