Few people now move to Afghanistan to start a new life. Visitors once came for tourism or trade, but these days most arrive for work postings of a few months or a few years at most, to fight or deliver aid, take pictures, or flit from meetings in barricaded ministries to embassy cocktail parties. They do not expect to fall in love with a country that, in the west, more often makes headlines for its violence, extremism and corruption.

The past four decades of conflict have driven away millions of Afghans, and almost all the foreigners who had made a home here. But as British troops withdraw after a 13-year military occupation, and other Nato allies send their forces home, a small band of expats has stayed throughout the turmoil. Some have been seduced by the natural beauty of the country, the hospitality and extraordinary history – the stupas and temples, mosques and forts, decaying but still spectacular. Others kept coming back over the years, and eventually settled – staying for love, or for work – often seeing another side of Afghanistan. They may be worried about the future, in a land where the Taliban has stepped up its fight for both territory and Afghan support, infiltrating stretches of the countryside, where they control the roads, levy taxes, run schools and dispense justice. But they are not leaving the country they now call home.

Nancy Hatch Dupree, cultural centre director, Kabul University

Dupree arrived with her husband, a cultural attache, in the 1960s. They lived in Kabul, where foreigners mingled at parties with the Afghan elite, then took morning horse rides through grass meadows.

“We met all these beautiful people: sophisticated, elegant, dressed in the latest fashions,” she remembers. “[President Mohammad] Daud Khan insisted they all brought their wives, because that’s what you did in a modern nation. The highlight was the Queen’s birthday party at the British embassy, where we would dance until dawn, then go up to Qargha lake with our bottles of champagne and watch the sunrise.”

Kabul should have been just the first of many postings as a diplomatic wife, but her life was upended when she asked anthropologist Louis Dupree to edit a tourist guidebook she had written, the country’s first. She walked into his office, and found the love of her life. The cultural attache became an ex.

“I didn’t have any sense that I was going to stay here for so long, but when I married Louis I caught the bug with him,” she says.

The couple spent years travelling through the Hindu Kush and the deserts of the south, seeking traces of prehistoric civilisations and exploring villages for anthropology research. Those years were a golden age for the country. “Louis and I would go in one car, and never think about security.” But in 1978, Daud Khan was toppled in a Soviet-backed coup, Louis was briefly imprisoned, and the Duprees were expelled. They moved to Pakistan, where Nancy worked in refugee camps.

Louis died of cancer in 1989, and when Nancy flew back to Kabul, in 1993, it was to a city battered by civil war. She helped salvage the national museum’s treasures, and after the Taliban were toppled, in 2001, she returned for good. Already in her 70s, she secured the backing to build the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University, a home for the couple’s collection of historical documents.

Despite the current conflict, her optimism endures. “The young have found their voices,” she says.

Alberto Cairo, physiotherapist

‘To see all these patients with terrible wounds was quite tough. But strangely, I have felt since the beginning that I’m in the right place. I realised I was really useful,’ says Alberto Cairo. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian

Cairo’s office sits a few paces from a metal workshop, near rooms full of plaster casts of legs, arms and hands. More than 130,000 disabled Afghans have passed through the simple rehabilitation clinic over several decades.

Cairo grew up in northern Italy and trained as a lawyer, but realised, at 30, that he did not want to spend his life in courtrooms and offices. He went back to college to study physiotherapy, spending days in a wheelchair to better understand his future patients, then joined the Red Cross. His first assignment in Afghanistan, in 1990, was at a hospital for war casualties. Given just three weeks’ notice, he asked what language the locals spoke and what the weather would be like. “I did not know anything,” he admits.

He worked 15-hour days for several months to get to grips with his work. “I was in Africa before, for three years, but it was not a war situation,” he says. “So to see all these patients coming with terrible wounds, it was quite tough. But strangely, I have felt since the beginning that I’m in the right place. I realised that I was really useful.”

Alberto Cairo refereeing a game of wheelchair basketball. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian

Foreign staff were evacuated when a rocket hit the hospital in August 1992, but less than two months later, Cairo was back, driving ambulances across frontlines and working at the rehabilitation centre where he is still based. He has always pushed the Red Cross to be more ambitious in their efforts to help the country’s disabled. He threw out old rules and began helping people whose injuries were not caused by the war. Now, only one in seven people treated at the centre are victims of conflict; others are maimed in car crashes, industrial accidents, or difficult home births.

Cairo started the Red Cross’s first rehabilitation projects, offering education and job training, and he insists that all staff at the centre are disabled themselves – from the security guards to the teams that make prosthetic limbs.

“It’s society that makes the life of disabled people impossible,” he says. “In Afghanistan, the disabled are not rejected, but they are given pity, not rights. They are not given a chance to restart their lives. So we have to fight.”

Recently, he introduced wheelchair basketball to the country, after finding a Chinese firm that makes the special wheelchairs cheaply, and an American willing to coach.

“Physiotherapy is painful. Prosthetic limbs are not easy. But sport is fun, it’s joyful,” he says.

There is not much about Italy he misses, though he sometimes longs for theatre or cinema. He taught an Afghan at the centre to make Italian food, and when he returns from a visit to Italy, his cases are loaded with parmesan and coffee.

“I will never be an Afghan, but when you ask me where is home, I say Kabul. This is the place where I want to be.”

Alexander Levenyets Yurivitch, former Soviet soldier, now a taxi driver

Alexander Levenyets Yurivitch in a field near the airport in Kunduz, where old Soviet military equipment has been left behind. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian

It was an unpromising introduction to Afghanistan. Alexander Levenyets Yurivitch’s plane had taken off from a Soviet Union airbase with no destination given; he and the other conscripts on board were not warned they were heading into a bloody, protracted war. When he stepped off the aircraft in windy Kunduz, he recognised the Afghan flag fluttering beside the Soviet Union’s hammer and sickle.

The young Ukrainian was primed to face squads of ruthless foreign fighters and hostile locals, but found himself chatting to Afghan teenagers who peddled hashish to bored soldiers, and he realised the war was much more complicated than he had expected.

Yurivitch started selling Soviet ammunition to his mujahideen enemies, but got caught. In detention he was barely supervised, because the guards thought that the prisoners’ fear of the men waiting outside the gates of their military base was security enough. And so, one night, Yurivitch slipped out.

“I wasn’t nervous. I was born in Ukraine but these are my people – I felt it as soon as I escaped,” he says. “I converted on the first day.”

‘I was born in Ukraine but these are my people – I felt it as soon as I escaped,’ says Alexander. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian

Alexander became Ahmad, and within a month he spoke fluent Dari, the only trace of his origins a thick Russian accent that has lasted over three decades. He sent a letter home to his only relatives, his mother and brother, after he absconded, telling them he was alive but had switched sides. His mother, whom he never saw again, replied, “I want you to be happy. You don’t have to come back – forget your debt to me.”

Yurivitch has left Afghanistan just once, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, travelling on an Afghan passport. He spent six years in the mountains fighting his former comrades, once barely escaping a village ambush in which the only other convert in the group was killed. But he found a band of brothers, after growing up desperately poor and fatherless.

“It wasn’t so tough,” he says. “We had heaters, electricity, everything was well planned; we even had a cook, a baker...”

In 1989, Moscow finally ordered its soldiers home, so he was able to give up his guerrilla life, move into Kunduz and turn his thoughts to marriage, a challenge for an outsider in a country where most people’s partners are chosen by their parents.

“The mujahideen looked for an Afghan woman for me. A radio operator gave me his daughter,” he says. His wife is a teacher, and they live with their four daughters in a small village 20 minutes’ drive north of Kunduz. The land there was left to him by his commander from jihad days. The legacy is testament to Ahmad’s popularity, bolstered by his reputation as a devout Muslim.

“I didn’t have any problems with the Taliban because I was one of them,” says Ahmad, who drove trucks for them in a time he looks back on as a golden age. “I had a fixed salary then.”

Now a taxi driver, he is ambivalent about the past decade. “Back then, people were honest, good Muslims. Nowadays, people want democracy and open society,” he says.

Still, sitting among the rusting wreckage of military transport planes and helicopters, on the airbase where he first set foot on Afghan soil, he is hopeful.

“I think things are getting better because the Americans are leaving, and we are all tired of fighting. This is a holy land, which can’t accept foreigners. Just like the Russians, they have been forced out.”

Father Giuseppe Moretti, Catholic priest

Father Giuseppe Moretti in his church at the Italian embassy. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian

To Father Moretti’s Afghan friends, the bishop of Kabul is “mullah sahib”, a token of respect for his status as a man of God, even if his God is not the one they believe in. Conversion to Christianity still carries the death penalty in Afghanistan, so Moretti’s diocese is a single church inside the grounds of the Italian embassy, its construction authorised nearly a century ago.

Communist secret police, civil war militias, Taliban vice police and now Nato soldiers have all passed through its gates in the years since 1977, when Father Moretti first flew into the city.

“I realised when I arrived that I could work from the presumption that I was European and therefore superior, and understand nothing; or I could open myself completely to this country and love it. And it was the latter,” he says.

His small house is crammed with mementoes of his life as an Italian priest in a war zone. When the country spiralled into civil war after the departure of the Soviet troops, he refused to leave – at first naive, then stubbornly committed.

“On 28 April 1992, the first night there was fighting, I thought it was a party with fireworks, beautiful. The second night, I thought the fireworks were continuing. The third night, our chargé d’affairs said to me, ‘There are no fireworks, that is fighting.’”

Undaunted, Moretti stayed to minister to the handful of nuns still doing charity work in the battered city. “We had nothing for our defence. I remember the boom, boom, boom, so close around.”

Two years later the shells hit his home and he barely escaped alive. “When I opened my eyes, my dog, Benji, was there in the ruins; he helped me cross to the ambassador’s residence. When the watchman saw me, he fainted. I must have been covered with blood.”

Moretti was ordered home to Italy to recover. When security returned to Kabul it was under the Taliban, and although they left the church and the nuns who prayed there in peace, there was no priest until the Taliban fell in 2001. That year, Pope John Paul II sent Moretti a simple message. “He said, ‘Father, it is time to go back.’”

The two celebrated mass together, and on the journey to Kabul, Moretti stopped to look around a small shop in eastern Afghanistan. With a surprise still evident, he found an oil painting of the pontiff there; it now has pride of place on his wall.

Newly invested with the authority of a bishop, he leads an eclectic congregation that has at times included ambassadors and Nato commanders. The only people he has not tried to reach out to are Afghans. “We are forbidden from proselytising, and I would not say anything about Christianity to my assistants, even as a joke. But they have respect: they change the flowers every day, ask me how many people came to the service.”

At 75, he is due for retirement, but has volunteered to stay on despite growing security problems. There have been two suicide bombings just metres from his gate, which have made him a virtual prisoner in his house. He no longer wanders freely through the city he remembers from decades ago. “It was not a splendid city, but every day you could see the mountains. It was a pleasant life. You could walk everywhere peacefully.”

His main worry is not the violence but his shrinking congregation. He feels an affinity with the Afghans because they are religious people. “For the Afghans, it’s impossible to think of a man without God. In the west, it’s the contrary: impossible to think of a man with God,” he says. “This is the most difficult thing for me as pastor of the international community: people are proud of their religious indifference.”

Hiromi Yasui, photojournalist

‘This is my home,’ says Hiromi Yasui. Photograph: Joel van Houdt/Guardian

Yasui’s garden is a shady escape from Kabul’s dusty, frenetic streets. A fountain sits among fig and mulberry trees, and two giant guard dogs given to her by nomad families loll on the lawn, longingly eyeing a small aviary.

“It’s comfortable to have a house of your own,” says Yasui, a photographer who was first drawn to Afghanistan by its wandering tribes of livestock herders. She had been captivated by an old book of photos of the country’s Kuchi nomads, and in 1993 she hitched a ride on an aid truck to the eastern city of Jalalabad. After a sheltered childhood in the historic Japanese city of Kyoto, she was shocked by the violence she found.

“I crossed the border and I was so excited, thinking, ‘This is Afghanistan.’ I only knew it from the book. I thought there would be caravans of nomads, and I looked and looked but couldn’t see a single one. There were just burning trucks and tanks, and then I realised: there is still a war here. I had never seen war,” she says. “I had to report these facts to Japan, instead of the Kuchi.”

After two weeks covering a sprawling, squalid refugee camp, Yasui travelled to Kabul, crossing the frontlines between several warring factions. Undaunted by her inexperience, or by the horrors she had already seen, she joined a handful of other journalists in the city’s dilapidated German Club and became a war correspondent almost overnight. “It was so surprising, so sad,” she says. “I was crying a little bit at the beginning… It was not necessary for so many children to die. But I was not frightened. It looks very dangerous being at the frontline but the [other soldiers] were a long way away.”

She returned to Afghanistan every year after that first trip, eventually photographing nomads in the Panjshir valley, and then befriending one of the war’s most famous commanders, Ahmed Shah Masood, known to his admirers as the Lion of the Panjshir.

“When his bodyguards introduced me, saying, ‘The Japanese female journalist is here’, he would joke: ‘She’s not a girl, it’s a boy.’ If you see the pictures, I have very short hair and I’m wearing men’s clothes for my work.” She laughs.

Masood gave her a Persian name, Mursal, which means rose. “After the war finished, all the mujahideen came to Kabul, everyone knew me. Every street, passing by, I’d hear ‘Mursal’ – someone calling to me.”

In 2002, after both her parents passed away, Yasui moved to Kabul full time. Months later she fell in love with an Afghan colleague, but dating was a challenge in a city so conservative that many couples don’t even meet until they are engaged.

“It’s difficult to secretly be boyfriend and girlfriend in this country, so in the end we decided to get married. We went to Turkey,” says Yasui, who converted to Islam for the marriage and sometimes worries that she is a “lazy Muslim”.

A decade later she has become famous in Afghanistan with a new generation, this time for her cooking and hospitality. Encouraged by an unconventional Japanese tour firm keen to invest in Afghanistan, she opened a small but immaculate hotel in the historic Bamiyan valley, looking out over cliffs studded with ancient Buddhist caves.

“At the beginning it was quite difficult, because I’ve no experience of being a hotelier,” she says. “But I have been a customer, so I try to put in what I think is comfortable.” That included introducing Japanese and Chinese food to a once-cosmopolitan valley that had fallen off international trade routes centuries earlier.

The Hotel Silk Road became the closest thing Afghanistan has to boutique accommodation, booked out for government retreats, charity workshops and diplomats’ holidays. Guests told her that, once back in Kabul, they missed her teriyaki chicken and tempura, so she opened a restaurant in the capital, and a handicraft business to provide jobs for local women whom the small hotel could not support.

She still works as a journalist, but her side projects now employ nearly 100 people. Security worries have already affected her business: roads into Bamiyan have been periodically cut off to foreigners and most government officials. But having endured one Afghan war, she is prepared to ride out another – and is still hopeful she won’t have to.

“I am ready to fight for things to go the right way,” Yasui says. “Sometimes I’m a little bit tired, but still I want to stay here. This is my home. We believe the future will be bright.”