Hamid Gul just wanted his family to be safe.

The 18-year old shopkeeper lived in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Afghanistan’s much fought over Helmand province. After his father was killed by an improvised explosive device (IED) in 2013, Hamid and his older brother, Mirwais, had to take care of his mother and younger siblings.

A focus of Taliban violence for many years, Lashkar Gah became much more dangerous after the US handed over primary responsibility for the security of Afghanistan to the Kabul government at the end of 2014. Not long after, districts in northern Helmand began to fall and Lashkar Gah looked in a perilous situation.

In 2016, Hamid sent his mother and siblings back to their family home in the district of Sangin. The insurgents had swept through most of the district earlier that year; this meant Hamid’s family home, now behind Taliban lines, would no longer be caught in the crossfire. Hamid stayed in Lashkar Gah to earn enough money to provide for the family, while Mirwais continued his studies at the city’s university.

By the start of 2017 the Taliban was pushing hard to take Sangin city’s district centre, a fortified compound which housed the local security and administrative officials, just a few miles from Hamid Gul’s family home. The compound was the only thing stopping the Taliban from claiming the whole district as their own. The US, which had lost at least 70 of its own troops keeping Sangin out of insurgent hands over the years, scrambled to respond with scores of airstrikes.

Hamid was convinced that his family were still safer behind Taliban lines than in Laskhar Gah, one of the Taliban’s prime targets. But on the morning of February 10 2017, he got an unexpected phone call from a neighbour in Sangin: the family’s house had been flattened.

In that one night Hamid Gul lost his 50 year-old mother, Bibi Bakhtawara, six brothers and a sister. All seven children were under 16 years of age. Bibi Rahmania, his niece, also died. She was just two years old.

