The soft strumming belies the radical nature of the mission that has taken root here: to preserve Afghan music and use it as a tool to counter those who want to eradicate it.
"The Taliban tried to silence us," said Ahmad Sarmast, the director of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, in his new office in Braga. "But we're much stronger and much louder than yesterday."
Launched in 2010 under the US-backed government in Kabul, the institute once stood as a powerful sign of the changes sweeping Afghanistan. Young male and female musicians often from poor backgrounds performed together in ensembles that included Zohra, the country's first all-female orchestra.
They toured the world, offering up a singular blend of Afghan and western music as they reclaimed the country's music traditions and directly challenged the years of silence enforced by the Taliban. "It was a symbol of progress, of human rights and of women's empowerment," Sarmast said. The institute's future, however, and that of its young musicians, went dark in August 2021 as the Taliban returned to power.
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