Sharbat Gula, whose piercing green eyes were featured on the iconic 1985 National Geographic cover, has been found again in Pakistan. She is being investigated by Pakistani officials, who found her with a fake ID.
Gula was 12 years old when photographer Steve McCurry took the famous portrait, which earned her the name “Afghan girl,” as she epitomized the struggle of Afghan refugees at the time. Now, her story is defining the struggle refugees face today.
According to Agence France-Presse, Pakistani officials say that she was living there without real identity papers. She had died to get an ID card if in the city of Peshawar in April 2014 with the name Sharbat Bibi.
She isn’t alone. There are thousands of Afghan refugees who have tried to use fraudulent papers by bypassing Pakistan’s Computerized National Identity Cards (CNIC). Her case is currently being investigated by the Federal Investigation Agency.
“This is one of the thousands of cases which was detected last year and sent to the FIA. We are waiting for the findings of the inquiry,” Faik Ali Chachar, a spokesman for the National Database and Registration Authority, told the AFP. “Our vigilance department detected (the) Sharbat Bibi case in August 2014 and sent it to FIA for further investigation the same month.”
According to Pakistan’s Dawn.com, Gula’s two sons - Rauf Khan and Wali Khan - also received fraudulent IDs. According to The Huffington Post, it is not known if these men are really Gula’s biological children, since refugees often put down names of non-relatives as family to help them get papers.
This is the first time Gula has been heard from since 2002, when McCurry returned to Pakistan for a National Geographic stary. Before then, her name was not known. At the time, she said she still did not feel safe, even though she left Afghanistan.