Ebook: Afghanistan: Lifting the Veil

The culture and people of Afghanistan: a visually stunning, profoundly revealing introduction.

-- Combines photographic images and newly commissioned essays from Reuters' world-class team of journalists and photographers.

-- "Lifts the veil" on Afghanistan, helping the world understand a people and a society that have been hidden for too long.

-- Answers the compelling questions: Who are these people? What is this place? How could Afghanistan have become fertile ground for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda?

After a generation of unspeakable suffering, the people of Afghanistan are awakening to the possibility of hope. Now, through new photographs, and a compelling narrative that places that events of recent years in their deepest context, you will come to understand the people of Afghanistan as never before: who they are, how they have endured, and what their future may hold. This is the untold human story that has been hidden behind the headlines -- told with unmatched insight, objectivity, and balance by the correspondents and photojournalists of Reuters, who have traveled throughout Afghanistan virtually non-stop throughout the years chronicled here, and were the only news professionals permitted to accompany coalition forces during the Tora Bora expedition against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. These journalists illuminate the country, its history -- and the life of its people under the Soviet occupation, the Taliban, and the new regime. From Osama bin Laden to the Northern Alliance, the refugee camps to the front lines, they bring unprecedented insight to the recent war -- and what may come next.