Faizabad

Faizabad is the capital of Badakhshan, strung along a gorge of the Kokcha where the river cuts through the town in a green line, and it is where every journey into the Wakhan and the Pamir is arranged and provisioned. The lapis lazuli that Egypt and Mesopotamia imported came out of the Sar-e-Sang mines up the same valley and is still cut and sold in the bazaar. Badakhshan was the one province the Taliban never fully held in the nineteen nineties. Flights from Kabul land on a strip above the river. The road on to Ishkashim and the Wakhan takes most of a day from here.