Combat On Carpet: Afghanistan's War Rugs

A foot rug decorated with a Soviet helicopter.

A lake filled with boats lies beneath a sky full of warplanes and helicopters in this beach-towel-sized rug. The carpet was made in Afghanistan soon after the 1979 Soviet invasion of the country.

A rug centered around an illustration of Afghan fighters with camels killing Soviet soldiers. The foreign troops are depicted as horned devils.
 
These rugs belong to the British Museum, which in late April made nearly 2 million photographs from its collections available for publication. More than a dozen war-themed Afghan rugs are held by the museum.

A detail of a rug made in the 1980s depicting tanks, bombers, helicopters, and hand grenades. The rugs are woven from sheep wool either by factory workers or in village homes by women who weave between their housework. A medium-sized rug can take a mother and daughter team around six weeks to complete.

A rug made in the 1980s features convoys of armored vehicles, escorted by helicopters, climbing a mountain road. Although many of the war rugs were made for the Afghan market, Farid Yar, an Afghan-born businessman who has imported rugs to Europe since 1991, told RFE/RL some were woven specifically for Westerners.

Yar says: "In 1980 and '81 some [war rugs] came to [West] Germany. It was during the Cold War, so it was interesting for Western people and they bought it, like a piece of history showing the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. When the merchants saw that there [was] a market for it, they ordered more from weavers in the north of Afghanistan. And they made a lot of pieces with guns and tanks, etc."
 
 

A rug shows armored vehicles being driven out of Afghanistan along a blood-red road, apparently referencing the 1988 withdrawal of Soviet forces. Weapons are labeled with the nicknames the CIA-supplied mujahedin fighters used: "Dashaka" for the DsHK heavy machine gun, and "Zigokk" for the ZPU anti-aircraft gun.
 

A colorful weave of weaponry, including a Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenade (lower left). Since the end of the Soviet occupation in 1988, Afghanistan's war rugs have evolved to illustrate the conflicts that have followed.

A rug made in 1992, during the Afghan civil war that broke out after the Soviet withdrawal, shows a swarm of military aircraft around a map of Afghanistan.
 

A depiction of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks includes two figures falling from the World Trade Center twin towers and a dove of peace between the U.S. and Afghan flags.
 

A war rug features the Tora Bora cave complex, where the U.S. military hunted unsuccessfully for Osama bin Laden in 2001.
 

Merchants display a rug decorated with modern weaponry for sale in Kabul in 2015.

The same year this photo was made, a carpet seller told AP: "if fighting stops maybe this custom [of making war-themed rugs] will change [and] people will design something else instead of these weapons and guns; they might start designing [rugs with] flowers and other things."