A few steps on, they came across a young woman sitting by the pile of blackened rubble that had been someone’s home, holding a ten-year-old girl who was howling in pain and had blood all over her face from a bad gash. The woman looked alarmed as she saw Ben and Wolf, but Ben laid down his weapon and crouched beside her, telling her in Pashto that he was here to help. In a flood of words the woman explained that the child belonged to her neighbours, whose bodies were somewhere underneath all the rubble, both shot dead in front of their daughter. There was another child, a little boy. She hadn’t seen him. Maybe he was dead too, she said. So many of us are dead.

Ben asked Wolf to fetch the first aid kit from the Humvee, and when it arrived he swabbed the blood away from the little girl’s face, disinfected the wound and did what he could to close it up with butterfly sutures. The woman talked and wept the whole time. The child sat rigid, letting Ben do his work. As he finished attending to her, a wiry grey-haired man appeared from the smoking ruins and asked Ben if he and his companions were soldiers come to liberate them.

‘I wish we could do more,’ Ben told him. ‘But what you see is all there are of us.’ The old man nodded sadly. His name was Hamza, he said, and he was the head man of the village, or what was left of it. They were a community of tribal Shinwari people, sworn enemies of the Taliban who had in the past volunteered a young male of fighting age from every family in every village to help defeat them. The bad blood between their tribe and the country’s new rulers ran deep, and the Taliban never forgot a grudge.

‘They have always wanted to destroy us,’ Hamza complained bitterly. ‘They take money and food from us, abuse our women and force our men to fight for them. We tried to resist, but they are strong now. And this is how they repay disloyalty.’ He waved around him at the ruin of his village with tears in his eyes. ‘But they are even angrier than before. Because of the foreign fighters they believe have come to mount a resistance against them. That must be you,’ he said, prodding at Ben with a bony finger.

Ben explained as best he could that they were only here to try to help Afghan people in trouble. ‘No government sent us. We don’t fight for anyone.’ Hamza looked crestfallen, but accepted the news with stoicism.