Mandol

Mandol is Nuristan's western district: pine forest, deep gorges and the headwaters of the Alingar river. Its villages sit above the water, some of them on crags high over the gorge, with the forest climbing steeply behind.

The Alingar gathers its headwaters here, from the Ramgal and Kulam valleys, and runs south through Nurgaram into Laghman. That river is also the way in: the road comes up the Alingar from Laghman, past Nurgaram, into the gorges. Mandol is lower and warmer than the Parun side of the province, and its timber and rivers shape daily life: houses are built from the surrounding cedar and pine, and paths follow the gorge walls between villages.

More than one language is spoken here. The people of the Ramgal and Kulam valleys speak Western Kati, the western form of the Kamkata-viri spoken along the Bashgal in the east, and it sounds noticeably different from the eastern speech. The Kuraj valley is Persian-speaking.

Matters that touch everyone still go to the jirga, and in Mandol a jirga can bring the men of a whole tribe together to sit before their elders.

Mandol also carries weight in the province's story. Gadmuk, in this district, served as the first capital when a smaller Nuristan province was carved out in the 1980s, and development surveys from the early 2010s recorded most of Nuristan's rug-weaving villages here.

Over the mountains to the north-west lies Panjshir. No road crosses; in summer people go over the passes on foot from the Ramgal valley.

The floods of July 2026 reached Mandol too. On 22 July, two days after the flash flood in Parun, floods in the Dehand Rahra area injured about 30 people and destroyed houses, water mills, roads and seven irrigation canals.

Mandol sees few visitors. The photographs on this page are our own: Abdulrahman Chonish, who leads our tours, with friends, elders and children across the district, at the jirga, and in the Persian-speaking Kuraj valley.