Deh Sabz people

Deh Sabz is a district that extends beyond the line of hills north of Kabul airport to the Kuh-e Safi mountains in the east and Bagram in the north. No longer fertile as its name suggests (Green Village), Deh Sabz, according to the Afghan Central Statistics Organization, is home to around 52,000 residents. Local villagers over the past decade have been joined by many thousands of Kuchi settlers who have lost their livestock or no longer find nomadic migration profitable or safe. Many of them enjoyed customary grazing rights on the district's vast pasture, which in the past served as an adequate stopping point as they traveled between the winter quarters of eastern Afghanistan and summer pastures in the Hazarajat or Panjshir highlands. The stop in Deh Sabz also allowed them to access the Kabul market with their meat and dairy products. Today, however, they are trying to settle permanently in the area. Although they often have no legal title to the land and, since 2006, a presidential decree prohibits the sale of land in the KNC, in some cases they have been able to purchase titles from local commanders who, in past years, have seized state-owned land and illegally sold plots - the titles are therefore of questionable value. In other cases, over the years, they have only progressively occupied plots of land, usually erecting walls where they would pitch their tents and eventually turning them into homes.