Afghan citizen Sharbat Gula, the green-eyed woman who rose to fame through her portrait on the cover of a 1985 National Geographic magazine, has been given refuge in Italy.
In a statement, Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s office said that the government intervened after the Afghan woman asked for help to leave Afghanistan after the Taliban rein in the war-torn country in August this year.
It added that her arrival to the country was part of a wider plan of Italy’s government to evacuate and assimilate Afghans.
In 1985, a U.S. photographer Steve McCurry captured Gula in his camera lens when she was a youngster, living in a refugee camp on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Her captivating green eyes, gazing out from a headscarf with a mixture of pain and fear, made her famous internationally but her identity was only ascertained in 2002 when the U.S. photographer returned to Afghanistan and searched for her.
