(Noah Coburn for “(Un)governed Spaces”)
 
If you look carefully along the winding roads inside villages, there are almost more shrines than you can count. Some are prominent, but most are tucked away next to mud walls or simply on the edges of fields. The large ones can be elaborate, with multiple graves and even a mountain goat skull, its twisted horns a subtle reminder of a more pagan past.
 
Most of the shrines are simpler than this: a pile of rocks, with a wooden pole rising up from it. Visitors tie scarfs to them, creating layer upon layer of haphazard patterns of color.
 
Ask locals who a shrine is for and they will undoubtedly tell you a mujahid, or someone who has died while fighting jihad. But ask which jihad and very often there is disagreement over whether this particular person died while fighting against the Soviets, or perhaps it was during the civil war, when it was never really clear who was on what side.
 
Others will suggest the brave man died during the fight against the British, or perhaps even before that. Regardless, scarves and other scraps of cloth will continue appearing, the shrine re-growing, an eternal-seeming marker of a forgotten history.