One Afghan refugee’s stunning photographs of the country’s ‘many stories that need to be told’

Two girls in Daikundi province, Afghanistan. Muzafar Ali wanted to capture the beauty of his country through photography before it was destroyed by the Taliban. Photograph: Muzafar Ali/The Guardian

Muzafar Ali, who lives in Adelaide, grew up as a refugee in Pakistan after his family fled Afghanistan in the mid-1980s. As a child, the only pictures he saw of his birth country were through Taliban-issued jihadi calendars and the occasional news report.

Ali is Hazara, a long-persecuted ethnic group who faced extreme violence from the Taliban after the Soviet Union left Afghanistan in 1989.