When Zahra Elham won reality singing competition Afghan Star — Afghanistan's equivalent to Australian Idol — at the age of 16, she sank to her knees and screamed.
It was March 2019. She had just become the first woman to win the competition, which launched in 2005, four years after the Taliban was overthrown by US and allied forces.
Elham is a member of the persecuted Hazara ethnic minority, from Ghazni province. Thousands of Hazaras were displaced in August 2018 when the Taliban attacked the provincial capital of Ghazni.
