Shindand is situated along one of the main routes for the smuggling of illegal arms and illicit drugs by the armed opposition and corrupt officials. In 2017, the United Nations reported that Shindand was one of two districts accounting for most of the 2,700 acres of opium-poppy fields in Herat Province. Infighting among Taliban factions in the district adds to the violence and insecurity. In March 2016, three days of fighting between two warring factions left more than 100 people dead in Shindand. In August, people were afraid to celebrate Afghanistan’s Independence Day, because it would mean raising the country’s tricolor flag in the shadow of the Taliban.

When we arrived at the office of Hekmatullah Hekmat, the district governor, he wasn’t there. He was in Herat City, where he spent most of his time, according to some of his constituents I spoke to in Shindand. The walls and windows of his office were riddled with bullet holes. We eventually met with him at his office in Shindand, where he admitted that his district was under constant threat. “Our main problem is simple; the armed opposition is here,” he said. “They come on motorcycles, strike where they want and then take off. It’s all so random. It doesn’t even seem as if they have a clear strategy, they just want to kill our people.” Local security forces don’t have the resources to contend with the constant threat. A local police official said that his forces had diminished by more than 80 percent over the past year, as the government went forward with a plan to subdivide Shindand into several districts.

As of late 2017, the Taliban controlled 219 schools in Herat Province. An education official told a local news outlet that the department of education could not even monitor schools in Shindand because of security problems. The fear of a Taliban attack was a reality that Nawid, a 14-year-old student, knew all too well. Though there are about 100 schools in the district, Nawid said that he and other students rarely attended, because of security fears. “Most of us only go on test days,” he said. The roads leading to the schools were too unpredictable.

Toryalai, a 24-year-old university student, initially tried to discredit the young man’s fears. “Tell the truth,” he said. “There are schools, but you all just don’t go.” But then he reconsidered. There had been an attack just before my arrival, and he had witnessed it. It embodied the kind of violence that has kept thousands of students from pursuing an education in a nation struggling to deal with a 36 percent literacy rate. “With my own eyes I saw four people killed by armed men,” Toryalai said. He had no idea who the gunmen were. “They could be Taliban, they could be anybody, all we know is that there are too many men with guns running around here.” It took the district’s police officers 30 minutes to reach the scene, he said. “By then, the gunmen had fled, and we had already transported the bodies to the hospital ourselves.”