They worked on him for five months. It looks magnificent, and they hate it. Because Saliha and Rahima don't want to make carpets, they want to go to school - but the Taliban forbid them. 15-year-old Saliha's hands dart forward, turn left, right, pull with a jerk, reach out again, turn, pull again, at a speed where the many movements become one to the eye. The girl sits in a mud-walled shack with a tiny window, in a suburb of Herat, a city in deep western Afghanistan. Saliha's neck is bent, twelve hours a day. In front of her, thousands of white threads rise steeply like a wall, a lattice of yarn, almost to the ceiling. "I hate him," Saliha says. Text excerpt from article about women who have been knotting carpets since the Taliban took power.