Daily Times

KHYBER AGENCY: Amid tight security, Afghan national Sharbat Gula was deported back to her country through Torkham late on Tuesday.

Gula, who is believed to be in her 40s and mother of three, was handed over to Afghan authorities at 2:00 am on Tuesday-Wednesday.

Sharbat Gula had been arrested by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) from her residence in Peshawar for fraudulently obtaining a Pakistani identity card. The authorities said that Shurbat Gula had obtained the identity card in 1988 and a computerised card in 2014.

Last week, a court rejected her bail request. Her lawyers had said that there was no complaint against her about her illegal stay in Pakistan. “The FIA raided her house and arrested her without fulfilling the legal procedure as there should be a complaint first in such cases,” they had argued.

The court had later found her guilty and sentenced her to 15 days imprisonment and fined her Rs 110,000. The court had also directed officers to deport her.

On her return to Afghanistan on Wednesday, the Afghan president welcomed her, offering her a furnished apartment.

“I welcome her back to the bosom of her motherland,” President Ashraf Ghani said with an expressionless Gula standing beside him during a small welcome-back ceremony at the palace in Kabul.

“I’ve said repeatedly, and I like to repeat it again, that our country is incomplete until we absorb all of our refugees,” he said.

Ghani promised to provide Gula with a furnished apartment to ensure she “lives with dignity and security in her homeland”.

Gula, wearing a blue burqa that was pulled back to show her face, did not comment during the ceremony, which her children also attended.

Gula was for years an unnamed celebrity after an image of her as a teenage Afghan refugee was featured on National Geographic magazine’s cover in 1985, her striking green eyes peering out from a headscarf with a mixture of ferocity and pain.

The image became a symbol of Afghanistan’s suffering during the 1980s Soviet occupation and US-backed insurgency against it.

The Soviet withdrawal in 1989 led to the collapse of the Kabul government and years of civil war until the Taliban movement seized power in the mid-1990s.

After the Taliban regime fell to the US-backed military action in 2001, National Geographic sent photographer Steve McCurry to find the girl in the photo, eventually identified as Gula.

“The woman who stands next to me became an iconic figure representing Afghan deprivation, Afghan hope and Afghan aspirations,” Ghani said. “All of us are inspired by her courage and determination.”

Gula had been living in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar for years with her children and husband, who died five years ago.