She was hailed as a hero. But the story behind what happened that night was more complicated.
Did Nooria shoot Taliban attackers, or her husband? Or both?
All names have been changed for safety reasons.
The men came to the village at night, under the cover of darkness.
According to Nooria, it was about 1am when they burst through the front door of her parents’ home. In her bedroom, the teenager, who was woken by the noise, stayed still and quiet. She thought about her 12-year-old brother in his bedroom.
Then she heard the men take her parents outside the small, hillside home. She described the events of that night in an interview with the BBC.
Nooria had grown up in the small rural village, in a volatile part of Afghanistan. She was an outwardly shy and quietly spoken teenager, but capable of handling guns and firing them accurately – a product of self-defence training by her father from a young age.
That night, instead of hiding, Nooria grabbed her father’s gun – an AK-47 rifle – and opened fire at the men outside. She fired until she was nearly out of bullets, she said.
Eventually, about an hour after they arrived, the men retreated into the night, she said. Outside the house lay five dead bodies: those of her mother and father, an elderly neighbour who was also her relative, and two of the attackers.
“It was horrific,” she said. “They were so cruel. My father was disabled. My mother was innocent. And they just killed them.”
Nooria was taken from her district to a safe house in Kabul Growing up in Afghanistan, teenagers like Nooria have known nothing but war. The ongoing conflict between pro-government forces and the Taliban, the country’s hard-line insurgent force, has waged for more than 25 years. Pro-government forces control cities and bigger towns, while the Taliban has seized vast remote areas. Villages like Nooria’s are often caught in between.
In her rural province of Ghor, raids by small groups of Taliban fighters targeting pro-government outposts are not uncommon. Nooria and her older step-brother, a military police officer, say their father was targeted by insurgents because he was a tribal elder and pro-government community leader.
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