Nuristan is a world on its own. Located in the northwest of Afghanistan and bordering Pakistan, it is isolated from the rest of the country by mountains of up to 6,000 meters. Bad roads that are usually blocked in winter add to the region’s isolation that was an important supply route for the Afghan mujahedin in the war against the Soviets in the 1980s. Also today, Nuristan is one of the major areas of infiltration by insurgents crossing the border from Pakistan. “Insurgents feel free to travel in this area,” says an official of the Afghanistan NGO Security Office (which advises NGOs working in Afghanistan on security threats) in Jalalabad, the nearest safe big town to Nuristan.

But insurgents not only feel free to travel in the area. Helped by violent local conflict (with rival tribes firing rockets at each other and whole villages being burnt down) foreign aid workers and even government officials travel only with the risk of their lives. \"Everyone here is at risk, [both] aid workers and government officials, from insurgents and people from local disputes,\" a government official in Nuristan told the United Nations’ Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) in February. Abdul Bari-Siddiqi, who works with the media NGO AINA in Jalalabad, even says “a civil war” is taking place.

In May last year, two Britons working for the private security firm Global Risk that was helping to provide security for the presidential elections of October 2004 were killed in Nuristan. Perhaps, as observers in Kabul believe, the men were at the wrong place at the wrong time. But the incident helped to make the elections a failure in Nuristan, which does seem to do its best to oust all foreigners. Afghan Aid, the only NGO that was still working in the area, decided to close down its Nuristan operation after an attack on its office there in September 2004. As a result, more than 50 people lost their job.

Other than Afghan Aid, no other organization offered job opportunities - or any other help. This winter, blocked roads and lack of medicines contributed to the death of at least 25 children in Nuristan, which has no phones, electricity, or big towns. Nuristan has become a sad example of an Afghanistan where local and foreign radicals have managed to scare aid and government workers away and force people to live according to their orthodox views. Because bleak as the situation in Nuristan is, as much do Taliban-linked insurgents and al-Qaeda prosper. They would even have bases in the area (except in winter when it is too cold) said Nick Downie, who heads ANSO, in October last year. Coalition Forces apparently try to take action against the fighters and are conducting operations in the area but they are “not very talkative” about it, says the ANSO official in Jalalabad.

But locals do not suffer only from insurgents. In the absence of any credible government authority, any Kabul-style post-Taliban enlightenment still has to take place in Nuristan. While a first female governor was appointed to the province of Bamyan in early March, life for women in Nuristan, if anything, seems to be getting worse. Religious elders for example forced a local high school to turn girls away and transform into a Madrassa (religious school) serving boys only. “We have been forced to hand [the school] over to fundamentalists,” a local teacher told IRIN. “You cannot talk of Afghan progress here.”

Infidel Nuristan was only forcibly converted to Islam at the end of the 19th century – when its name changed from Kafiristan (the land of the infidels) to Nuristan. But since then, Nuristanis seem to have become more orthodox than many an Afghan in other parts of the country. Here, clerics still force people to publicly burn their televisions and CD players. And in the absence of any government authority they can probably do so for some time to come.