A woman and her son walk along Kabul’s main avenue. Once a bustling thoroughfare lined with merchants, the avenue was destroyed by four years of fighting. 1996©Didier Lefevre

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international independent medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural and man-made disasters, and exclusion from health care in more that 75 countries.

MSF was founded in 1971 as the first non-governmental organization to both provide emergency medical assistance and bear witness publicly to the plight of people it assists. A private nonprofit association, MSF is an international network with sections in 19 countries.

MSF began working in Afghanistan in 1980, shortly after the Soviet invasion. Small medical teams undertook clandestine cross-border operations to reach people stranded in areas hardest-hit by the turmoil. MSF continued to open programs over the next 24 years: conducting surgery as fighting raged in Kabul during the mujahadeen wars; providing medical care to women and advocating on their behalf during the rise of the Taliban; and running clinics for people displaced by the fighting during the Taliban years and in the aftermath of the US-led military intervention.

On June 2, 2004, five MSF aid workers were assassinated while traveling in a clearly marked MSF vehicle. At the time, 80 MSF international volunteers and 1,400 Afghan staff were providing health care in 13 provinces. These teams faced an increasingly violent and chaotic environment, in which aid workers had become targets for military factions, and where the lines between military and humanitarian action had become increasingly blurred. Unable to ensure the security of its teams, MSF closed all of its medical programs in Afghanistan in July 2004.

A series of photographs can be viewed online, and also at a major exhibition at PhotoLA in January 2005.