KABUL, Afghanistan -- Abdul Hadi Momand was convinced the American warplanes' first target would be near the hills of Qala-e-Zaman-Khan, where the Taliban was dug in.
He was right.
One morning in early October, Momand was moving his family from their home there to a safer apartment in the center of the city when a missile hit nearby, knocking him to the ground.
From a few steps behind, Shafiqa Momand, 31, peered through the smoke and dust. She saw her husband lying in the dirt, his stomach and chest an open wound.
"He was nothing. He was gone," Shafiqa recalls calmly, six months after the U.S. attack on Kabul, which signaled the beginning of the end of the repressive Taliban regime.
Shafiqa says that day was an end for her, too -- the end of hope in her life.
As a widow, Shafiqa depends entirely on her father and brother for support. They pay her rent and stay with her during the night, as is the custom, which forbids women to be left alone after dark.
She cannot work or go back to school because she must take care of her children. According to custom, most Afghan widows don't remarry.
"I look at other people with families and I feel embarrassed that my husband is gone," she says.
A sturdy woman with kind brown eyes and a shy smile, she never used to wear a burqa before the Taliban required them. As a widow, Shafiqa doubts whether she will ever walk uncovered again for fear of attracting the attention of strange men. She prefers to keep a low profile, leaving her apartment only when it's necessary to buy bread, flour and clothing at the nearby market.
Two of her sons, Farhid Jhamil, 6, and Farzide Jhali, 8, are staying with family in Lowgar, a rural province in the south.
A third son, Fawad, 11, moved with Shafiqa to a two-bedroom apartment, which they share with her father, mother, brother and sister in the Microroyan -- the neighborhood where her husband wanted to relocate the family when the bombing began.
SHAFIQA WAKES in darkness on most mornings, hurrying Fawad off to the mosque for his daily prayer lesson.
She has taught him all that she knows from the Holy Koran -- only a few verses. With his father gone, Fawad will rely on the mullah to teach him Islam from now on.
After Fawad leaves for the mosque, Shafiqa finds a quiet corner of her apartment, kneels on the carpet, and begins to pray. She understands almost none of the Arabic words, but repeats the refrain, "There is no God but Allah. There is no God but Allah," over and over again.
Through her window, she can hear the mullahs crooning on loudspeakers across the city. She relies deeply on her faith since her husband's death.
"I ask God to make me patient," she says. "He will help keep this pain quiet."
After prayers, she prepares green tea and toast for her father, a government lawyer in Kabul. Fawad returns from the mosque, eats breakfast and then heads off to school.
Shafiqa spends the rest of the morning cleaning and straightening the sparse apartment. In the living room, there's a small boom-box radio, a television and a VCR. A calendar, containing the portrait of Mohammad Zahir Shah, the ex-king, hangs on the wall next to a clock with a picture of a mosque surrounded by palm trees. Shafiqa also has a black-and-white picture of her husband in a silver frame.
"I can't forget him," she says."When I am cooking, or when I am alone, he's on my mind."
ABDUL HADI MOMAND was an army officer under the Mujahideen government, but he lost his job and became a carpenter when the Taliban took control of Kabul in 1996.
When he came home from work, Abdul Hadi always asked Shafiqa about her day; what she ate for lunch, how were her prayers.
After the civil war forced the family to move to Lowgar, Abdul Hadi, 36, did everything to make Shafiqa comfortable in a place with no running water or electricity.
The two had known each other since they were children. They were first cousins and their families arranged the marriage. They had been married for 15 years.
"My hands became stronger," says Shafiqa's father, Abdul Baqi Momand, quoting an Afghan proverb. Her father now had both a nephew and a son-in-law.
When the air strikes started, Abdul Baqi rushed to his daughter's home in the hills, but no one was there. A short distance away, he came upon his son-in-law's body next to a crater.
Abdul Baqi's head was spinning with fear.
"I thought this is the end of my life, too," he recalls."They will use the bomb they used in Hiroshima. They will kill all the people in Kabul. But I didn't get angry at the U.S. They were trying to finish all the terrorists."
There were other things to worry about. He needed to find his daughter and grandchildren.
And he needed to find a car to take Abdul Hadi's body to his native Lowgar to be buried.
SHAFIQA DOESN'T blame the United States for her husband's death. "They didn't want to kill him," she says. "It was a painful accident, that's all."
Pentagon officials have said repeatedly that any civilian deaths were "collateral damage," caused by bombs that strayed from military targets.
The Pentagon does not keep records of the number of Afghan casualties, largely because officials cannot verify that the deaths were caused by the U.S. military campaign.
"We have no way of knowing," says Lt. Col. Dave Lapan, a Defense Department spokesman in Washington, D.C. "Secretary [Donald H.] Rumsfeld has said that in war there's lots of ordnance flying, and when someone is killed it's hard to tell which side it comes from."
In a report earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times estimated the civilian death toll in Afghanistan between 1,067 and 1,201, from the start of the bombing on Oct. 7 until Feb. 28, when the air campaign had largely ended.
Lapan says the Pentagon is discussing with the U.S. State Department and the National Security Council, among other agencies, whether to compensate Afghan civilian victims. There is no time-table for that decision. The United States did not compensate civilian victims of the military campaigns in Iraq and in the former Yugoslavia, Lapan says.
In April, Global Exchange, a U.S.-based advocacy group, organized a rally for family members of civilian victims outside the American Embassy in Kabul, asking for compensation.
But Shafiqa did not attend. She leaves these issues to her father and brother. If aid groups approach her, she will accept their help. "But I'm not going to go begging," she says.
Shafiqa hopes her son Fawad will become a doctor or an engineer. Her father is paying for him to attend English classes in the afternoon. In late April, Shafiqa moved into her own apartment, a few blocks from her father.
Abdul Baqi says he would allow his daughter to remarry, but Shafiqa has no plans to start over.
"This is the end of my life," she says. "I am about my children now."
