On Friday October 5, 2018, Dr Denis Mukwege had started in surgery at 7.30am as usual. He was on his second operation when he heard patients and colleagues crying. At first he thought something terrible had happened. But when he came out in his scrubs everyone started hugging him. He had been awarded the Nobel peace prize, jointly with Nadia Murad, a young Yazidi activist, for their work highlighting the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

In his acceptance speech in Oslo in December, he said: “My name is Dr Mukwege. I come from one of the richest countries on the planet. Yet the people of my country are among the poorest of the world … My country is being systematically looted with the complicity of people claiming to be our leaders … The Congolese people have been humiliated, abused and massacred for more than two decades in plain sight of the international community.”

The country is the Democratic Republic of Congo and it has been endlessly plundered by its rulers for its gold, diamonds, copper and tin, often with the connivance of multinational mining companies. But in recent years other minerals have become important: those key to the technological revolution. DR Congo supplies two-thirds of the cobalt needed for the batteries of electric cars, mobile phones and laptops, as well as coltan, a dull black metallic ore from which comes tantalum, used to make capacitors. Companies that are household names rely on the country’s minerals, and probably every household in the West has at least one of their products.

Those riches have intensified the rivalry of militias that vie for control in lawless parts of the country. And part of the violence, as Mukwege knows only too well, is the use of rape as a weapon of war.

Over two decades he has treated more than 54,000 raped women and girls at his hospital in the east of DR Congo, and he thought he’d seen the worst of the worst.

Then, in 2014, he had to treat a baby who had been raped. “She was just 18 months and, really, I didn’t understand,” Mukwege says. “She was dying. We managed to save her, but, for me, it was really shocking. The nurses were all sobbing — it was the first time I had seen them crying while treating a patient. We prayed in silence, ‘My God, tell us what we are seeing isn’t true, that it’s a bad dream.’ But it wasn’t, it was the new reality.”

Despite the horrors and heavy personal cost, Mukwege kept working to help thousands of women and children. But the use of rape as a weapon has worsened, he says. “Now, if you look at the numbers of patients coming into the hospital, they are stable, but the big problem is the number of children is increasing,” he tells me when I visit Panzi Hospital in the militia-infested east of the country. “Ten years ago, 3% of our patients were under 10. Last year it was 6% and it’s going up.” The brutality of an already brutal land is getting worse.

“To do this to babies — this is not human,” he says. “When we let impunity take place, you authorise things even animals don’t do.”

Mukwege founded the hospital in the city of Bukavu 20 years ago to reduce the appalling number of mothers dying in childbirth, for which DR Congo is one of the worst places in the world. Even today, seven out of every 1,000 mothers dies in childbirth.

“My vision was to fight maternal mortality,” he tells me. “In France, where I finished my training as a gynaecologist, I had never seen a woman die giving birth, but in Congo it was so common that women uttered their last words when going into labour because they didn’t know if they would survive.”

After graduating from Burundi University in 1983 and returning home to Bukavu, where his father was a Pentecostal pastor, he moved to Lemera, a remote area to the south of the city, to work in its hospital. There, he began building small centres for women to give birth in and schools for training midwives. Within a few years they had drastically reduced maternal mortality.

“I was really happy with the results,” he says. “But then in 1996 the war started.”

Following the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda in 1994, hundreds of thousands of Hutus fled across the western border into the forests of what was then Zaire. Among them were many of the Interahamwe, a Hutu paramilitary group that had led the genocide, and they took control of the vast refugee camps that had sprung up around Goma and Bukavu. Soon the Tutsi-led Rwandan army of General Paul Kagame, who had ended the genocide and taken power in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, came in pursuit, sparking the First Congo War of 1996-97. With the support of Rwanda, rebel forces led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila swept from the east across the vast country that later became DR Congo. On the night of October 6, 1996, they attacked the rural Lemera hospital near Bukavu, where Mukwege was working as a paediatrician. He managed to evacuate some patients, but soldiers blocked the road behind him and he could not get back to help the rest. Some 33 patients were slaughtered in their beds as well as many staff.

“I suffered for a long time,” Mukwege says. “When I eventually returned to my senses, I came home to Bukavu, where I again saw the same problem of women dying needlessly in childbirth. I thought that to help women I didn’t need a big infrastructure, just a few boxes of equipment, a delivery room where I could do a caesarean, if necessary, and a couple of rooms where mothers could stay for a short period after birth. I could save lives doing small things because I had knowledge.”

But then, in 1998, a second war started as the Rwandan and Ugandan backers of Kabila, who had become president of DR Congo, quickly tired of the corpulent leader and his dictatorial ways. It became the world’s deadliest conflict since the Second World War, drawing in nine countries and leaving around 4m people dead, and millions more displaced from their homes.

For Mukwege it was a disaster. His rooms were trashed and equipment was looted. So, in June 1999, he began treating pregnant women in tents. “That was how Panzi started,” he says. But the first patient didn’t come to give birth. “It was a woman who had been raped 500 metres away from my place by several men, and after raping her they shot through her vagina. I was so shocked I thought this must be an isolated incident carried out by someone on drugs who isn’t really conscious of what he is doing.”

Over the next three months, 45 more women turned up, all with the same story. One after another told him how they had been at home with their families when men with guns came and shot dead their husbands and raped the women. “Some were raped by five or more men till they lost consciousness,” he says. “All in front of their children. I realised then these militias were using rape as a weapon of war.”

Militias allied to different ethnic groups and different sides were all carrying out the rapes, while fighting for control of DR Congo’s precious minerals, which Mukwege believes have “cursed” its women rather than making the country rich.

Each group seemed to have its own signature torture, and the rapes were so violent that often the women suffered grievous physical wounds. “It’s not a sexual thing, it’s a way to destroy another, to take from inside the victim the sense of being a human, and to show you don’t exist, you are nothing,” he says. “It’s a deliberate strategy, raping a woman in front of her husband to humiliate him so he leaves and shame falls on the victim, and it’s impossible to live with the reality, so the first reaction is to leave the area and there is total destruction of the community. I’ve seen entire villages deserted. Rape as a weapon of war can displace a whole demographic and have the same effect as a conventional weapon but at much less cost.”

Twenty years on, Mukwege and his hospital have treated so many rape survivors that he is known as Dr Miracle. He and his team have developed a whole support system.

In a consulting room cheerfully decorated with Mickey Mouse and Pluto transfers sits little Violette, hair twisted into almost horizontal pigtails, eyes as wide as saucers, like a character from one of the cartoons on the walls. The anguish in those eyes as her mother, Amala, gently lifts up her orange and yellow patterned skirt is a snapshot of such terror that it imprints itself on the brain.

“I left her at home to work in the rice fields,” says Amala. “When I came home, she wasn’t in the compound, then I found her crying and bleeding with her clothes in her hand. I was scared and asked, ‘What happened? Did you fall?’ She said, ‘No, a man came and took me into the latrine behind the school, then put his hand over my mouth and hurt me.’ ” Violette was only four years old.

Her mother could not afford treatment, but a local health worker with links to Panzi Hospital arranged for them to travel the 350 miles east from their home town of Kindu by bus, plane and boat to Bukavu, where the hospital is. Doctors there sat Violette in salted water to soothe her wounds and she was seen by a psychologist.

One week on, the examining surgeon, Desire Alumetti, is planning to operate the next day. He wears a red baseball cap emblazoned with the words “Dr Mukwege My Hero” and a reassuring smile.

But Amala begins to cry. “My heart is broken,” she says. “I feel guilty because I left her, but I had no choice other than to go to the forest and earn money to buy food.”

Little Violette puts her head on her mum’s lap as if trying to shut out the world. Her mother takes her out and the door opens again. This time it is a young woman, breastfeeding a baby with a mass of curls. Initially I assume the woman is the patient. Instead, she lays the baby girl down to be examined. Her name is Chantal, she is only seven months old, and she immediately starts crying. I have never seen such fear in a baby’s eyes. “She cries whenever I put her down now,” says her mother, Anazo.

She explains that she had left the baby with her younger sister and gone to work in the fields when she heard shots. The village had been invaded by Raia Mutomboki, one of the most feared of the region’s many mai-mai, or militias, responsible for the murder and rape of hundreds of villagers, according to UN reports. They also kept women in caves as sex slaves.

“Everyone fears those men,” Anazo says. “My sister came to find me and said that she had run away and left the baby because the rebels had come. I ran home, but the house had already been attacked; they had taken the bag of rice and all my and the baby’s clothes. I found the baby on the bed crying, so I just took her and ran. But she wouldn’t stop crying. I tried to breastfeed but she wouldn’t eat. I didn’t know what was wrong. Then I took her to the medical centre. The doctor straight away saw she had been raped. When I heard that, my whole body was shaking. I felt like I’d lost control, I didn’t even know where I was. In our area, the rebels often came and destroyed houses and looted things, but this was the first time I had heard of anything like this.”

They had travelled about 160 miles from Kaloli village in Shabunda, a remote part of South Kivu province at the eastern edge of DR Congo, where gold had been found. It had brought misery rather than prosperity to the villagers by attracting militias.

The examination over, Anazo puts Chantal back to her breast. “I hope whoever did this will go to jail for years,” she says.

I ask Alumetti why an adult man would rape a tiny baby.

“Sometimes they do it to push people out of the area so they can exploit the minerals,” he says. “Sometimes they think it gives them power to make them invincible.”

I ask him what he would do for the baby. “We have given her an injection against hepatitis B and bathed her in antiseptic water against infection, then we will operate.”

Chantal would be the youngest baby Alumetti had ever operated on.

Panzi offers far more than medical treatment, as I saw while I wandered around the hospital grounds over the next few days. Mukwege’s experience has led him to pioneer a four-pillar holistic approach that is widely referred to as the Panzi model.

“What we discovered was that treating victims medically was not enough because of the trauma,” he explains. “So we hired a team of psychologists and began using art and music therapy. But even when the women recover mentally, we saw that to send them back to their villages was not a solution as most were discriminated against and rejected by their family and community.

“So the third pillar is socioeconomic support. If they are younger, we pay their school fees and support them. If they are pregnant, we have a safe house, Maison Dorcas, where we take care of them.

“For adult women we offer a literacy course and teach them different skills such as handicrafts, tailoring and agriculture so they can be independent. We teach them to set up mutual funds and we provide seeds and microloans for them to have small businesses. It’s a way for them not just to earn income but to be strong and to fight for their own rights.”

There is also a centre for babies born of rape as they tend to be rejected.

The fourth and final pillar is legal advice. “We find that once we have helped the women to be self-sufficient, they come back and say, ‘I want justice,’ so we have lawyers who can help them file cases.”

This, he says, is both part of the process of healing and key to changing the situation. “It’s not something of one day — it might be six months or even five years before a woman says, ‘I want to speak up.’ It takes time, but the only way we can change society is to end impunity. Because what is protecting perpetrators, even in Europe, is silence.

“We need to help women understand that what they went through is not normal, and that if they start to speak out, it is helping not only them but the community. Even these men have families, and when the women make public what they did, many [of the men] are afraid for their position in society and their own families.”

Setting up this whole system was not easy. “Many hospital staff didn’t believe it was part of healthcare and were resistant.”

His work began to attract attention overseas. Eve Ensler, the American playwright and feminist best known for The Vagina Monologues, has been an ardent fan since they first met in 2006 and he invited her to visit the hospital. “I couldn’t believe there was such a man on the planet devoting his life to ending sexual violence,” she says.

So impressed was she that she co-founded City of Joy, an inspirational centre for survivors, with Mukwege and Christine Schuler, a human rights activist.

Back home, however, Mukwege made powerful enemies for his criticism of the complicity of the government — much of the raping is carried out by the military. “I’ve had lots of threats,” he shrugs.

In 2011 he was invited by Margot Wallstrom, the first United Nations special representative on sexual violence, to address the UN General Assembly in New York. When he got there, Mukwege says, a DR Congo official summoned him to his hotel. “He said, ‘You need to make a choice — either go home or stay and give your speech, in which case you take responsibility for what will happen to you and your family. My family was in Congo and I was in New York, so it was a clear threat. I decided to cancel.”

The following year, in September 2012, he was invited again to address the assembly, this time by William Hague, then Britain’s foreign secretary. Mukwege agreed and was outspoken in his criticism of the Kabila government.

When he returned home in October, five men with pistols and AK-47s were waiting. “They had taken my daughters hostage and started to shoot. I thought I was going to die. My guard of more than 25 years, Jeff, was killed in front of my daughters and I don’t know how I was saved.

“They did not do anything to my daughters, rape them or anything. But of course my daughters were waiting, thinking something might happen, which was terrifying.”

After their narrow escape, the family left the country for Belgium. But within two months women in Congo started to write to him, asking him to return. “One day I heard they were selling bananas and tomatoes to pay for my ticket, so I had to come back.”

In a sense the hospital has now become his prison: since the attack he has lived on site and has troops from the UN peacekeeping force Monusco protecting him. “We are always in danger,” he says. “I can’t move without security.” Even so, he says there is often gunfire. “They come round the hospital or my house and shoot.”

One of his colleagues, Dr Gilda, was killed in 2015, shot dead while working at a hospital in Kasenga, in the south of the country. “That was devastating to me,” Mukwege says.

His five children are grown up and, though he misses them, he is glad they are out of DR Congo — he worries that the country is slipping back into the horror of the late 1990s. “We are in a situation now of no war but no peace,” he says.

He has a son who is training to be a gynaecologist, and though Mukwege hoped he would follow in his footsteps at Panzi, he is now torn. “How can I ask him to come back when he has young children and I am living in a prison?” he asks.

Later, in his office in another part of the hospital, Mukwege wearily lowers himself onto the sofa next to me and shakes his head. A tall, lumbering man with the kindliest of faces, his eyes are bloodshot. It’s 2pm and the 64-year-old has already done four operations, two on rape victims.

Behind us, a group of young doctors sits around a table waiting for him to give them some training as part of the Panzi network he is trying to create across DR Congo, no easy task in a vast country about two-thirds the size of western Europe. As usual he had started at 7am, conducting prayers for the staff, and will probably work till 11pm.

It isn’t the workload that is weighing him down, though. “For the past five years, we are getting more and more babies,” he says. “How can these things happen and we don’t act? I have been crying for years to stop these things, but people are just denying them.”

I tell him that his Nobel address, in which he begged the world to take notice and act to stop DR Congo’s horrors, was one of the most powerful speeches I have ever heard.

“Everyone applauded but nothing happened,” he says sadly. “We need the UN Security Council to say no, the war in Congo is not acceptable, and action must be taken.”

Outside, a placard congratulating him on winning the Nobel prize lies discarded upside-down against a wall. Wailing starts up, then a crowd appears carrying aloft a wooden stretcher bearing the body of a young woman who did not survive.

“Maybe the Nobel is an honour, but our fight is not for an honour, it’s to stop what is happening to girls and babies in Congo,” Mukwege says. “Instead, it’s my impression we are going backwards.”

Some names have been changed

Solange Kanena sits on her broken orange sofa, heavily pregnant, resting. Looking around her three-room shack, she wonders how she will feed her eight children. Her husband died in a mining accident 10 days ago.

She has never held an iPhone and has no idea what an electric car is. But when the deep, muddy tunnel collapsed on her husband, he was digging for a commodity that is critical to the batteries of both: cobalt.

Last year about 70% of the world’s supply came from the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the poorest, most violent and corrupt places on Earth. Much of its cobalt comes from around this town.

“Without DR Congo there is no electric car industry and no green revolution,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, head of Rights and Accountability in Development (Raid), a UK-based campaign group.

It is estimated that 125m electric vehicles will be on the road by 2030, about 40 times more than at present. Britain is among a number of countries planning to phase out petrol and diesel in the next 20 years.

However, while electric car owners might feel happy about cutting carbon emissions, the dark side of the green revolution is all too visible in Kolwezi’s modern-day gold rush.

In the shadow of shafts dug by huge multinational companies such as Glencore is what looks like a human anthill, one of the “artisanal” mines that account for 20% of production. Child labour is common and safety standards are non-existent.

In the Cinq Ans district, beneath every house is a warren of tunnels and holes, covered with sheets of orange tarpaulin, as hundreds of men and women dig into the red mud and children scurry about, bringing yellow jerrycans of water. There is even a hole beside a church where a gospel choir is in full song.

Known as creuseurs, or diggers, the miners use no equipment more sophisticated than spades, shovels and plastic head torches as they burrow into the ground looking for the tell-tale blue veins of cobalt. Those who strike lucky fill sacks with the metallic grey sludge.

Two holes sink to a dizzying depth in Tabue Joseph’s garden, where scrawny chickens peck at the earth. “A few years ago a local guy was digging a latrine in his yard and came across cobalt, so we all started,” he said.

“The conditions of mines are terrible,” said Josue Kashal, a lawyer for miners. “Any time a tunnel can collapse, but they keep going.”

Kanena knew how dangerous the job was. “I knew it was risky, particularly these days when it is raining,” she said. “But there is no other work.”

On February 28, when Alain did not come home she went to the hospital. “I found his dead body and collapsed crying,” she said.

There were nine bodies in all. But no accident was reported. According to Kashal, accidents are often kept secret: “They know the government and other partners may use it as an excuse to close the artisan mines and take over the land.”

This, he added, is why many of the diggers are hostile to outsiders. A crowd of them swarmed around me and a photographer when we visited and followed us on motorbikes.

“The authorities have told them: if you see any foreigners taking photos they are coming to take the riches of your country,” added his colleague Etienne Mwembo. He said that people were often told to keep their children at home when outsiders with cameras arrived.

It is common for children as young as nine to work in the mines, according to the lawyers. But the problem is not just child labour and accidents.

Van Woudenberg pointed out the irony: “The place we hope will clean up our planet is one of the most polluted on Earth.”

Once cobalt is found it is taken to a stream for washing by the women — in the same place where others are washing clothes and fetching drinking water.

The World Health Organisation says that exposure to cobalt can cause long-term health problems such as asthma, hard metal lung disease, dermatitis and decreased pulmonary function.

For all the risks the diggers take, they do not make the real profit. Most have what they call “sponsors” who pay them to dig the tunnels but then take a large cut of the profit.

Erick Simba, 35, a father of seven, is on his fifth tunnel, which could take three or four months, even digging with five other workers. A sponsor pays them £15 a week but will take half of what they find. The real profiteers, he says, are the Chinese dealers who buy the cobalt.

The main market at Musompo consists of 145 walled compounds, called “depots”, lining the main road. Inside Depot Tigre, under a line of red Chinese lanterns, Congolese workers unload sacks from rickety bicycles. The Chinese stand around smoking, glowering in gangster fashion, while the boss sits in a wire cubicle, pointing a measuring gun to test the cobalt content. On the wall is a price list.

“They rob us, giving us a low price and cheating us, saying the content is only 8% when it’s 50%,” said Simba.

“My wife also has to mine so that we have enough to eat.”

He laughs as he pulls his ancient phone out of his pocket: “Look at this, it’s the oldest model, while we are dying to produce your new ones. I’m the one who finds the richest cobalt for all these things we will never even touch in our lives.”

Others do not have a clue what the cobalt is used for. Kanena looked baffled when asked.

“It has so many uses in clothes and that,” she said. “It makes a lot of money for those who take it outside.”

The Chinese depots mostly sell the ore to a subsidiary of Huayou Cobalt, a Chinese company that is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of cobalt products. After smelting in Congo, it is exported and sold to battery component manufacturers in China and South Korea.

These companies sell to battery manufacturers which then sell to corporations such as Apple, Dell and Microsoft.

“It’s the Chinese who are making most of the money and our government is in cahoots,” complained Kabeya Mutombo Johnson, 42, the president of a digger association.

Kolwezi now has Chinese casinos and restaurants, while flights in and out of the nearest international airport of Lubumbashi are filled with Chinese.

It is not just the prices that the diggers complain about. Last year the Chinese subsidiary company partnered with the local government and took over land being used for many artisan operations, evicting 614 families and turning the area into a vast opencast mine.

The company pledged to spend $12m (£9m) on machinery, safety and resettlement expenses but according to Kashal, the lawyer, left most people homeless.

“The Chinese only built 15 homes and left other people in the street,” he said.

“The compensation was too low — $3,000 for those who had already started digging and $5,000 for others.”

One of those evicted was Kabenda Fana, a car mechanic and father of nine. “We were given just two days to leave our home,” he said.

“They used very aggressive tactics, sending street boys to force us out. We had nowhere to go and take our stuff so we ended up on the street.”

The $5,000 he was given was not enough to buy a new place. “A good plot here costs $10,000 so we had to rent. Before, we had water and electricity; now we don’t have any of that. It’s a poor, miserable place. Our kids had to leave their school. It was completely inhuman.”

Recent weeks have brought angry clashes between diggers and Chinese at a new mine called Comis. Last Tuesday diggers climbed the slag heap and attempted to invade.

Comis is one of a planned 12 new “model mines” meant to improve standards but Johnson says they are simply an excuse to take over the land.

After a report into the horrendous conditions by Amnesty International in 2016, the London Metal Exchange launched an investigation into sources of cobalt. Some companies such as Apple now track their suppliers to try to ensure they are not using child labour or encouraging unsafe conditions.

It is unclear how this is done, given how murky and chaotic the supply chain is. Most of the product is sourced in China, which refines about 80% of the world’s cobalt chemicals.

Companies are now being stricter about where it comes from, according to Caspar Rawles, a cobalt expert at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

“But changing that is not an overnight process,” he said.

“Once it goes from the state it was in to semi-processed cobalt hydroxide, there is no way of knowing if it is industrially mined or artisanal.”

“Some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world are still making excuses for not investigating their supply chains,” complained Seema Joshi, head of business and human rights at Amnesty International.

“If companies are in the dark about where their cobalt comes from, so are their customers . . . The energy solutions of the future must not be built on human rights abuses.”

With Bloomberg predicting that cobalt demand will rise 47 times by 2030, attempts are under way to reduce its consumption in batteries and manufacturers are desperate to find new supplies.

A group of billionaires led by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, are financing a start-up that aims to build a “Google Maps for the Earth’s crust” to scour the globe for new sources of cobalt.

What do you do if you’re waiting to be picked up by some Indians from the Enawene Nawe tribe on a river bank in the depths of the Brazilian rainforest and they don’t turn up?

I’m miles away from mobile-phone reception and didn’t bring a satellite phone for fear of losing it if the canoe capsized. But even if I had, who would I call? “Hello — is that the Enawene Nawe?” Naturally, Amazon Indians do not have phones. The rendezvous had been arranged by radio message via third parties. But four hours of waiting on the banks of the Juruena river with the sun climbing in the sky and giant ants crawling up my legs was bringing home the fact that the distance between their world and mine was not simply a matter of geography.

The more I wait, the more I realise it always sounded a dodgy arrangement. My instructions: fly to nail rolex day date mens 41mm 218206 diamond pave dial automatic Cuiabá, the capital of Brazil’s Mato Grosso province, 16 hours from London via Lisbon and Brasilia. Get the night bus west to Brasnorte (10 hours), a place that isn’t even a on my map. There, someone called Mathias would pick me up in his freight truck, then drive me three hours to the river, where I would meet the Enawene Nawe, who would come from their village a seven- hour canoe ride away. They would come, I was assured, because they were anxious for the world to know their struggle to hold back those who are destroying the forest and turning it into cattle pasture and soya- bean plantations. Burning the rainforest is responsible for 20% of carbon emissions — more than all cars and planes combined — which is why both the Conservative party and Prince Charles are launching rainforest initiatives from Brazil next month. The Enawene Nawe might be very far away but they are protagonists in a drama involving climate change, globalisation, poverty and hunger that has implications for us all.

The only problem, it seems, is getting to them. The first part went fine. My plane landed more or less on time in Cuiabá and a taxi took me to a bus station. Even at 8pm it’s sweltering, so I am surprised to see the other passengers clutching pillows and blankets. On board I discover why, as an icy blast of air conditioning leaves me shivering. The lights of the city are quickly left behind and we head through the forest. I spot a vast soya silo emblazoned with the name Maggi — the world’s biggest soya producer and the surname of the state’s governor.

Every so often we lurch to a stop in a bubble of light — the razing of the forest for cattle ranches and soya means frontier settlements are constantly springing up in the middle of nowhere. Each has a bus stop and a bar with flower- bedecked saints in the window. The clientele are hard- faced men downing cachaça — rough sugar- cane rum — in between resting their hands on the narrow-waisted shorts of women known as meninas de programa — literally programme girls: prostitutes.

Around 5.30am we pull into Brasnorte. I am relieved when, across the road, the lights of a white pick- up flicker on. Mathias greets me with a gruff smile. As we drive along the main road, he tells me that his family came from the south in the 1970s as part of a military- government scheme to colonise the Amazon. In common with thousands of poor families, they received grants to move and were given work on a fazenda — a large farm — cutting down trees until they managed to get their own patch of Amazon and chop down its century old trees to grow capim — grass for feeding cattle.

Over the last few years his contact with the Enawene Nawe has made him regret such destruction. “Look at this,” he says, gesturing either side of the road to the river. Where once there was forest, now there is just grass dotted with black burnt- out stumps and broken logs around which graze hundreds of white- humped cattle.

It’s shocking but this, along with those Maggi soya silos, is why I have come here. I look at this and see the destruction of the world’s largest rainforest, the precious carbon sink for our children’s future. Not only do rainforests maintain our climate stability φτηνό Στυλό Ηλεκτρονικά Τσιγάρα by absorbing billions of tonnes of heat- trapping carbon dioxide and emitting clean oxygen, but destroying them means wiping out species before we even know what cures they may hold.

As I climb down from Mathias’s truck, I see the blue waters of the Juruena river. It looks so serene, yet it was from here, 40 years ago, that Norman Lewis wrote a shocking report in this magazine, entitled Genocide in Brazil, about the extermination of the Amazon Indians. Along these banks, land- grabbers wiped out whole tribes by handing out clothes impregnated with smallpox, or sugar laced with arsenic. All this was taking place with the connivance of the Brazilian government’s own Indian Protection Service.

By 1969 there were estimated to be fewer than 100,000 Indians left from a population believed to have been between 4m and 6m at the start of the century. The leading Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro predicted there might be none left by 1980. Happily, his fears were wrong and, far from being wiped out, the Indian population has been growing. Today there are an estimated 460,000 Indians from between 225 and 227 tribes, of which about 26 have never been contacted.

“It’s actually been a tremendous success story,” says Fiona Watson, a campaign co-ordinator for Survival International, the organisation for the rights of tribal peoples founded as a result of Lewis’s article. Much of this is down to Survival, which from cramped offices in London’s East End has become the first port of call for indigenous people under threat. Yet Watson is now more worried than in all her 19 years at Survival. “A real war is going on again against the Indians,” she says. Instead of the gold miners, rubber barons and missionaries written about by Lewis, they face a new threat — from those who would turn the Amazon into a food factory for an ever- expanding world. In a quietly global shift, over the last few years Brazil has become the world’s biggest beef and soya producer. Within the next decade it hopes to overtake the United States as the world’s largest agricultural producer, though many of its biggest exporters are multinationals such as Cargill and Monsanto.

All this has come at a cost. Over the last eight years, Brazil has lost more than 170,000 square kilometres of rainforest — an area larger than Greece — and, since 1970, over 700,000 square kilometres — one- fi fth of the forest. After several years of reduction, last year deforestation was once again on the increase, rising 4% to almost 12,000 square kilometres. Around two- thirds of this was for cattle pasture. Much of this Amazonian beef may end up on our dinner tables; partly because of foot- and- mouth disease at home, the EU has become Brazil’s biggest customer.

Soya exports have also boomed with the development of a new strain suitable for cultivating in the Amazon region. Soya farmers generally take over already- cleared land, but Philip Fearnside of the Amazon Research Institute points out this drives the small slash- and- burn farmers deeper into the forest, pushing back the frontier. “Soya bean farming provides a key economic and political impetus for new highways and infrastructure projects,” he says.

Decades after Lewis’s report, pioneers are once again in league with corrupt politicians. Last summer the Brazilian government launched its Amazon fund, requesting billions in international aid to preserve the forest (Norway has already pledged $ 1 billion). But at the same time it is planning huge dam- and road- building projects under Pac — the rapid- growth programme — which Survival says will destroy many tribes’ ancestral lands.

The central Brazilian province of Mato Grosso has become the main battleground in this struggle, overtaking Para as the state with the highest deforestation.

The last few years have seen much of its tropical forest razed for cattle pasture and industrial soya- bean farms. In 2003, one of the worst years on record for deforestation, 20% of Mato Grosso’s forests were converted to cropland. In 2005, Greenpeace awarded its golden chainsaw to the state governor Blairo Maggi, whose family firm happens to be Brazil’s biggest soya producer.

Maggi was recently reported as saying: “We are big producers but we know how to preserve.” He added that there are more damaging forms of pollution than deforestation. “There’s no point discussing month after month whether it’s gone up 2% or 5%.” The Enawene Nawe are right on the front line of this war. Not only are the lands under threat from cattle ranchers and soya barons, but to help provide power to the soya plantations the state government has begun building a series of hydroelectric dams on the Juruena river. The Indians fear these will pollute their water and kill the fish on which they depend. “It’s David and Goliath,” says Fiona Watson.

I have been waiting nearly five hours on the river bank when suddenly I hear the putt- putt of a motor. A long aluminium canoe appears, piloted by an Indian wearing red trunks, scarlet feathers in his ears, red cords round his wrists and black war paint smeared across his face. His name is Xiwiro and he is clutching a sheaf of wooden arrows. I greet him with relief and then ask foolishly: “Where have you been?” “I saw the river was full of fish and they looked too good,” he explained through a combination of gestures and odd words in Portuguese. I could not see any fish in the boat — he had not only stopped to fish but also cooked and eaten them.

I had come 10,000 kilometres to meet him and he’d gone fishing. These are people with an entirely different sense of time and priority.

Finally, around dusk, Xiwiro turns the boat into a narrow inlet overhung by trees. As we round a bend, the air is full of whooping. On the bank are dozens of naked Indians, done up with war paint, beads and feathers and brandishing arrows. It’s like stepping into the pages of National Geographic. Immediately I am surrounded by Indians wanting to touch my fair hair and use my torch, which has a blue light and disco- fl ashes if you press it twice. Everyone is smiling and joking and speaking in nasal sounds. One old man grabs my pack and I follow them up a sandy path to a clearing where, in the fast- gathering darkness, I can just make out some long huts arranged in a circle.

It turns out that whoever grabs the foreigner’s pack gets the “honour” of having them sleep in their hut. The old man leads me into his, which is pitch- black inside and smoky from a number of fires. There are coughs and grunts and chatter coming from different directions. My torch swings around and I see a number of women and children lying in string hammocks, and a few green parakeets on a perch of sticks.

Juliana Almeida, a young Brazilian anthropologist from Opan, a nongovernmental organisation that defends the rights of Amazon Indians in the region, helps me string up my hammock.

After the long journey to get here I am exhausted, so hardly overjoyed when she warns me that the Enawene Nawe don’t sleep in blocks like us but odd hours here and there, and quite likely to be wandering around at 3.30am.

The last thing I expect to see when I emerge blinking from the hut the next morning is an office chair. An Indian girl is playing on it but scampers away when she sees me.

I have travelled in the Amazon many times but never seen a tribe of such beauty. There is clearly no shortage of food, and their diet of honeywater, corn, cassava bread, fish and fruit seems to result in glossy hair and skin. Among Amazon Indians, the Enawene Nawe are a rare success story. They survived the fl u epidemics and the massacres that Lewis wrote about in the 1960s because they kept moving deeper into the forest.

All this is now threatened. Five years ago, men from Maggi Energia arrived in the village and announced plans to build hydroelectric dams on the Juruena river. The Enawene Nawe were horri- fi ed. Unusually for Indians, they only eat fi sh, never meat. Moreover their whole belief system revolves round the river and fish, which they believe commune with their ancestral spirits.

“If the fish dies, we all die, you inuti [non- Indians] and we Enawene Nawe,” explains Marikerosene, a man in his thirties with red- and- black stripes daubed across his face.

It was not the first time the Indians had come into conflict with the Maggi group. In 1998 — two years after their land had been demarcated — they had discovered them building an illegal road through the reserve to transport soya. They succeeded in getting that closed by a judge. But this time around the Indians were tricked into signing a document. “They told us it was just the minutes of the meeting,” said Marikerosene.

Construction started without the tribe being informed. In September 2007, some Enawene Nawe were out fishing when they came across building works. They secured the support of the public prosecutor in Cuiabá, who managed to stop the work for fl outing environmental laws.

But Governor Maggi appealed to the Supreme Court and the suspension was overruled. Another delegation of men from the company arrived, offering 470,000 Brazilian reais in compensation.

“We thought if we take the money and the dams are built, we’ll lose the fi sh and rituals and all that is precious,” said another Enawene Nawe, Daliyamase. “All that we will have is the money, which will run out — and then what?” Unfortunately for the Enawene Nawe the other four tribes who live along the river did accept the cash along with boats and promises of electricity.

“The other Indians live a very different life,” explains Marikerosene. ” They don’t live on fish like us, they plant soya, they commute from the cities and they are further away from the dams.” For a while the issue threatened to split the tribe. Ten Enawene Nawe went to meet with people from the company.

“But each time we went to a meeting, the numbers changed,” said Marikerosene. “First it was five dams, then eight, then 11.” Then, last July, they discovered that the state government now intended to build 77 dams on the river. “They have lied to us,” said Daliyamase. “We’ve written to the authorities, we go to meetings but nothing happens, nobody listens, and so we got angry.” Last November they decided to take matters into their own hands. “We spent six or eight days planning the attack on a dam,” said Marikerosene.

“Some people were very angry and wanted to go and kill whites. They said otherwise this won’t solve anything; they will just go back and start work again. But we agreed we wouldn’t, only if they tried to kill us.

“Our idea was that by doing this, everyone will know what the government is up to and it will be forced to act.” They chose the nearest, Telegráfica dam, three and half hours away by boat. “Everyone gave money from selling beads and bracelets to buy diesel,” said Daliyamase.

“We got there about 8am, pointing our bows and arrows, shouting and whooping to frighten them,” said Marikerosene. They must have been a fearful sight. “The first thing we did was take the radios of the guards and cut phone cords to impede communication,” he continued. “Then we began to break cars, puncture the tyres of lorries, setting fire and smashing equipment. We looted office chairs, computers, cameras, TVs and phones. Then at about 11 we left.” When after 10 days there was no reaction, a group of Enawene Nawe travelled upriver to the small town of Juina, which has the nearest office of Funai, the government Indian service. There they demanded a meeting with its president in Brasilia. Funai arranged a bus to take a delegation of Enawene Nawe on the two- day journey. Arriving at the futuristic capital was a huge shock — until then the biggest town any of them had seen was Brasnorte, with its population of 16,000.

But the Enawene Nawe refused to be intimidated.

“We asked why is Funai in favour of these dams?” said Marikerosene. ” The president said the decision was taken by his predecessor and that he’d thought they were outside Indian lands.

He promised the work would stop but he has gone back on this.” On the way back, they stopped at Cuiabá for a meeting with Governor Maggi. He told them it would be very difficult to stop the work because loans had been made and contracts awarded.

“He is not just the governor — he is the soya chief and owner of some of the works,” said Kawari, another Enawene Nawe. “He doesn’t care about the animals and plants and trees. Indians don’t matter. He’s only worried about money.” As the day finally starts to cool, there is a whooping sound and someone comes to get me.

A long line of wooden gourds containing fish soup has been laid out across the centre of the patio. Large grilled fish are carried out on banana leaves and placed on the ground, and the Indians come and grab chunks of the white flesh. Kawari explains it is an offering from a family that has been experiencing a lot of illness. “By giving to the others they are giving to the spirits.” As darkness falls, everyone drifts off to their huts. In the middle of the night I am astonished to be woken up by pop music. Some of the men are listening to the ring tones of mobile phones they have looted.

Sadly, it’s unlikely in today’s Brazil that the Enawene Nawe will win. The first five dams are already two- thirds finished. Last year, local farmers held a protest against expanding Indian reserves under the slogan: ” Wake up Brazil — the Amazon is ours!” “The world is looking at Amazonia from the wrong viewpoint,” complains Wanderlei Ferrari, a cattle farmer who owns the local supermarket.

“You go on about deforestation but the world needs to eat, and if Brazil doesn’t use all its land to produce food we won’t even have enough for our own population, let alone Europe and China.

Instead of giving more land to the Indians we need to take back at least half. Indians don’t generate economic activity — they just cost money.

Brazil should spend that money by building more ports and making the rivers navigable.” This is the real issue, according to Opan’s Fausto Camponelli, who has been visiting the Enawene Nawe since 1990. “The problem is the dams are just the beginning,” he says. “There is already a bill in Congress to install locks to make the Juruena navigable so they can transport soya more cheaply. More soya means more agri-toxics in the river, more pressure on the forest. That really will be the end of the Enawene Nawe.” It’s a view echoed by the state’s public prosecutor, Mário Lúcio Avelar, who has been fighting in court to stop the dams, which, he says, contravene the country’s own laws. A young man with round Harry Potter glasses, he arrives harassed and two hours late for our meeting at his office in Cuiabá. Papers and files cover every surface, and he has to move a mountain off a chair so I can sit down.

“There’s no way these hydroelectric projects should be going ahead,” he says. “There’s been a series of irregularities in the licences granted by the governor — no independent environmental studies and no attempt to look at their impact on the lives of indigenous people. Our own laws are not being complied with.” When he cited these issues to halt the works last year, the Supreme Court overruled him. “It’s a conflict of civilisation versus resources,” he says. “A society based on harmony with nature versus a country only interested in economic development.

The argument they put is more or less like this: can 500 Indians derail the development of the whole country of more than 180m?” He has gone back to court but is not hopeful.

“Unfortunately, the matter is complicated by the fact that the state governor owns 50 to 60% of these dams. It’s a real conflict of interest. Maggi wants these dams because they are a gold mine — you get a licence for 30 to 35 years, cheap state funding, and the electricity produced pays back the cost within four years. It’s actually a much better business than soya.

“It’s very unlikely we’ll win, as Brazil’s highest courts are very susceptible to economic- development arguments and there is tremendous political pressure,” says Avelar. “I fear within the next 10 to 15 years that the Enawene Nawe will lose their culture of hundreds of years.” Despite the cloud hanging over them, in my few days with the Enawene Nawe I never saw them less than cheerful or utter a cross word.

“They avoid sadness,” says Juliana Almeida.

“They have strong bones, fast feet and rapid smiles,” adds Camponelli. “They live totally in balance with nature, eating very well but not polluting and conscious of conserving resources. But that seems to have no relevance.” Their words remind me of Norman Lewis’s description from 40 years ago of the Indian as “the perfect human product of his environment”, and how he added: “from which it should follow that he cannot be removed without calamitous results”.

When I get home I discover the flashing blue torch that so intrigued them has disappeared from my rucksack pocket. In its place is a necklace of seeds in many colours.

When I called a cab to take me to Wentworth Golf Estate, the driver expressed surprise that I was carrying no golf clubs, but seemed happy with my explanation that I was visiting someone for tea. I told him that I was a journalist from the Sunday Telegraph, but it was only when I directed him past one of the estate’s dancing fountains to a leafy cul-de-sac guarded by two Scotland Yard officers in a white Portakabin that it dawned on him exactly who I was going to see.

“S’pose you’ll be going to interview Milosevic next week,” he growled, as we pulled up at the tall iron gates of 28 Lindale Close, residence of one Mr A Pinochet since last November. Feeling guilty, I gave him a large tip and was shepherded by another Scotland Yard officer to join Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, on the general’s patio.

It is not every day that one takes elevenses with a dictator – even a retired one. That the encounter took place in a rose-filled Surrey garden on a hot summer’s day, at a table overlooking a lawn in the middle of which fluttered a Chilean flag and a colourful plastic windmill, rather than in some sombre wood-panelled room lent an air of improbability. I was high on morphine, too, having only got out of hospital the previous day, after giving birth ten weeks early to my first child, and that added to the surrealism of the situation. Had any of Wentworth’s other famous current or past residents such as Bruce Forsyth or Fergie dropped in, I doubt I would have lifted an eyebrow.

Gathered on the patio were several of Pinochet’s advisers: since his arrest last October, I had often met them in smoky coffee bars of London hotels to hear the latest word from his camp. As we waited for the general to emerge, they shuffled nervously. Pinochet does not like journalists and had only agreed to this encounter with the Sunday Telegraph after protracted negotiations and in the belief that his situation could not be worse – proceedings to extradite him to Spain to be tried for torture and conspiracy to torture begin in September.

There was a sudden silence as Pinochet emerged from the French windows, then a chorus of “Buenos dias, mi general “. I stared at the man I had read so much about, joined protests against at university and written about since his arrest, who now shook my hand, smiling and congratulating me on the birth of my son.

Without his uniform and the sinister dark glasses he used to wear, he didn’t look as I expected a dictator to look. Eighty-three last November, he was dressed in a navy suit with a high waistband, a pearl tie-pin on his silk tie. Leaning unsteadily on a crutch, a hearing aid in his right ear and his thin white hair ever so carefully combed, he looked like someone’s elderly uncle. Adding to this impression was the pushchair propped against the wall, belonging to the replica tag heuer aquaracer wbd1313 ba0740 watch for sale youngest of his 25 grandchildren, three-month-old Augusta Victoria, who had just flown over with her mother from Chile. But the most unexpected thing was the voice. Instead of the military bark that I had expected was a high-pitched whisper.

The general took his seat, the Chilean Constitution placed ostentatiously in front of him. This, his extremely polite manner and frequent references to God (there are Catholic icons all over the house), took me back to an encounter 11 years before with the then military dictator of Pakistan. General Zia ul-Haq had insisted on pouring me tea and serving me yellow iced cakes as he lied through his teeth, constantly justifying his actions with references to the constitution, a document he had completely emasculated, and to Allah.

“I do not normally authorise such meetings,” Pinochet began, with a smile which did not reach his pale blue eyes and was not at all reassuring. His advisers had told us that the current commander in chief of the Chilean army had been on the phone the day before, trying to stop the interview. Watching him gesture with liver- spotted hands for someone to pour the chilled water, I was fascinated by his fingers. They were flat and meaty like those of a butcher. We could, he said, ask him anything.

We started on safe ground with Pinochet’s midnight arrest while he lay in a private suite at the London Clinic recuperating from an operation on a spinal hernia. He insisted that he had been “kidnapped”, and strangely his main objection seemed to be that no one had had the decency to warn him beforehand. “The least they could have done is warn me that I was going to be arrested,” he complained. “I wasn’t in England as a common bandit. I was here as a diplomatic figure and had been welcomed as such.”

His arrest had been particularly hurtful because it had happened here in England, his favourite country, where he liked to shop in Burberry and Fortnum & Mason, visit Madam Tussaud’s and take tea with his friend Margaret Thatcher. “As a child, my teachers and other people who educated me always said that Chile was one of Britain’s best friends . . . I was always happy when I came here because I felt Britain was a place where people really respected one another.”

Speaking so softly that we had to lean forward to catch what he was saying, his words often lost in the whir of the fan, he reminded us both of Marlon Brando in The Godfather. “Britain was famous for its justice system,” he whispered, before complaining with some justification about the farcical nature of the legal proceedings against him which have so far run up millions of pounds in costs and will probably never see him brought to trial. Even if he were tried and convicted in Spain, he is too old to go to jail.

“First there’s the ruling. That’s appealed, the appeal succeeds, then they appeal against the appeal and so it goes on. It’s like being on a wheel.” He waved one of his meaty fingers to illustrate his point. “They are playing with the life of a person who is very old, giving him hope of being freed, then taking it away again.

“I’m the only political prisoner in Britain,” he added, banging his fist on the patio table. “Bandits, common criminals, violent people are all pardoned and allowed home.” It was hard not to smile at the image of Pinochet appealing to Amnesty International, who had documented hundreds of cases, during his regime, of victims tossed from helicopters, people herded into sports stadiums and executed by firing-squads or undergoing electric shocks and other tortures in the changing-rooms.

Had he committed crimes against humanity such as torture and conspiracy to torture, for which, in their historic judgement in March, the Law Lords ruled that his status as a head of state gave him no immunity against prosecution?

Instead of the argument I had heard many times from his advisers – that the situation in Chile under Salvador Allende had been near civil war and that the country had been in the frontline of the war against communism – the general simply denied everything. “Never!” he replied. “Not now. Nor do I think I could do something like that in future because, if you read these acts which I drafted, you will see the first thing I said was that we must encourage people’s development and provide security to anyone detained.”

Brandishing the constitution, he jabbed at a section: “It is forbidden to apply any unlawful force on any person.” I thought of this later in his office, where I saw a shelf of Jean-Claude Van Damme videos.

He implied that, after he had seized power in the 1973 coup, he was too busy to torture anyone. “I didn’t have time to devote myself to controlling the actions of others. To say that would be gross slander!” He added: “There was so much to sort out. We had inflation of 500 per cent. We had to recuperate agriculture to provide food for the people and we had to build houses because they were living in shacks and huts. It would be too long to list everything . . .”

This version of events did not really correspond with the report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, according to which 3,197 people were murdered or disappeared during his 17 years in power. Was he saying he had never given orders to torture or kill anyone?

His reply to this – the crux of the case against him – was a Chilean saying. “One does not erase with the elbow what one writes with the hand,” he said, pointing again to his constitution.

Yet General Manuel Contreras, head of the DINA, the Chilean secret police, with whom Pinochet breakfasted every morning, claims that he did nothing without Pinochet’s authorisation. Recently declassified Pentagon papers include one stating: “Gen Contreras reports exclusively to and receives orders from President Pinochet.”

Pressed on who was responsible, Pinochet launched into a complicated discussion about “how” and “what”: “There are many things I ordered him to do but who can say what? You see, as head of the army you always ask “what” not “how” – that’s up to the chief of intelligence. Civilians don’t understand.”

The July sun was getting hotter and Pinochet’s Chilean butler came and served strong coffee in tiny china cups. Clearly not leading anywhere on torture, the conversation moved on to his conditions at Wentworth. “Would you be happy confined to the same 80 square metres for ten months?” asked Pinochet. “Always seeing the same place, the same people?”

A tour of the house revealed it is less luxurious than the reported 12-bedroomed mansion. With some of Pinochet’s family visiting for lunch – his favourite lamb stew, which his Chilean cook was making in the kitchen – the living-cum-dining-room was crowded. Two of the four bedrooms are taken up by Scotland Yard officers in case Pinochet tries to leg it, as is a small room next to the kitchen full of surveillance screens. There is little space for Pinochet’s exercise bike, and he spends most of his time in a cramped office, reading books on his hero Napoleon or surfing the Internet to read the Chilean press. Typical of rented accommodation, the decor has little character – all cream carpets and cream leather chairs – and the only personal touches are the photos on every shelf and mantelpiece of the general, his family and Margaret Thatcher.

Since last month, Pinochet has been allowed to move freely in the garden, though always monitored by Scotland Yard officers and various surveillance cameras and infra-red movement detectors. His greatest joy is his grandchildren. “I’m too old to run around or play ball, but we have a set of remote-control cars and hold races round the lawn,” he said.

With this unlikely image of the dictator and his toy cars, we bade farewell to the old man and left the redbrick house with the roses rambling over the white shutters where we had taken elevenses and chatted about torture.

The sound came first. A low, ominous bang, like the sound of a large metal door clanging shut.

I was standing in the middle of Benazir Bhutto’s open-top bus, talking to Aitzaz Ahsan, her long-time legal adviser. We stared at each other in horror. This was what we had all feared but somehow, crazily, dared to hope wouldn’t happen.

Someone shouted: “Down!” But there was no need. A wall of orange flame came over the left side of the bus and blasted us all to the floor.

The twanging music that for nine hours had been blaring out, welcoming Bhutto home after eight years in exile, stopped. For a moment there was ghastly silence.

“It’s okay, it’s okay – it’s a burst tyre,” said Agha Siraj Durrani, an amiable giant of a man who, as the closest friend of Bhutto’s husband, had spent the whole journey scanning the crowds for potential threats. But we all knew what it really was.

Then the sirens and screams started. I was sure there would be another one and that it would be worse. Within a minute, it came.

Again the bang, much louder and nearer this time, and once more from the left. Orange flames shot up all around us, rocking the bus and sending pieces of shrapnel raining down. In the left-hand corner at the back of the bus, I could see two young men lying dead in pools of blood.

There were probably 20 of us on the bus when the attack happened in Karachi on Thursday night. Around me were some of Bhutto’s closest lieutenants. She had told them not to come, not wanting the party’s leadership all at risk. But there were also relatives and friends.

Bhutto herself had gone downstairs 15 minutes earlier to a bulletproof compartment to relax her feet, swollen from standing for so many hours. We had no idea if she was still alive.

“We have to get off the bus,” I shouted. We knew we were the targets. Everything was lit up as if it were day instead of six minutes past midnight, and there seemed to be bodies strewn everywhere. A nearby tree was on fire, as were a police van and a car. Flames were coming from the side of the bus. I was terrified the fuel tank would explode. I climbed over a body and made for the ladder where people had started clambering down. Someone yelled: “Don’t – it’s too exposed.”

There was the sound of pistol fire. One man jumped off the side. I was about to do the same when Victoria Schofield, Bhutto’s friend from her Oxford days, pulled me to a chute. She jumped down to be caught by a guard at the bottom, and I followed her, not caring about the 14ft drop.

All about us, the road was littered with body parts and plastic sandals. The nearest bodies had to be those of some of the boys in white Bhutto T-shirts who had made a human shield around the bus, linking hands so nobody could get through, and waving and smiling at us through the nine hours.

I thought about all the people who had travelled for days to see their returning leader and who had been dancing and waving flags, hoisting up children, who would beam with delight when we waved from the bus.

Trying not to look at a severed arm with its palm facing upward, I ran down a side street, just wanting to get away from the carnage.

A crying woman in a pink shalwar kameez grabbed me and tried to lead me to an ambulance. Only then did I realise there were great splashes of blood all over my left shoulder and arm and spattered across my trousers. It was somebody else’s.

“I’m fine. I’m not hurt,” I said, shaking her away. Only later would I realise there were bits of burnt flesh in my hair; and I would stand in the shower for hours under scalding water, trying to wash them – and that awful night – away.

A man with a moustache stopped me running and took me into his house, where I was soon joined by Rehman Malik, Bhutto’s frizzy-haired security chief, Farooq Naik, her lawyer, and Makhdoom Amin Fahim, who has led the Pakistan People’s party (PPP) during her years in exile. All three were spattered with blood.

Bhutto was fine, they said, and had been driven to Bilawal House, her fortified family home in Karachi. I wanted to phone my husband and son in London, wishing fervently I had not called home so excitedly earlier to say I was on Bhutto’s bus. But the batteries on all our mobile phones were flat after so many hours in the convoy.

The man with a moustache giving us sanctuary turned out to be an army colonel, a bizarre twist in this land where politicians and military have rarely worked together. He produced a battery charger, which we all fought over, and made us milky tea. He then drove us to Bilawal House.

Other survivors from the bus had gathered there, and we all hugged one another, crying with relief. Among them was Bhutto’s cousin Tariq, who had told me on the bus how his wife had begged him not to get on board and how he had always stayed in farming and avoided politics.

“Our family is cursed,” he had said. “All the Bhuttos who get involved end up dead: Benazir’s father, both her brothers …”

The military hanged her father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, in 1979; her brother Shahnawaz was poisoned in 1985; and her brother Mir Murtaza was shot in 1996.

Benazir Bhutto, the survivor of this “cursed” dynasty, was now sitting, pale but composed, in Bilawal House, watching BBC World’s live reports from the scene of the bomb attacks. I sat on the arm of her chair and she told me how she had survived this attempt on her life.

Nursing her sore feet inside her compartment, she had been working on a speech she was due to deliver when the bus reached the mausoleum of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. With her was her political secretary, Naheed Khan.

“I had been reading it to Naheed, and we’d just finished, but then I thought there were a few more points to add. I was saying we should add the point that I would ask the supreme court to allow political parties in the tribal areas – and as I said ‘tribal areas’, the first bomb went off.”

Both women were thrown to the floor. “First the sound, then the light, then the glass smashing,” Bhutto said. “I knew it was a suicide bomb. My first thought was, it’s actually happened.” As she spoke to me, we watched the death toll rise on the television screen.

First, they said 15. We knew it was far more than that, for the street had been packed with tens of thousands of supporters. Suddenly, it shot up to 89, then more than 100. It was Pakistan’s most deadly bomb.

She told me she had not wanted to come back to Bilawal House. “I thought they would target this, too, and would be waiting, knowing if I escaped I would come here. But my security insisted.”

After a while, Bhutto went upstairs to wash her face. It was her first time back in the house for eight and a half years, and her old toothbrush was still in its glass in the bathroom. As she came back down, she stopped at the group of black-and-white photographs on the wall of her and her three children.

She touched them with her hand.

Bhutto’s journey home had begun about 16 hours earlier at Dubai airport. Journalists and supporters of her party had flown there from London, and spirits were so high that the Emirates airline staff struggled to contain them on the flight. One PPP activist from Canada had ended up rolling round the aisle, drunk.

Bhutto arrived at the airport from the villa where she has been living in exile since fleeing Pakistan amid a welter of corruption charges. She looked stunning, dressed in an emerald-green-and-white shalwar kameez, the colours of the Pakistani flag, to symbolise national unity. Her jacket was finished with tiny white pearl buttons, and over her head was a trademark floaty white dupatta, which as usual rarely stayed on.

As she said goodbye to her two daughters and her husband, Asif, in the VIP lounge, she announced: “This is the beginning of a long journey for Pakistan back to democracy, and I hope my going back is a catalyst for change. We must believe that miracles do happen.”

Already, however, the warnings were coming in. General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, had publicly told her not to come because of security threats. Bhutto said she had prior warning that suicide squads would try to kill her on her return. She said the telephone numbers of suicide bombers had been given to her by a “brotherly country” and she had alerted Musharraf in a letter last Tuesday.

As her plane landed at Karachi airport, a message came from the government to her security adviser, Malik. “They told us it wasn’t safe and they would take her in a helicopter direct to Bilawal House,” he said later.

Bhutto is nothing if not brave, and she was defiant in the face of what they thought was a government attempt to stop her triumphant homecoming.

“By then we knew that more than 1m people, maybe 2m, were on the streets,” she said. “They had come from all over the country, taking days and spending what little money they have. How could I disappoint them, sneaking in the back door?”

The excitement among her supporters on the aircraft had reached near-hysteria, and the pilot was refusing to taxi off the runway and open the doors until they quietened. Bhutto herself had to broadcast a message from the cockpit.

Finally we came to a stop, the doors were opened and the media was allowed off first. Then came Bhutto. As she reached the bottom of the steps, surrounded by a phalanx of photographers, tears spilt from her eyes and she almost stumbled.

“I was just so emotional to be home,” she told me later. “It felt like this huge burden off my shoulders after so many years.”

I have known Bhutto for more than 20 years. Her wedding in Karachi in December 1987 was my introduction to Pakistan and led me to move there as a freelance foreign correspondent.

Over the next two years I covered her fight against Pakistan’s last dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, and her struggle to become the country’s first woman prime minister at 35, campaigning even though pregnant with her first child. Within 20 months of being elected, she was deposed.

Since then I have been back and forth, seeing her ups and downs as she became prime minister for a second time, only to be thrown out once more amid charges of corruption against her and her husband that were never proved.

Because of this, I knew her closest aides. When they saw me among the hundreds of journalists at Karachi airport, they hauled me on to her bus, one of only two foreigners on board.

Bhutto had always been a crowd-puller, particularly in her home province of Sindh, but I wondered if she would still have the kind of support I had witnessed 20 years ago.

Then she was untainted, a fresh-faced girl not long out of Harvard and Oxford and daughter of a man who had been seen as the first Pakistani to give a voice to the poor before Zia deposed and hanged him. This time she was coming back as part of a deal with another dictator, Musharraf, even if she refused to call it that.

She insisted it was an “understanding for a transition towards democracy”. But everyone knew that as a result of the deal the government’s corruption cases against her had been dropped, allowing her to return and contest elections due to be held by January.

Moreover, this was a US-brokered deal that had involved frequent meetings with Richard Boucher, the US assistant secretary of state for south and central Asia, as well as 2am phone calls from Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, to break deadlocks.

Britain had also played its part, and Jack Straw was credited with bringing Bhutto in from the cold when he was foreign secretary. “As long as Washington and Whitehall are wedded to keeping Musharraf in power for their war on terror, she had no choice but to come back like this,” said Malik, who led the negotiations on her side.

Polls commissioned by the US State Department, which showed that Bhutto commands never less than 30% of public support, led America to see that the way forward in an increasingly unstable Pakistan might be to bring her back as the democratic face of a beleaguered Musharraf.

“Each time military rule has failed, they have turned to a Bhutto to save the situation,” says Husain Haqqani, director of the Centre for International Relations at Boston University and a former adviser to Bhutto and the military.

“Her father in 1971, then her in 1988. This time, at least, there is a Benazir Bhutto available to save the situation. If the military and intelligence agencies don’t stop meddling in politics, next time maybe there won’t be.”

In a country where Osama Bin Laden commands far higher popularity ratings than President George W Bush, would America’s role in her return work against her? It seemed not: her supporters came out in their hundreds of thousands to welcome her home.

From the top of the bus, it was an amazing spectacle: red, black and green PPP flags waving and people cheering, dancing and holding banners showing pictures of Bhutto and her father. Car horns blared.

“Only she can do this,” said her mother-in-law, Mrs Zardari, as she looked out on the crowds from the top of the bus. “It makes me cry.”

The sun was already setting as we reached Star Gate, at the end of the airport road, and turned right onto the main Shar-e-Faisal highway towards the city. For the first time, we could get an idea of the size of the crowds packing the road, which stretched as far as we could see into the distance.

As we all looked out, there was a flutter of feathers above our heads. Somebody had released a clutch of white doves, which circled above us amid “ooh”s and “aah”s. One fell to the floor of the bus and hurt its foot. Bhutto cradled it and put it on her shoulder, where it perched for hours as she waved indefatigably to the crowds.

One thing was clear, however. The bus might have bulletproof sides, but we were standing in the open on top. We were travelling at a snail’s pace, and, with people all around – on the streets, up trees and lampposts, on top of buildings – it felt very exposed.

“How can you possibly secure this?” I asked one of the police officers on the top of the bus. He looked up at the heavens. “It’s in God’s hands,” he said.

Bhutto herself stood right at the front, not behind the bulletproof screen that had been constructed to withstand even a shot from a Dragunov high-velocity rifle (“available as easily as sweets in the bazaar,” according to Zulfikar Ali Mirza, who designed the bus). Durrani, the best friend of Bhutto’s husband, was getting increasingly worried about how he could protect her.

The route of the convoy took it not only past a number of tall buildings but also under a series of footbridges and flyovers, which we had to duck to get underneath. The crowds on top were so close that their hands brushed ours. Fortunately, nobody threw anything more harmful than petals and rosebuds.

Durrani told me another fear was that someone might use a remote-controlled toy plane loaded with explosives to land on the bus. He was constantly on his mobile phone. “The government promised to provide us with jammers so we could intercept any remote-controlled explosive device within 200 metres,” he explained. “But the man in the car in front of the bus with the jammer keeps telling me it isn’t working and that we should do something.”

Desperately, he tried to phone Tariq Aziz – the national security adviser and Musharraf’s point man in the negotiations with the Bhutto camp – but to no avail. Then Asif, Bhutto’s husband, called.

“He asked me what was going on. ‘I can see you all on mobile phones, and they shouldn’t work if the jammer is working.’ I told him it wasn’t. [He said:] ‘For God’s sake, get Benazir behind the bulletproof screen.’ I asked her but she said, ‘No, I must be at the front and greet my people.'” It was not only bombers that they were concerned about. As darkness fell, I stood at the front with Bhutto.

“Have you noticed the streetlights?” she asked me. “Each one we approach goes off so the road is in darkness and my guards can’t see anything. Someone is doing this. We’ve had information they might try a shooting.”

She was right. Illuminated by the bus’s lights, we passed along like a bright bubble while the crowd on either side was in darkness.

I remembered back to when I lived in Pakistan. Whenever there was a mystery attack in Karachi, usually taking out somebody the intelligence agencies did not like, the shootings would be preceded by the streetlights going off.

Suddenly there was a crack of what sounded like gunfire. I threw myself on the floor before realising with embarrassment that it was fireworks. “I don’t like the firecrackers,” Bhutto said. “Anyone could use it as cover for shooting.”

Her security people used searchlights to sweep the darkened crowds, looking out for anyone with a gun or a suspicious backpack. “There’s no technique to identify a suicide bomber in an open street like this until it’s too late,” Durrani admitted. “That’s why we decided on a human shield.”

He said they had trained 5,000 young men, volunteers for the so-called “jan israin na Benazir Bhutto” – those prepared to sacrifice themselves for Bhutto. Of those, 3,000 were sent on to the bridges and tall buildings and into the crowd while 2,000 stayed around the bus.

Unarmed, they were identifiable by white or black T-shirts. Bravest of all – and many of them doomed – were those who formed a human chain around the bus. Others formed an outer cordon around the bus’s police escort, holding a rope to stop the crowds coming too near.

At about 10pm we suddenly lurched to a halt. There was a moment of panic until someone explained that the bushad a flat tyre. Some local activists were told to get off as the load was too heavy. I was allowed to stay.

We sat stationary, crowds surrounding us and the vans of bored-looking police officers with Kalashnikovs forming a cordon either side. Somebody brought burgers and Pepsis, which we gobbled hungrily. Pizzas also arrived.

Seven hours after leaving the airport, we weren’t even halfway along the 15km route to the Jinnah memorial, where Bhutto planned to make her speech. “If we keep going at this rate I’ll have to order in breakfast on the bus,” Malik joked.

Eventually the bus started moving again. As it got later, the security fears began to be forgotten and the mood became euphoric. There were even women in the crowd, which had been almost exclusively male. Many had brought their children, dressed in their best and excited to see such a spectacle.

Bhutto rested in the armchair inside the bulletproof shield on top of the bus, the wounded dove still perched on her shoulder, her face animated. I sat on the arm and we chatted.

“Aren’t you tired?” I asked.

“Not at all,” she laughed. “It’s incredible, far more people than in 1986. How must Musharraf be feeling seeing this?”

She continued: “This is the real Pakistan, not the militants or the military. We are giving a voice to the moderates that don’t want to see their country taken over by terrorists.”

For a moment she grew sombre. “I just hope I can meet all these expectations… but also that I am allowed to.”

Abida Hussein, one of Pakistan’s best-known women MPs and a former critic of Bhutto who recently switched sides, got on the bus. The two women went downstairs to the safe compartment. Perhaps 20 minutes remained before the bombs would shatter the euphoria.

Karachi’s police chief said yesterday the first bomb was a grenade or car bomb to make space, while the second blast was the work of a suicide bomber. His body – or body parts – has not yet been identified.

Although three people died on top of the bus, the only reason that Bhutto and the rest of us were not killed, it seems, is that the human shield worked – the young volunteers around the bus stopped the suicide bomber getting closer, paying for our protection with their own lives.

So, who did it? The awful thing about Pakistan today is that it could be any one of a number of people or organisations, from militants to the military.

Potential suspects include ethnic groups such as the MQM, the organisation that vies with the PPP for rule of Karachi, Taliban sympathisers and even old-guard politicians in deadly opposition to Bhutto.

“Far from bringing stability, Bhutto’s return has threatened everybody,” said a member of Jamaat-e-Islami, the largest religious party.

Bhutto has pointed the finger at remnants in the intelligence and political elite from the Zia regime that executed her father. Some of them, she says, are still in power – although she is keen to make clear she is not implicating the president.

“We have confidence in some elements of the current regime, such as General Musharraf and the foreign minister, but it is the wild cards that give us concern, and those wild cards are usually the old cards,” she said.

Musharraf had telephoned her the morning after the attack, she said. “He told me he had warned me not to come back, that there were security risks and he himself had faced two assassination attempts. But he said this shows we moderates must stand together.”

Senior members of her party were not so sure. “My fear is they will use this as an excuse to declare martial law and not go ahead with the elections,” said Malik.

Would the army really relinquish power? It has run the show for 33 of the country’s 60 years of existence and pulled the strings from behind for much of the rest of the time. During Bhutto’s two stints as prime minister she often complained: “I am in office but not in power.” She later admitted she had been forced to leave both the nuclear programme and Afghan policy in the hands of the military.

Since Musharraf seized power in 1999, the military has markedly increased its role in the public and private sectors. Retired generals and brigadiers run the tax authority, the postal system and the housing department. Two of Pakistan’s four provinces have generals as governors. According to Military Inc, a recent book by the defence analyst Ayesha Siddiqa, the army also controls large parts of the economy.

For Bhutto, the assassination attempt was a brutal awakening to how much the country has changed since she packed her bags and fled to London in 1998.

The evening after the attack, I sat with Bhutto in her small, book-lined study. She had just held her first press conference since her return, a bravura performance at which she had railed against “those who turned triumph into tragedy” and insisted she would not be deterred from her fight to bring back democracy, even if it cost her her life.

Dressed in sombre grey silk with a black armband, she told me she had had just less than four hours’ sleep after the attack, from 6am to 10am. She had woken up with blood in her ears from the effect of the blast.

“I haven’t felt weepy yet, but it suddenly hit me about 5.30am that maybe I wouldn’t have made it,” she said. “I kept thinking of the noise, the light and the place littered with dead bodies. Everything seemed lit up.

“Also I kept thinking of the boys, the human shields. Do you know more than 50 of them lost their lives?”

On the wall of the study was an old spelling certificate for her youngest daughter, Aseefa, who is 14, a reminder that Bhutto may be a politician but is also a devoted mother.

Her eldest, Bilawal, 19, started at Oxford earlier this month, while Aseefa and her other daughter, Bakhtwar, 17, have remained in Dubai with their father and “a house full of dogs”, as both have important exams coming up.

The first thing she thought of after the bomb went off was the children, and she admitted it had been hard speaking to them that morning.

“They kept saying, ‘Mummy, are you okay? Mummy, are you okay?’ They had been desperately keen to come with me, and I said, ‘That’s why I didn’t want you to come.'”

She added: “The worst thing is hurting them, making them fearful. I feel children need their parents. Losing my father was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I was 25 – they are still much smaller. I worry about the effect on them.”

She insisted, however, that they understood that she had to return to Pakistan.

“My mother comes from Iran, and many of her relatives and friends never went back home, so I used to think I didn’t want to be one of those people who’d lost their country.”

She said that after the attack her husband had been about to jump on the next plane from Dubai to be with her. “I said: ‘Don’t come back, because what if they don’t let you out? Then the girls will be on their own.'”

Although she vows to continue, she is having to rethink her strategy. Today she had planned to return in procession to her ancestral home in Larkana, but that has been put on hold.

“Originally I was planning to be on the road the whole time, but now that’s clearly impossible,” she said. “We can’t be intimidated by them but we can’t take reckless risks. We know they won’t give up.

“The problem is, in Pakistan people want to see their leaders,” she added. “Our power base are the poor and dispossessed. They don’t have TVs or computers we can reach them through.”

Yesterday the usually cacophonous city of Karachi was subdued. Relatives of those who never came home on Friday morning crowded city hospitals and morgues, waving pictures of the missing. Others brought them to Bhutto’s house.

A survivor, Nadir Ali Magsi, a 25-year-old peasant farmer from a village close to Larkana, lay in the neurosurgery ward at Jinnah hospital. He had shrapnel embedded in his head and legs. One eye was bandaged up, and he had difficulty hearing, but he managed to speak.

“Benazir zindabad,” he repeatedly said. Long live Benazir.

“Have you ever used a pistol?” yelled Sergeant-Major Mick Bolton amid the Kalashnikov fire and bursts from a machinegun as we ran across a baked-mud field and dived for cover. “If it comes down to it, everyone’s going to have to fight.”

Round after round fizzed past our ears, sending up clouds of dust. My heart was thudding crazily against my flak jacket, my breath coming in short, rasping pants.

The whoosh of a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) close enough to lift the hairs on the back of my neck was followed by an orange blaze of flame as it landed nearby.

I hurled myself into an irrigation ditch and crouched amid the tall reeds, the soil just above me flying up as bullets landed all around. Then firing started coming from behind too. The Taliban had us from three sides.

It was late last Tuesday afternoon. Justin Sutcliffe, the photographer, and I were with the elite of the British Army, 48 men of C company, the 3rd Battalion the Parachute Regiment – with an attachment of airborne troops of the Royal Irish Regiment – facing a bunch of Afghans in rubber sandals.

We could not see them, but we knew they were less than 100 yards away.

The silver-haired sergeant-major had kept us amused for days with his wisecracks, behind which was a touching concern for his soldiers and adoration for the girlfriend he was due to marry in November, whose photo he had shown me.

Now this veteran of two tours in Iraq and six in Northern Ireland was telling us we were the closest he had ever come to being “rolled up”.

“If we get overrun I’ll save the last bullet for myself,” said Private Kyle Deerans, a handsome South African of 23. With his black floppy hair, I was sure had broken a string of hearts.

In horror, it dawned on me what had been wrong about Zumbelay, the village we had just visited on a hearts and minds mission with soft hats and offers of development projects. I should have noticed there were no children around.

There was no more time to think about that as a mortar landed nearby. “Get out of the ditch!” screamed someone.

I wanted to stay in hiding. “No, no, it’s not safe,” said Lee, a military policeman attached to the unit, tugging me away.

I clawed my way up the slippery bank, oblivious to the thorns ripping my hands. I felt terrifyingly exposed as I climbed over the mound and rolled down the other side. “Keep down! Keep down!” came another shout. As I flattened myself, a mortar landed just where I had been crouching.

For the next two hours we were trapped under such relentless fire we thought we would be killed. The ambush of our lightly armed patrol not only was unexpected but also brought into question the entire strategy being pursued by the British in Helmand, the huge province they have taken on.

The paras had been in lively mood earlier that day when we left Camp Price, the British base at Gereshk, a sprawling town of walled compounds, two bridges and a bazaar. C company is a close-knit group and the trip was the furthest east they had ventured since arriving in Gereshk two months ago.

The plan was to go to Zumbelay, meet villagers, then camp before stopping at another village on the way back.

Some of the soldiers had not been out of the camp before and none had experienced a “contact” with Taliban, unlike their fellow paras in A company who have had what they describe as a “fruity” time and were engaged alongside British special forces further north.

To keep the men occupied, Major Paul Blair, C company’s wiry Irish commander, had organised an “iron man” contest the day before involving ordeals such as flipping a giant tyre and sprinting round the camp carrying boxes of ammunition.

As we set off with cold drinks and Pringles, we joked about going on a picnic.

“Aggressive camping is what I call it,” said Colour Sergeant Michael Whordley.

They laughed at me in my local dress of shalwar kameez worn with desert boots and a flak jacket.

We were in a convoy of 15 vehicles, an assortment of Snatches – the lightly armoured Land Rovers that have caused such controversy over their vulnerability to roadside bombs in Iraq – open troop-carriers and Wmiks, open Land Rovers that look a bit like safari vehicles except for the machinegun on the front and heavy guns mounted on top. Their firepower would save us.

As we drove out of Gereshk we noticed a man in a black turban pull out on a motorbike and follow alongside for a while. But we could hardly hide our intentions, sending up clouds of dust visible for miles as we travelled east through the desert.

Long ago, when the Russians occupied Afghanistan, I travelled around on the backs of motorbikes of anti-Soviet mujaheddin who went on to become Taliban. Even back in 1989 they regarded them as the best transport against a fixed army.

The journey east took about 90 minutes through a landscape of undulating sand and gullies in temperatures close to 55C.

We were close to Zumbelay by late afternoon – that special time of day when fingers of fading sunlight trap the dust being churned up by men returning to the village with herds of goats.

Most of Helmand is desert but Zumbelay seemed a small oasis. Bedouin tents and mud-walled houses, some with courtyards of flowers, were scattered amid a patchwork of fields of tall green grass and dried poppy stalks. A wide canal ran through one side, with deep irrigation ditches leading off between fields.

The convoy stopped about a mile from Zumbelay. A fire support group (FSG) drove off in the Wmiks with a mortar team to take up a secure position beyond a ridge to protect us in the event of trouble.

The rest of us downed helmets and walked in, crossing a field where a few scrawny camels gazed at us. I caused hilarity by falling into a ditch.

Everyone commented how quiet and bucolic the village seemed. “All it needs is a nice pub where we could enjoy a cold pint,” joked Major Blair as we watched a kingfisher swoop low over the water in a flash of bright green.

Even the name had a nice ring to it: Zumbelay made me think of Manderley from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Of course Manderley had a sinister secret and in retrospect the quiet of Zumbelay was suspicious. The one thing we should have noticed was the lack of children, who usually come running up demanding pens or baksheesh.

We sat on a raised bank at the edge of the field under a mulberry tree along with a few other men, one of whom seemed to be glaring at us from under his sparkly prayer cap.

“We are British not Americans,” explained the major through an interpreter. “We come at the invitation of your government as friends and brothers to help you and find out what you need.”

An old man with a white beard said the other elders were at the mosque for prayers. (Later we would realise it was not prayer time.) He said the village had no problems and suggested we come back for tea two days later on Thursday at 10am when everyone would be around.

As we took our leave, he pointed in the opposite direction to the way we had come.

“If you go that way there is a bridge,” he said.

Afghans are the most hospitable people on earth, offering everything when they have nothing. I was thinking it was unlike them not to offer tea to visitors; but Major Blair seemed happy. “I think that went well – they seemed quite friendly,” he said to me as we walked away.

Almost immediately a burst of gunfire rang out from the ridge to the left where the FSG was deployed.

“We’ve had a contact,” came the message over the radio.

They had spotted a gathering of 12-14 men dressed in black and armed. Two of the support group’s vehicles had peeled off to try to intercept them; but as they did so RPGs started to rain in on the support base – followed by small arms fire.

For a moment we stood staring up at the ridge listening to the gunfire and explosions. Then we started walking again through a field, looking for the bridge.

Within seconds we heard the staccato crack of Kalashnikovs. I threw myself into a ditch as bullets whizzed overhead. “Helmets on!” shouted someone. “Put your f****** helmets on!”

I followed the paratroopers, running for our lives across the fields. The ground had been ploughed weeks before and had baked hard into dry, treacherous ridges. We stumbled over the furrows, with bullets and loud explosions all around us. I wished I was wearing camouflage instead of the blue press flak jacket and helmet that made me so visible.

I did not see Justin fall as we ran. “I lost my footing and managed to turn onto my back as I ploughed into the ground, my body armour taking the impact of the fall,” he said later.

“Looking up, a rocket- propelled grenade flew over our heads about 10ft above, bursting in the field near a group of paras who had made the sprint in better time.

“I struggled back to my knees in time to see the first mortar round land exactly where we had been only half a minute earlier. The troops returned fire. A prolonged burst of rapid machinegun and rifle fire. Then, using white phosphorus grenades as cover, they moved left to take up firing positions behind the ridge.

“Again we were diving to the ground to avoid incoming fire, but this time it was to our left flank as well as the original direction. Feeling very exposed, we returned fire and ran back to a ridge along the field at right angles to our position.

“Once again we took incoming fire, this time from behind us. Their mortars seemed mercifully slow at retargeting and they fell where we had just left.”

All around me was shouting and screaming. The two platoons had been scattered by the ferocity of the ambush. In the deep ditches their radios were not working. The soldiers were releasing canisters of red or green smoke to show each other their positions, even though this would reveal them to the Taliban too.

The firing came again and again, with hardly any break in between. The 8ft deep irrigation ditches which crisscrossed the fields had turned into trenches. In and out of them we climbed, slipping in the muddy water as the paras tried to regroup, yelling instructions I did not understand, such as “Go firm!”, which means stay still.

“When we shout ‘rapid fire’, run!” yelled Corporal Matt D’Arcy as we crouched in yet another ditch. “Rapid fire!” he screamed and, ears ringing amid a clatter of heavy fire that I could not identify as ours or theirs, I forced myself to climb out of the trench.

One of the Afghan interpreters stayed praying and moaning in the ditch until Private Deerans, the handsome South African, grabbed him by the collar and kicked him out.

I thought about my husband Paulo and our six-year-old son Lourenço back home in East Sheen, southwest London; of the World Cup birthday party Lourenço was due to have this afternoon; and how stupid it would be to die in this Helmand field from a Taliban bullet.

In my belt purse were some of Lourenço’s toy cars and pens he had given me for the “poor children of Afghanistan”. I had taken them to the village but never got a chance to give them out. I had to survive and the image of my son’s face kept me running and jumping into yet another trench.

Frantically, I looked around for Justin. We have worked together on and off for years, surviving everything from arrest in west Africa to abduction in Pakistan and regard each other as a kind of talisman. In the confusion we had split up and I had no idea if he was all right.

In fact he was with Major Blair, a usually charming man, who was very angry indeed.

“Where’s the f****** air support?” the major was yelling on the radio to British headquarters at Camp Bastion, reading off a GPS position.

“Two A10s 10 minutes away can be with you for 20 minutes,” came the reply. Nothing arrived.

“We need air support. Where’s the air support?” Major Blair radioed again after sliding on his back in another trench, pulled down by the weight of the kit on the mud.

The message came back that the A10s had been called off to Sangin, a village to the north where two British special forces had been killed. No other planes were available because fighting was still going on.

Why they were more important than us was unclear.

“We’re going to have to get out of this alone,” Blair said. He checked the grenades on his belt. Later he explained: “I was counting them because I thought the fight would get down to 25 yards.”

I was in a group led by Corporal D’Arcy. At one point we ran one way back towards the village only to be fired on from that direction.

“They’re playing with us like chess pieces,” shouted the corporal. The Taliban clearly had someone on the ridge to the right of us directing movements, for they were constantly changing position.

I ran again and found myself in a trench with the platoon snipers, including Private Deerans. Some used .338 Magnum rifles, which sounded like a cannon. Others were armed with Minimi 5.56s, the army’s lightweight machinegun.

“Look, two over there behind that white mound!” shouted Sergeant Whordley, who at 39 is in his last year in the army.

Known as the Buzzard, the sergeant usually controls the helicopters in and out of camp, but he had begged to go along on the patrol. “In 22 years of service I’ve never been in anything like that,” he said later.

“Got him!” shouted Private Deerans as a man in a blue shalwar kameez and short beard popped out from behind the mound and straight into his sights to be hit in the chest. “I f****** killed him!”

The day before I had learnt that a private like him earns just over Pounds 1,000 a month, and that the British Army is the only one in the world whose soldiers pay tax while overseas.

“Happy days!” shouted someone back. I looked at him incredulously. This was the worst day of my life by an awfully long way.

In the 19th century thousands of Englishmen spilt their blood on fields like this and I didn’t want to join them. I thought about John Reid, the former defence secretary, glibly saying he hoped to complete the three-year British mission to Helmand without a shot being fired.

Why were we there? Why had we thought the Afghans would not fight – they defeated the Russians after all. And why did everyone in Kabul and London keep insisting nobody in Helmand really wanted to support the Taliban but were being forced to?

What if they were wrong? After all, almost everyone in the province now depends on growing poppies. Whatever the British commanders might say, villagers must see the presence of British troops as threatening the opium trade.

I thought back to a conversation with Captain Alex McKenzie, commander of the FSG, before the patrol began. “We’ve never been out to these villages and want to see what kind of reaction we get,” he had said, adding that, according to US intelligence, there were between six and eight medium-level Taliban commanders in the valley less than a mile to the north.

“If you ask me, what we get is a Taliban attack,” I had said to Justin.

“How much ammo have you got left?” Corporal D’Arcy called to his snipers. Were we running out? And where was the promised air support? What about Britain’s new Apache helicopters that we had all heard so much about?

“Targets at 10 o’clock! Targets at 10 o’clock!” shouted someone.

“No, don’t shoot, they’re civvies!” yelled Corporal D’Arcy.

“How can we f****** tell?” screamed someone else.

The firing had been going on for almost two hours and I was finding it harder and harder to run. I had thrown off everything, even dropping my notebook – something I have never done in 19 years as a foreign reporter – and, less wisely in Helmand’s infernal heat, my water bottle.

I was gasping from thirst. Lee, the military policeman, saw my plight, thrusting the straw from his camel pack into my mouth and urging “Drink!” before pushing me to run again. My helmet was almost falling off because of the broken strap I had never got round to fixing.

I have been in some hairy situations, not least in Afghanistan, a country that I love, where at the age of 22 I was trapped in trenches by Russian tanks with a group of mujaheddin. But this was the first time in my life that I thought I would not survive.

Worse, I looked at the taut faces around me and could see the soldiers thought that too.

I thought about all the things left undone in my life, words left unsaid or unwritten, but most of all, my little boy’s big blue eyes and curly hair, and I just wanted it to stop.

We were under relentless fire from AK- 47s, RPGs, mortars and a Dushka, a Russian-made heavy machinegun.

Justin – separated in a trench with a group led by Major Blair – was under attack from all sides, but witnessed the turning of the battle.

“We were ordered out of the ditch and, under heavy covering fire, scrambled up the sides. Breaking towards the river, we came under fire again. This time there was a massive burst of fire from the FSG on the ridge directed at the Taliban.”

The paras had managed to regroup impressively. The men of the FSG beat off their own ambushers, drove their vehicles to the south where they were more secure and then moved back along the ridge to our aid – with devastating effect.

“We could see the group of 10 to 15 men who engaged us moving towards the houses down below,” said Captain McKenzie later, “so we let rip with the four 50-cal heavy guns.

“The force of the blast from those guns is so powerful it can rip off your arm without even hitting you. All that was left of those guys was a pink mist.”

Down below we managed to get away from the fields of trenches and onto open ground, where I felt even less secure but the paras were much happier because they could see. They assured me it was all right to run across the exposed hillside.

“Single file with good spaces between! Single file!” barked Sergeant-Major Bolton.

“This is not Club Med!”

By that time it was 8.30pm and light was fading. Only then came the reassuring sound of the Apaches, almost two hours after they had been requested. With those overhead, we reached the vehicles and withdrew.

The battle was not over. There was only one way back to Camp Price and only one bridge back over the Helmand river. Major Blair was convinced the Taliban would lay an improvised explosive device (IED) or ambush us there. We could not go back to Zumbelay.

Instead we drove south through the desert. At last we had air support. I was in Major Blair’s Land Rover and all the time his radio operator was in touch with the planes overhead.

On and on we drove through the bumpy sand until the pilots assured us there were no ACMs (anti-coalition militia) within a mile or so and we pulled the vehicles into a herringbone formation, where we would stay for the next few hours.

We all tumbled out of the vehicles and started talking, pumped up with adrenaline at having survived. Veterans of conflicts all over the world said they had never experienced such a battle, and none of us could believe we had survived unscathed.

“I’ve never been in anything as intense as that,” said Major Blair. “That was a 360-degree battle.”

Everyone was stunned at how quickly the Taliban had organised themselves and how co-ordinated they had been. From the time we had walked into the village to the start of the ambush was less than an hour and they had been undeterred by our array of hardware.

“That’s as bold as it comes,” said Captain McKenzie, shaking his head in awe. “The Taliban are quite ingenious but they’ve probably got 25 dead blokes and we’ve got none, and that speaks volumes.”

Private Deerans said: “We don’t tend to think the Taliban can fight as well as us, but they’re fighting for something they really believe in and they have the advantage of local terrain. They’re world class at getting rounds down but fortunately their shooting was crap.

“Still, it was close enough for me. They had the advantage from the beginning and I don’t know how none of us got shot.”

Some of the men realised they had forgotten to wear their wedding rings that day.

“I have my fiancée’s ring on a string and it’s the first time I’ve gone on an operation without it,” said Sergeant-Major Bolton.

I looked at my own bare finger, remembering how while checking in for my flight at Heathrow 20 days earlier I had realised the two rings I always wear were in an oyster shell by the side of my bed.

The big question was whether the villagers were in on the ambush. It seemed clear to me they had directed us straight into it, and there must have been locals fighting for them to organise so quickly.

“Maybe they were coerced by the Taliban,” said Major Blair. The official British line is that 80% of the population of Helmand are “floating voters” stuck between a rock and a hard place of an evil Taliban and a government in Kabul that does nothing for them.

It seemed more likely to me that they feared the British had come to take away their source of income, the poppy.

While we were discussing this, another burst of gunfire rang out. Surely we were not under attack again? “Hush,” warned the sergeant-major. “Everyone still and quiet. It’s not over yet.”

We still had to get back across the bridge into Gereshk, and we needed air support.

I lay on the warm sand staring up at the stars that covered the sky. In the distance were flashes I first thought were shooting stars until someone told me it was from the fighting at Sangin.

I looked at my watch. It was after midnight Afghan time, mid-evening in Britain. I realised that had I been in England I would have been at a summer party on the roof of New Zealand House in Haymarket, central London.

For the next two hours Camp Bastion kept telling us that “all assets” were tied up in Sangin where the snatch raid on four Taliban commanders had succeeded in getting two of them before descending into a bloody firefight where Harriers, Apaches and A10s had all been called in.

Surely they weren’t going to leave us to go back on our own?

In between his radio pleas for air support, Captain McKenzie and I discovered we grew up near each other, although I had done so a good 10 years before him, and knew the same pubs.

It was after 1.30am when we finally got the nod for air support – only to find three of our Snatches had got bogged down in the sand. Amid all the stars we could just see the lights of two American A10s, anti-tank aircraft of awesome firepower.

“How long have we got air for?” asked Major Blair as spades were used to dig the vehicles out. “Forty more minutes,” came back the pilot’s American accent. After that they would have to refuel.

Major Blair checked his watch. It was going to take a good half an hour to get to the bridge and some of the Snatches were still stuck.

I remembered Corporal Robert Jones, an American Humvee driver I had met, who had expressed horror at how exposed the British vehicles were. He had told me that if any American vehicles got bogged down for more than five minutes in Helmand they abandoned them.

“We just hate going west from Kandahar,” he said. “It’s all IEDs, RPGS, Taliban, Al-Qaeda. We call it Hell-man.”

Eventually the vehicles were pulled out and we were on the road to the bridge. We reached it just before the planes had to refuel.

“Please don’t let there be an IED,” I prayed.

“Do you want me to give a show of force?” came the pilot’s drawl over the radio.

“Could drop to 5,000ft and drop some flares.”

“Many thanks,” replied our controller and we laughed in relief at his very British reply as we crossed the bridge safely, white flares dropping all around.

It was first light as we drove into Camp Price to be met by those who had been left behind, half-anxious and half-envious. It was clear there was now a big question mark over the British hearts and minds operation.

“I’m going to have to review our approach to villages,” said Major Blair. “We’re going to have to go in with far more security. It’s very annoying to think we were sitting there offering things and having a laugh and a joke with villagers who knew that five minutes later we’d be attacked.”

More and more senior military officers are saying it has been an enormous mistake for British troops to move out of the main urban centres of Lashkar Gah and Gereshk and into outlying areas.

They blame the Americans – and some over-enthusiastic British generals – for dragging British forces into Operation Mountain Thrust, a large offensive against the Taliban in which some 500 people have died across the south, creating much local resentment.

What some have described as “military and developmental anarchy” may change when Lieutenant-General David Richards, Nato commander in Afghanistan, takes control of the Helmand operation on July 31.

On the military front, the general wants more fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, and the British government is seeking more military support from its European allies. But General Richards has also been bashing heads together on the need to make some improvements in the lives of the Afghans.

Five years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan still remains bottom of the list for almost every significant indicator from infant mortality to lack of access to water or electricity.

“We’ve got to stop talking and start doing,” he said last week. “Otherwise we’re in danger of losing this.”

It may be just too late. Disillusion with the government of President Hamid Karzai has never been so high. The Taliban have reorganised, possibly with the help of both the Pakistani military intelligence and Al-Qaeda, to use the sophisticated tactics I experienced firsthand in Zumbelay.

No longer are they just a few dozen ragtag fighters here and there. Now groups often include hundreds of heavily armed men equipped with motorbikes, cars and radios.

All over the south they have set up shadow administrations and kill any Afghan who is even indirectly associated with the government, such as teachers. About 1,500 Afghan security guards and civilians were killed by the Taliban last year and some 900 already this year.

The Taliban are also winning the propaganda game. Within hours of our return to Camp Price, the Afghan Islamic Press in Peshawar had put out a statement claiming the Taliban had killed seven British soldiers in Zumbelay.

Far from losing any men, the brave paras from C company had killed about 20 Taliban. Yet the Ministry of Defence put out nothing. If Justin and I had not been there, you would probably never have read about it.

When we decided to go by train from Mpika, in northern Zambia, to Dar es Salaam, I did not expect my dancing prowess to be on trial.

But I should have realised it would be no ordinary journey when I called Tazara reservations and a giggling voice answered, “Here is Beauty”.

When I explained I was calling from Portugal, Beauty was very excited. “Por-too-gell,” she said in wonder, “what time is it?” When we established it was the same as in Zambia, Beauty was astonished. Someone called Precious came on the line, equally excited, then the telephone went dead.

After several conversations, which never got near reserving a compartment, I gave up and decided to try my luck on arrival. The Tazara train goes from Zambia to Tanzania twice a week and, according to my guide book, is one of Africa’s most reliable.

The line was built by the Chinese and the company’s motto is “On Time All The Time”. So the Friday morning that I arrived with my boyfriend at Mpika station – a concrete monstrosity in the African bush – to buy our tickets and catch the afternoon train, we were confident of soon departing.

Forty hours later, we were still waiting. Now 40 hours is a long time, even for those used to the vagaries of England’s Connex South Central. It is a very long time in Mpika, where the concrete road from the station peters out after 50 metres into red clay dotted with shacks. Few tourists stop and we were soon the object of fascination.

People popped up from nowhere to tell us about Chinese railway workers breeding dogs to eat for dinner. The one-eyed stationmaster confided his dream of becoming a marketing executive. A group of evangelists with black briefcases tried to convert us, and a man asked Paulo how many cows he had paid for me.

We hung out in Kalolo’s bakery, the only cafe, where we introduced the custom of halving scones and spreading them with butter, and bought the only painting off Kalolo’s wall. News spread and we were besieged by people trying to sell us land, baskets and brown pebbles. By the time the train came, at 4am on the second day, we had many new friends.

We were, however, seriously short of sleep and dreaming of our first-class sleeper compartment, which we hoped we would have to ourselves. So when I slid open the door and nine smiling Zambians stared out, my heart sank.

“Come in!” they called, apparently well into their second case of Mosi beer. Sharing a compartment for four with nine other people who are drunk and want to party when you want to sleep, is not conducive to international relations. Grumpily clearing people off our bunks, we covered ourselves in Tazara blankets and tried to sleep.

At 6am the radio came on, blasting out music. One of our new bedfellows opened the blinds and announced it was time for breakfast. Barely conscious, we stumbled along the corridor to the dining car for rubbery omelettes, cold toast and grey tea.

Everyone else seemed to be in their best clothes – men in shiny shoes, spotted bow ties and colourful shirts, women with complicated head-dresses, putting us, the only white passengers, to shame in our dusty jeans and T-shirts.

Back in the compartment, our fellow passengers introduced themselves and apologised for the previous night. I apologised for my bad mood. They handed us beers and we were all friends. They were travelling to Dar es Salaam to buy car parts. In Zambia, they cost five times more because of high import tariffs.

“What about customs?” I asked Chola John, the leader of the group.

“We have an arrangement with the customs officer,” he smiled.

The day got hotter and the music louder. More beers were drunk. We stopped at villages of beehive huts and acacia trees.

Suddenly Chola John’s wife Joan, slid her ample frame off the seat. “Time to dance,” she shouted.

“Yes, yes, yes!” yelped Chama, a big-bottomed schoolteacher.

Soon everyone but us was dancing.

“Cristineee, you will show us how people dance in London,” commanded Moses.

Never the most elegant of people on the dance-floor, I shuffled my feet. My audience was not impressed. “Cristineee, we will teach you to dance like an African mama.” Soon the whole train had heard about the white woman trying to dance the African way. People came and offered advice, but it was no good – my hips just would not sway with that graceful fluidity.

Paulo, who is dusky and Portuguese, kept getting mistaken for the Zambian Minister of Agriculture, and was thus excused from dancing. We were both relieved when lunch was announced. In the dining car, everyone we met told us they were off to buy spare car parts.

Having made up its mind to be late, the train fell further behind schedule. By the second day the water ran out, so we were not only drinking Mosi, but brushing our teeth in it. The stream of visitors to our compartment continued.

On the third and last day, as the train crossed into Tanzania, and the beer switched from Mosi to Safari, we hogged the window seats pointing at the Masai with their cattle and hoping to see wild animals.

“How is the bush in Portugal?” asked Chola John. “Do you have giraffes?” Before we could answer, the radio, which had been mercifully, silent, started blaring again.

“Time for dancing,” shouted Moses.

The illuminated clock tower of Rio Central railway station told me it was 4.15 am. I was balancing three plastic peacocks, each a metre high, on my head and a pair of sequin-encrusted plasterboard wings on my shoulders. My torso was contorted by a body stocking several sizes too small and my legs tottered on silver boots. I reflected that I had never really wanted to parade, clad like this, before 60,000 people. Especially at this hour.

With my centre of gravity somewhere behind my neck, an armpiece fell off if I moved my legs. If I waggled my arms, the head-dress started to slide. As if to accentuate my discomfort, a group of wayward birds started a jarring rendition of the dawn chorus. The dull thud of a hangover was pounding my temples and my smile was a grimace.

I was about to compete in Rio’s yearly carnival parade as one of the 4,500 dancers defending the reputation of the Mangueira samba school – and still I had not mastered the samba despite the valiant efforts of Carlinhos de Jesus, my fleet-footed teacher.

The shout went up. It was our turn. Fireworks exploded and drums thundered until the whole road shook and the air quivered with excitement and anticipation. Our feet pawed the ground like racehorses. Pushing us into lines, a man with a stick yelled ‘Move it! Open your mouth! Sing!’. Then we were off, running suddenly into the glare of a thousand lights. All around in the stands, a blur of faces were waving pink and green flags – the school’s colours – and cheering ‘Mangueira!’

The digital clock marking our progress moved slowly. We had 65 minutes to pass along the 540m avenue. For the first 10, I thought I would never make it. My throat rasped like sandpaper as, over and over, I croaked out the words of our song: ‘I’ll devour this mango, even the core.’ Sweat poured down my face, glitter in my eyes. Suddenly, though, propelled by the energy surging from the crowd, my feet began skipping in an extraordinary way. I became part of an enormous magical opera, a wealth of feathers and glitter, of floats bearing giant golden elephants, painted zebras and fearsome warrior heads.

Carlinhos had said that samba moves people because its rhythm is like the beat of the heart – and he was right. It was addictive, I never wanted to stop.

The parade, which stretches from dusk to dawn on two nights, is the glittering centrepiece of carnival, the biggest, most lavish party on earth. A week-long jamboree, it involves hundreds of thousands of people and brings the whole of Brazil to a stop. But, unknown to the mesmerised tourists, the glamour and glitz hides the fact that it is funded largely by organised crime.

The sponsors of the party are the bicheiros, the men who run the jogo do bicho, or animals’ game – an illegal gambling racket – and whose tentacles spread through the underworld of Rio. Maria Laura Cavalcante, an expert on carnival from Rio’s Institute of Folklore, says: ‘Beneath the parade’s beautiful face of light and art lurks a dark underside of crime, killing and urban violence.’

It was not always so. Carnival has religious origins: the date marks the start of Lent and the name derives from the Italian carne vale (goodbye to meat). It began last century with European costume balls and parades for royalty, based on the Italian Commedia dell’Arte. At the same time, the African slaves on the sugar plantations in Brazil’s north-east had their own, far humbler carnival when one man would dress up as king for the day. The two fused late in the 19th century after abolition of the trade and a searing drought in the north-east sent many former slaves to Rio. The pounding samba beat was the result of a suggestion by a Portuguese named Zé Pereira that all the members of his carnival club should play their drums at the same time.

Founded in the 1920s, the first samba schools were so-called because they used school grounds for their rehearsals. Today, there are 60 schools in Rio, mostly in the poorest areas after which they are named, and they have become the heart of their local communities. The 14 top clubs, or Premier League, compete annually in the main parade. This used to be in Avenida Rio Branco, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare, but in 1984 it was transferred to the Sambadrome, a specially-constructed stadium designed by Oscar Niemeyer and consisting of a long cement corridor lined with rows of boxes and stands.

What really turned carnival from a somewhat ramshackle affair, with the poor scraping together their own costumes and floats, into the grandiose spectacle of today was the bicheiros. The jogo do bicho is as old as the republic, having been launched by a certain Baron João Batista Drummond to raise funds for his private zoo after the Portuguese empire ended in 1889. The lottery – in which different animals represent different numbers – was such a success that it was copied and multiplied, going underground when gambling was declared illegal in 1946.

Despite being illegal, there are gambling points visible on almost every street corner and around 300 bicheiros in Rio run a network of 1,200 lotteries employing some 40,000 people. It costs just Cr1,000 (3.5p) to bet and the game is so popular, particularly among Rio’s 3m favela (slum) dwellers, that it moves millions of dollars each week. No one cracks down because the police receive kickbacks, the politicians often have their campaigns funded by the bicheiros, and the people can dream of winning fortunes.

Bicheiros have long contributed to samba schools to gain support in the poor communities where most of their clients (and much of the electorate) live, but their patronage has become more explicit since the 1970s. The turning point was 1975 when a bicheiro known as Anisio hired a top carnival designer, Joãozinho Trinta, to produce a spectacular parade with huge papier-mache animals, spinning roulette wheels and fabulous costumes for his school, Beija Flor. Since then, the bicheiros have thrown money at the schools in attempts to outdo each other. In 1984, they created the Premier League, in which only the Mangueira school is not run by them but by an elected president.

Samba schools each spend an average of more than $1m on the parade and some as much as $4m, up to 50% of which is bicheiro money. Such large sums mean that the parade has, increasingly, become professionalised. Schools hire directors and keep dancers and singers on fat retainers, swapping and selling them like football stars. Watched live on television by 50m, the splendour of the costumes and floats has superseded the importance of energy and dance skills in judging each parade.

My school, First Station of Mangueira, is one of the oldest. It was founded in 1924 at Rio’s first suburban railway station. In its fierce struggle to retain some independence, it has obtained some sponsorship from companies such as Shell. But the bicheiros are infiltrating; they have taken one directorship already and the jaws of the big-timers who do not yet control a school are snapping at the door. The last-but-one president was assassinated and rumour has it that drug money is rife.

This year, a series of misfortunes suggested that Mangueira could keep out the bicheiros no longer. Already-scarce funds were frozen last month when a judge ruled in favour of a woman who claimed that Mangueira had stolen her song. Rehearsals were cancelled and fierce squabbles broke out. Dona Neuma, the school’s 70-year-old First Lady and daughter of one of the founders, attacked the ‘new administration’ and said she would not parade for the first time in 64 years. Roberto Firminho, the president, retorted furiously that ‘the old lady should retire and stay at home with her mouth shut.’ The case was, however, resolved a week before carnival and Dona Neuma relented.

Four weeks before the big night I visited the barracão, the school’s centre of preparations in an enormous concrete hangar with a corrugated iron roof and a pink gate, guarded to prevent rivals taking a sneak preview. Reeking of carpenters’ glue, hammers were banging and drills whirring everywhere. Disembodied papier-mâché figures and limbs lay discarded on the floor: here a cow’s head, there a count’s leg. It seemed they could never be ready on time and the work force was buzzing with talk about other schools’ sumptuous special effects. Firminho sauntered out to greet me. Rubbing his moustache, he claimed not to be worried. ‘It’s always like this,’ he smiled, unconvincingly.

He was right, though. The week before carnival, the barracão had been transformed into a magical kingdom of medieval castles, French drawing rooms complete with marble columns, green brocade, gilded mirrors and chandeliers, Portuguese galleons on a silver sea, 10 ft-high elephants, and zebras dancing around an enormous African warrior head.

A man with a clipboard of pencil sketches was barking orders at 100 people working round the clock on 10 floats, scurrying up and down ladders with hammers and paint brushes, creating marvels from foam, fibreglass, wire and paints of myriad colours. Ilvamar Magalhães is the carnavalesco, the man who creates the Mangueira ‘look.’ Having chosen this year’s mango theme almost a year ago, he buried himself in libraries to discover how the fruit came to Brazil and to design the floats and costumes (known as fantasias) to tell the story.

Carnival is an enormous industry, bigger even than shipbuilding. Preparations for the big week provide permanent employment for 80,000 people including musicians, architects, carpenters, electricians and sculptors. Samba schools are the main breeding ground for musicians and dancers, who spend the rest of the year giving demonstrations. Some of the painters in the barracão are well-known artists.

Parade day dawned cloudy and rain-laden but could not dampen the general glee. Inflation of 30% a month and searing recession were forgotten as society people and slum-dwellers mingled, worry lines falling from faces before my eyes. Walking towards the lights of the Sambadrome through a warren of tiny streets littered with beer cans and bits of fantasias, Cosmi Tudo, a drummer from Mangueira – resplendent in white silk tunic and gold turban and unrecognisable as a construction worker – said: ‘We’re poor and no one notices us but, for one day of the year, we’re kings.’

As we watched the other schools parade, our spirits soared. Surely, we said, the Mangueira song is catchier, its floats prettier. We laughed cattily as the Salgueira school’s flag-bearer slipped, someone lost a hat, and a dancer from Estácio fainted. On and on went the processions of warriors, Indians, voluptuous women in rhinestoned bikini bottoms (their breasts splendidly naked and surely silicone-enhanced), cavemen under showers, giant insects, mermaids, and older women whirling in wide, hooped skirts held up with hosepipes.

We marvelled at the giant steamships of Salgueira and the gadgetry of Mocidade with its flying model helicopter, lasers and video screens. It seemed an incredible waste in such a poor country for so much luxury to be created for just one night and then thrown away, but Trinta explained: ‘Intellectuals want poverty but the masses don’t. They want luxury.’

Finally, it was our turn as the last school of the second night, the pink glow of dawn visible already over the lights of the favelas. The roar of the audience sent us into ecstasy – except for five breath-stopping minutes when the mast of our Portuguese caravela got stuck under the television tower. Afterwards, Magalhães was jubilant: ‘It’s definitely our best since 1987 (the last time the school won).’

Convinced we had come second, the results announced the following afternoon were a huge disappointment: Mangueira was placed a poor fifth and Salgueira had clinched its first victory in 17 years, scoring top marks in all categories from choreography to floats, story, costumes and music. A devastated Firminho said the school would appear at the champions’ parade for the top five schools wearing black headbands. He complained: ‘Some judges always try to appease the most powerful.’ Dona Neuma was more philosophical: ‘Mangueira has been parading 68 years. We’re used to such results. I cry.’

Over at Salgueira, it seemed the celebrations would never stop. King of it all, in a white suit and banana grin, was Waldemir Garcia, known as Miro – a bicheiro who describes himself as a farmer. Only a week earlier, he had been in court – bracketed by heavily-armed security guards in dark glasses – facing charges for drug trafficking and running gangs.

She’s the most famous schoolgirl in the world. She gets Skyped by the secretary-general of the United Nations, Angelina Jolie drops in for tea, and Madonna has dedicated a song to her. On her 16th birthday in July her photo was projected onto the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, she got a standing ovation at the UN, and Beyoncé sent her an Instagram. Her iPod was a gift from Bono, her portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery and she is the youngest person ever to be nominated for the Nobel peace prize.

She is also hopeless at getting up in the morning, likes listening to Justin Bieber, telling jokes and mimicking Mr Bean, and fights endlessly with her brother. Doublejointed, she enjoys making people cringe by clicking her legs as she walks, and teases her dad for travelling the world advocating girls’ rights yet never clearing the table at home.

Over the last nine months I’ve been privileged to get to know the real Malala and her remarkable family as they adjust to being uprooted from their remote mountain valley in northern Pakistan to the second biggest city in Britain — and worldwide fame. It all started in January when a an email unexpectedly dropped into my inbox with the subject “Malala Yousafzai”. It was from a literary agent representing Malala, asking if I’d be interested in writing her story.

I was living in the US on October 9 last year when Malala was shot in the head on a school bus on the way home, and, like most people, was horrified that the Taliban could shoot a schoolgirl. Much of my career as a foreign correspondent has been spent covering Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Taliban, so I’d followed her blog on the BBC website in 2009 about life as a schoolgirl in the Swat valley when the Taliban took over. I was in awe of her bravery, risking her life for the right of girls to go to school, and of course intrigued to meet her.

So it is that on a freezing January afternoon I find myself sitting at a kitchen table in a high-rise apartment in Birmingham, being interviewed by a 15-year-old girl, as a blizzard batters the plate-glass windows.

I had travelled up from London by train with her agent. As I am quickly to discover, there is a circus of people around Malala, including a leading PR company, an investment-banker friend of the family, do-good celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, and even former prime minister Gordon Brown, who hired Malala’s dad as an adviser to his own role as global education envoy for the UN. Everyone wants a part of her.

Malala’s dad, Ziauddin, greets us at the entrance of the building. A dapper man with a moustache and a wide smile, he seems familiar. He tells me that we met back in 2009 in Peshawar, when I was interviewing people about the military operation against the Taliban in Swat. “In those days people wanted to talk to me, not my daughter,” he laughs.

He takes us into a modern apartment to wait for Malala. On the floor along the wall are piles and piles of cards and toys, letters from all over the world. Most are from schoolchildren, though later I would discover the pile includes a marriage proposal and offers to adopt her.

As I chat to Ziauddin it is easy to see where Malala gets her activism from. He has a fascinating story of his own, growing up in a desperately poor village and even toying with becoming a jihadi, yet becoming passionate about education and going on to establish his own school with 800 students. It was at that school where Malala was studying — the school bus in which she was shot was his.

In 25 years of travelling the world I have interviewed warlords, dictators, royals and Taliban, yet I find myself nervous waiting for a teenage girl. I had seen an image of her waving when she left the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) a couple of weeks earlier, but I have no idea if she can walk and talk.

The door opens and a short, slight figure in a flowery shalwar kameez, red sandals and a black dupatta shuffles in with a tray of tea. “I am Malala,” she smiles. Her head is covered with the dupatta, but as it falls from her face I can see that the hair on the left of her head is short and flat — it was shaved before surgeons could operate. The left side of her face pulls down as if she had suffered a stroke, and her mouth twists as she smiles, which she does a lot. Her facial nerve was cut when she was shot. She’d had an operation to repair it in November, but it will take time for it to start working. For now, she has to massage her face every day.

I give her a get-well card and teddy bear from my son, who is a couple of years younger than her and has seen her story. Like most teenage boys, he is baffled by the idea that anyone would risk being shot to go to school.

As we talk, I realise she cannot hear me from the left. Later, she explains that her left eardrum was destroyed in the shooting. She does not remember being shot. The last thing she recalls is getting on the bus. Afterwards, doctors tell me how astonished they have been at how mentally strong she is — maybe the memory loss was a protection mechanism. Instead she tells me about the terror of waking up in a hospital in Birmingham with no idea what had happened and her parents nowhere to be seen. She shows me that the bullet went through the side of her left eye and travelled 18in down past her jaw, ending up embedded just under her left shoulder. “It could have taken my eye,” she says. “I might have had no eye, no brain. It was a miracle. I feel like I have been given a second life to help people.”

She places my hand on her tummy. “Feel this,” she says. I feel something hard under the skin and grimace, which makes her laugh. “It’s the top of my skull!” she says. When she was operated on in Pakistan, doctors removed part of her skull so her brain could swell, and placed it there to preserve it. At this moment, there is just skin over her brain.

She is enchanting. Her face lights as she talks and her voice is girlie and full of wonder. Her English is fluent — as her school taught in English — and charmingly old-fashioned, using expressions like “kith and kin”. She also speaks her native Pashto and fluent Urdu.

On the train home, I know I really want to do this. I have reported from some of the world’s least developed places and seen the difference girls’ education can make. I am also dismayed at the situation in Pakistan, where one in three primary-school children don’t go to school and militancy has taken hold. Maybe this one girl’s story could wake people up to what’s going on.

The next time I visit Malala, I meet her brothers: Khushal, who is two years younger than her and bored; and Atal, an excited nine-year-old. Their mother comes in. She is lily-skinned, with green eyes and beautiful. Her name is Tor Pekai, which means raven tresses, though her hair is chestnut. Even though she speaks no English, it’s clear she is being driven mad by the boys. They haven’t been to school since arriving in Britain in November, and it must be hard for them to be all cooped up.

To my surprise, Tor Pekai is illiterate, which makes Malala’s journey even more surprising. The move has been hard for her. She had never used an electric oven or seen a microwave or travelled in a lift. She grew up in a poor, neighbouring village to Malala’s father and, after marrying him, moved to Mingora, the main town of Swat, where the tallest building was two or three storeys. Not only is the Birmingham apartment on the 10th floor but it’s just off Broad Street, with its nightclubs and strip bars — she tells me the scantily clad girls make her feel she is drowning.

Before we can proceed any further with the book, Malala has to have another operation. She returns to QEH to have the skull bone removed from her stomach — and is delighted that the surgeon is a woman. But when the surgeon looks at the piece of skull, she decides not to put it back as it has not kept well and there is a risk of infection. Instead she carries out a titanium cranioplasty, fitting a specially moulded titanium plate in Malala’s head with eight screws. It will do the job of a skull and protect the brain. Another surgeon then inserts a small electronic device called a cochlear implant near her left ear. Malala is in theatre for five hours and has three operations, but is back in the apartment within five days.

A few weeks later, a receiver is fitted behind her left ear and she hears “beep beep” for the first time. To start with, the sounds are robotic, but she soon starts hearing better.

The first time I realise how famous Malala has become is on a bitterly cold Saturday in March when she comes to London for the first time for a day’s sightseeing, including afternoon tea at Harrods. She has travelled with the British doctor Fiona Reynolds, who happened to be in Pakistan when she was shot and ended up bringing her to Britain.

I suggest we meet on the top-floor members’ area of the Southbank Centre as it has one of the best views in London, and I thought it would be quiet. It turns out that I could not have made a worse choice — a Women of the World (Wow) conference is under way and there are women everywhere.

Lots of people try to photograph Malala on their mobile phones. I tell my son to stop them. “Everyone recognises her!” he says. We sit down by a window overlooking the London Eye and a blonde woman from the Southbank Centre comes bustling up, introducing herself. “Can you come and speak to some of the younger women?” she asks.

I explain to her that Malala is tired and we only came in for a cup of tea. But the woman is not to be deterred. “Just a few minutes,” she says. “The session ends at 3 and I will come back to get her just before.” By this time Malala has put her head on the table, and Dr Reynolds and I again explain that she simply can’t.

My son brings ice-cream cones. Malala eats the ice cream, then asks: “What do I do with this?” She has never eaten a cone.

Shortly after, the woman returns. “Are you coming now?” she asks poor Malala.

“I don’t think you understand that no means no,” I say to her in astonishment.

We get up to leave, more people whipping out their phones for pictures. I am starting to realise the fame and power this young girl has — and the demands that are made of her.

As we walk towards Westminster Bridge we pass a carousel of white horses, Wurlitzer music churning and lights shining in the falling dusk. I see her looking. “Would you like a ride?” I ask. She giggles and nods. “You must come too,” she says. We all get on the horses. Her eyes gleam as we go round and round.

The next time I see Malala, the family has moved house. It had become claustrophobic in the apartment, and the Pakistan consulate has found them a house in Edgbaston, near the hospital. I’m amazed when I arrive. The house is enormous, in a wide leafy road with electric gates guarded by stone lions. Inside is a grand piano that nobody can play, and murals a the walls of Greek gods and little cherubs peeking from the corner of the ceilings. Malala’s mum doesn’t like it. “I feel men looking at me,” she says.

It feels as though they are camping in the house. Their belongings have stayed in Swat, as they left the day Malala was shot and taken to hospital in Peshawar, and never went back. There’s also a huge garden with a Neptune fountain and lots of trees, which reminds them of their green valley. Often, I see Tor Pekai wandering the lawn, feeding the birds with scraps from breakfast and singing to herself.

“She used to feed lots of poor children in our neighbourhood, so they’d have food in their tummies when they went to school,” explains Malala. “Now, she’s shocked by all the waste.”

It is Tor Pekai’s lonely figure that brings home how this family has been wrenched from all they knew. Malala tells me her mum was very sociable: women of the neighbourhood gathered in their back yard every afternoon.

“Our house was always so full of people that we never had privacy and sometimes I cried — I couldn’t do my homework,” she says. “Now we long for guests.”

Ziauddin gets to travel the world attending conferences with Gordon Brown, but he misses the school he created. Without him, it has begun to lose pupils. Malala’s brother Khushal tells me he misses his friends. He spends most of his time upstairs in his room playing Xbox. Only the youngest, Atal, has settled quickly.

Although Birmingham has a large Pakistani community, the family is nervous of getting involved. Malala may be admired around the world, but there has been an astonishing outpouring of vitriol from her own people, saying that she wasn’t shot or that her father shot her deliberately so they could get asylum and fame. So widespread is this, that when a doctor friend of mine in Swat finds out I’m writing the book, he emails to say: “You know she wasn’t really shot; it’s all just a drama.” Once Malala says to me: “If Taliban come again I hope they shoot me where everyone can see.”

Each time I visit, there is more movement in her face. The surgeon later tells me it’s the best result he’s ever had. Her mother often hugs her and cries, knowing she nearly lost her. “She treats me as if I’m her youngest rather than the eldest,” says Malala. They make her eat dried fruit with milk before each meal to build her up.

Ah, the meals. Although they say they are lonely, people are always coming and going. As for all Pashtuns, hospitality is important, so anyone who comes is fed. Dinner is often not until midnight. They go to bed late then don’t get up till lunchtime, so I am left twiddling my thumbs in the morning.

The more I go there, the more I realise that although Malala’s mum may be illiterate, she is very strong. I love the teasing relationship she has with her husband, rare in Pashtun society. “‘He even tells his wife’ is an insult in our society,” Malala’s dad explains. I spend so much time with them they begin to feel like family. I take my husband and son to stay and we are overwhelmed by their generosity.

Ziauddin goes to Vienna and is given the famous sachertorte. They know I like chocolate, so save it to cut when I am there, then insist I take the rest back for my family.

“We lost everything,” Malala tells me. “Why should we mind about a cake?” I feel sorry that their first year in Britain has been the harshest spring in 50 years. When the weather finally improves, my son plays cricket and football with them and is astonished whenever he sees Malala on TV.

“She’s just a girl!” he says. Her father has tears in his eyes listening to the children laughing in the garden. He tells me that sometimes when he is napping in his bedroom with the window open, he wakes to hear children’s voices drifting up and panics for a moment, thinking that Malala is not there.

Just before Easter, Malala begins school. In her strange new existence, the police first have to do a security sweep, and it becomes a global event. She tells me she likes it, but has been put down two school years because she hasn’t done the GCSE syllabus. She shows me her homework, which is incredibly neat. Her favourite subject is physics, but she finds it difficult. She’s also finding it hard to make friends. “They see me as ‘Malala, social activist’, not just Malala, like my old friends.”

She Skypes her friends back home. They have kept her seat in the class, though she is starting to realise she won’t be going back. She tells me that she has nobody to joke with here, so she saves her jokes for those calls.

In one of our conversations, Malala told me that she once went to the theatre — a show called Tom, Dick and Harry in Islamabad — and loved it, so I got tickets for Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. As it starts, she is wide-eyed. She jumps at the gunshot as the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears, and I hope it doesn’t trigger anything. A long and violent Shakespeare play may not have been the perfect choice — more than three hours is a lot for anyone to sit through, and both Malala and my son fell asleep. But they woke for the swordfight at the end.

fterwards, she says she loved it. “I think it’s a good lesson,” she says. “Hamlet does to Laertes [killing his father] the same as what happened to him and it gets him nowhere. I don’t seek vengeance against those who tried to kill me. They were led the wrong way. I just wish I could have talked to them.”

She is way too wise for a 15-year-old.

One day in mid-April, Time magazine arrives with Malala’s face on the cover, as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. She complains she doesn’t like the photo.

Sometimes when I go to their house I notice elaborate bouquets. When I ask where they come from, they say, “Oh, Angelina Jolie was over for dinner,” or: “The ex-prime minister of Norway dropped in for tea.” The family visits London and is taken to see Boris Johnson. He leaves Malala slightly baffled. “He just kept saying, ‘What’s it all about?’ ” she says. In the paper we read she is favourite for the Nobel peace prize. My son is amazed. “How can she win?” he asks. “She’s always fighting with her brother!” In May, I travel to Swat to visit Malala’s school and village. The area has been under military control since the Taliban were driven out in 2009, so I need permission to go there, and an army escort. Swat is beautiful, its green valleys full of spring flowers, and I can see why Malala’s family aches with longing for it.

I arrive at her school on the morning of its annual spring gala. Since the Taliban days, there has been no sign outside, just a brass door in a wall on a narrow mud road. To my amusement the girls arrive in rickshaws with their heads covered, then the moment they are through the door they throw them off.

Everyone is gathered at the top of the steps in a colourful open courtyard. I told the headmistress I would be keeping a low profile — after all, if Malala is a target, then I suppose her co-writer must be too. But when I come in, I am announced over the loudspeaker and told I will be judging their art show.

Afterwards, when I chat to Malala’s classmates, tears spring to my eyes. All of them are so eloquent and passionate about schooling, even though some of them say their brothers would withdraw them from school at the first hint of any independent thought. One of her classmates says to me: “We could all have been Malala, but our parents wouldn’t have let us speak out publicly as hers did.”

Malala’s journey becomes even more astounding when I visit the village where her parents come from and see the way women are all kept in purdah. I stay with her cousins and am put in the purdah section downstairs. I am starving when I arrive, but we must wait to eat until the men upstairs have been served, taken their fill, and the leftovers come back down. It’s long after midnight when we eat.

Everyone gives me gifts to take back to Malala: clothes, letters, photos. Her cousin Sumbul gives me a shoebox containing a china teapot, a diamanté hairclip, sandals and a bead bracelet, clearly all the treasures she has in the world. Malala and her mother cry when I give them the mementos. They miss home so much. All is going well with the book, except for one thing. Tor Pekai is very religious, praying five times a day, and very conservative, and doesn’t want to appear in the book.

“My family will not like it,” she says. This is complicated. Ziauddin won’t go against her wishes, so my only hope is Malala. “We can’t have a book about you as an icon of girls’ rights, and your own mother not appearing,” I beseech her. She sees the point, and bit by bit Tor Pekai allows a little of her own story to be told.

Pashtuns also have a very different sense of time and no understanding of deadlines. In the crucial weeks before the book is due to go to press, the entire family decides to fast for Ramadan. No food or drink can pass their lips between sunrise and sundown, which, in July, means not dining till 10.30pm and breakfasting at 3.30am. Unfortunately, it coincides with a heatwave. I arrive to find everyone hot, tired and sleepy. The last thing they want to do is work on the book.

Finally, the writing is done, but I still need the family to read it. The only day we have looks set to be Eid, the main Islamic holiday to commemorate the end of fasting, where the children are given gifts of money. “It’s like our Christmas,” says Malala. The moonsighting committee, which announces when Eid will be by the appearance of the crescent moon, is split, and some think it’s a day later. “We Muslims can’t agree on anything!” laughs Ziauddin.

People ask me, is Malala really so special, aren’t there lots of girls like her? She’d be the first to admit that. She is passionate, eloquent and knows she has been given a platform. I have no doubt she will use it, as anyone who saw her speak at the UN in July will agree.

She’s also amazingly level-headed, for which her family must take credit. After all, how many schoolgirls sit doing history homework on the Treaty of Versailles next to a collage on the wall made by Angelina Jolie’s daughter Shiloh? Last time I was there to do the pictures for this article, Malala had been in Dublin the night before, where she had been made an Amnesty International ambassador along with Harry Belafonte.

The award was presented by Bono. “Can you imagine — he was wearing sunglasses at night!” she told me. To her horror, he embraced her hands. “That’s totally against our culture,” she said. Her father laughed. “I can protect you from the Taliban, my dear, but not from Bono,” he said.

When a shepherd’s daughter from northern Afghanistan succeeded in sending the four policemen who had gang-raped her to jail, it seemed to be a turning point for Afghan women.

In May 2012, 21-year-old Lal Bibi from Kunduz was repeatedly raped for five days by local policemen. One of them had had a dispute with her cousin, and Lal Bibi was the object of their revenge.

Such stories, sadly common in Afghanistan, usually end there — with the girl shamed, unmarriageable, and perhaps outcast in a shelter, while the perpetrators go free — for this is a society where men with guns have power.

Lal Bibi ended up in a shelter, broken and unable to speak. But her family stood up for her, particularly her grandfather. In the shelter she met Mary Akrami, an activist who runs the Afghan Women’s Skills Development Center and was one of the first women in Afghanistan to set up shelters for battered women and girls. Backed by her tribe and helped by Akrami, Lal Bibi and her family bravely went to court in Kabul. In November 2012, they succeeded in getting her rapists convicted — a court decision hailed by human rights groups worldwide. If only the story had ended there.

As the judge announced the 16-year sentence, the convicted police commander pointed at the family and shouted, “I’ll be free one day, and I’ll deal with you people!”

The family was scared and remained in Kabul, sheltered by Akrami. Then in early 2014, Lal Bibi’s grandfather died, so they returned to their village. Within hours, her father was arrested by the police commander’s men, and falsely accused of killing someone. He remains in jail, and Lal Bibi and her family have been forced to go back in hiding.

Akrami receives threats every day. She has had two miscarriages because of the stress. Her husband has pleaded with her to stay at home, but she refuses to give up.

“We are the only ones to stand up to these powerful people,” she says. “We can’t give in.” It’s easy to forget now, but western leaders often cited repression of Afghan women as a key reason for toppling the Taliban regime after 9/11. In his January 2002 State of the Union speech, after the fall of the Taliban, President George W. Bush declared: “The last time we met in this chamber, the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today, women are free.”

Akrami is the first to say that things have improved enormously for women compared to life under the Taliban. Then, women could not work, go to the bazaar, wear white shoes, or laugh out loud. They could be beaten or jailed for wearing nail polish or lipstick, and the shapeless blue burqa that they were forced to wear became synonymous with women’s repression. Girls were not allowed to go to school.

“Then, women couldn’t go out of house,” says Akrami. “Now, they’re going to court. But as Lal Bibi’s case shows, society is not ready.”

Activists like Akrami fear that Western commitment to the freedom of Afghan women is being forgotten in the rush to get out of Afghanistan. They are terrified of what will happen to women when NATO troops leave at the end of this year.

There were no women among the eight candidates in Afghanistan’s April presidential elections, and just one — Dr. Habiba Sarobi, former governor of Bamiyan — on any of the slates (as second vice president). There were, however, two warlords running for president (and four as running mates) who are known for trampling on women’s rights.

“When you go from darkness to light you have to pass through shade,” says Sarobi. Yet many women say that things are already going backward, into the dark.

As someone who has gone back and forth reporting on Afghanistan throughout the twelve-and-a-half years since the Taliban were toppled, I have seen the situation of women visibly improve.

In the ancient city of Herat, the day after the Taliban fell there in November 2001, I came across a group of courageous female writers and poets who had met secretly under the guise of a sewing circle throughout the Taliban years. Though they arrived for meetings with fabric and scissors, they never made a single garment. Instead, led by a literature professor at the university, they discussed Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf as well as their own work. I was astonished that they had risked their lives to be able to write.

They also ran secret classes for girls. Today, it is a common sight to see lines of schoolgirls on their way to lessons, book bags proudly in hand. Of the estimated 8 million Afghan children in school, 2.4 million are girls. The number of students going into higher education has increased from just 4,000 in 2004 to more than 120,000 in 2012, and about a quarter of these are girls.

In cities like Herat and Kabul there are women drivers — admittedly only a handful. Afghanistan even has female rappers, though one of them, Remika Khabiri, says she has to hide her face or she gets abuse spat at her, even by fellow students at Kabul University. Even in the remotest villages, life has changed for women. Microfinance loans for projects like dressmaking or beekeeping have turned illiterate women who had never worked outside the home into entrepreneurs earning more than their husbands.

This February, I travelled north to Samangan, one of Afghanistan’s poorest provinces. The area is so arid that the mud-houses blend into the mountains; the province is dotted with ghost villages, completely abandoned as people fled war and poverty.

There, in a village called Asiabad, I met an amazing woman named Kubra. Her house stood out because of the two white-and-yellow taxis standing outside along with a cow.

Like most Afghan village women, Kubra looks much older than the 50 years she claims. Her skin might be wrinkled and weather-beaten, but she is like a human dynamo — her hands waving back and forth like windmills and her black button eyes flashing as she leads the way into a pink treasure palace of a room full of ribbons and sequins and old-fashioned Chinese sewing machines.

“Nine years ago, I was a very poor simple woman,” she says. “I’d been married off at 13, as my parents could not afford to feed me. Then I had 11 children, as I didn’t know any different, and my husband worked in the fields growing wheat. You can see nothing grows, so there were many days when we had no food or just one meal.”

Then Kubra’s village was visited by Afghan Aid, a British charity that has worked in Afghanistan for 30 years. Aid workers suggested that the women learn tailoring and lent Kubra 80,000 afghanis ($1,400) to buy machines and material and trained her on their use. “I worked day and night so I could buy another,” Kubra says. She passed her skills on to others, and now she has 16 village women sewing, taking orders for weddings and selling their work in nearby villages. “Now my income is more than my husband’s!” She smiles broadly, showing gold teeth.

The economic empowerment has had other effects. “Before, I couldn’t even go to the bazaar on my own,” Kubra says. “No female was allowed to sit with men. Now our men have accepted that women can go outside. Now my daughters go to school, and one even has a job registering the voters for election.”

With their new income, the women formed a savings group and used the money to set up a small convenience store from which they divide profits. Kubra also purchased a cow, which provides milk for curds, and with the money from the cow’s produce, she bought a car for the sewing group — which doubles as a taxi driven by her son. Recently, she added another taxi. “I am slowly moving up the ladder,” she says, laughing as she mimics climbing the rungs with her fingers.

Kubra also administers vaccines for the community against tuberculosis and polio — skills she learned by watching a video. “I’m illiterate, but am good at fixing things in my head.” The village will soon have electricity, and Kubra has already bought an electric sewing machine.

When Kubra and her fellow women sit and sew, their main topic of conversation is what will happen when the NATO troops leave. Having tasted independence, she says, there is no way they will relinquish it.

“If the Taliban tried to come back now, although we don’t have weapons, we have power and we would resist.”

Afghanistan’s changes go to the highest levels. Women hold three cabinet-level posts, a quarter of seats in parliament (the U.S. Congress, by contrast, is only 18 percent female), and there is one female provincial governor.

At the start of 2014, more history was made: the appointment of Afghanistan’s first female police chief. Colonel Jamila Bayaz now heads the station in the Mandayi bazaar right in the teeming heart of Kabul. Amid wooden stalls selling combs, belts, and Justin Bieber posters, Col. Bayaz commands about 400 police in a region that she thinks has 500,000 inhabitants until her deputy corrects her — it’s 1.5 million.

“This is a chance not just for me, but for all women of Afghanistan,” she says, sitting in her upstairs office, surrounded by plastic flowers and trays of almonds and pistachios, as a stream of friends comes to congratulate her.

The 50-year-old mother of five says that she always dreamed of following in her father’s footsteps and becoming a police officer; “I saw it as a way to help people, and I loved the uniform!” she laughs.

In her black headscarf and gray uniform with silver and red epaulets, Bayaz cuts an impressive figure. As she carries out her weekly inspection of Kabul’s District One police, it’s a stark contrast to her male subordinates — an unruly sight clad in a mishmash of uniforms, leather jackets, torn anoraks, and assorted headgear.

Back in her office, Col. Bayaz answers phones, signs papers, and briefs staff as her 12-year-old son sits on the sofa looking bored. “He refused to go to school, as he complains he never sees me at home,” she said. “I work 24 hours a day.”

Bayaz first trained during the Soviet occupation, working as a police officer until Taliban fighters invaded the capital. September 26, 1996, is a day she says she’ll never forget. “When I walked home, I changed from a police officer to an ordinary woman,” she says. “The Taliban stopped everything. It was as if they had stopped life itself.”

Twice she was beaten: once for showing an ankle and another time for taking off her burqa before she entered her house, unaware anyone was watching.

After the Taliban left, she went back to the police force, receiving new training from American, British, and Norwegian experts. The job took her to Colorado, Miami, New York, Dubai, Cairo — even Siberia. “It was all very different to policing here,” she says.

Bayaz describes her promotion as a “victory for all women of Afghanistan.” She would not be drawn on the fact that in Helmand province, two fellow female police officers were recently assassinated.

“What we’re seeing in Afghanistan today is two opposite faces,” explains Hassina Safi, executive director of the Afghan Women’s Network. “On one side, we’re seeing promotion of women like Jamila to key positions as a result of our advocacy over the last years — and at the same time, there is no security for women, and we’re seeing the systematic killing of women working outside, especially in police and defense.”

“People need to realize the gains we have made are fragile and we still need help,” Safi adds.

A few miles away from Bayaz’s police station is the Kabul stadium where the Taliban publicly lashed women. A cavernous room inside the stadium is host to an unexpected scene: a dozen female boxers sparring and aiming punches, laughing and teasing as their trainer barks instructions.

They’re hoping to qualify for the next Olympics. Once, there were 25 of them, and each received $100 per month in allowance as well as transport provided by international aid. The aid money has dried up. All they have now are their boxing gloves and a room to train in. More than half of the original participants have dropped out. As the outside world loses interest in Afghanistan, says Mary Akrami, the Afghan women’s groups once feted by Western donors are all now seeing their funding collapse. “I believed women’s rights were a global issue and thought we had women from all the world behind us, but now I see we’re alone.”

Brave women activists are dreading the departure of foreign troops at the end of 2014. “We will be the first target,” says Akrami. “If, God forbid, something happens during the transition, we’re the ones on the front line.”

The Afghan parliament recently reduced the percentage of seats reserved for women from a quarter to a fifth; those women MPs say they have no power anyway.

Habiba Danish was a teacher in the northern province of Takhar who was forcibly married to a local police commander at age 17. She joined parliament in 2005 to try and help other women. Instead, she finds that the courts will not listen to her, and she receives constant threats to the life of her 12-year-old son, whom she raised as a single mother after the commander was killed.

“The situation for women is very bad, even for women like me in positions of power,” Danish says. “In the past, the men running the country had long beards. Now they are short, but the mindset is the same. Every day they call, saying, ‘We will kill or kidnap your son.’” In August 2013, one of Danish’s colleagues, female senator Rooh Gul, was shot as she traveled through Ghazni Province. Gul survived, but her 8-year-old daughter was killed.

Danish is terrified that the situation will deteriorate further as foreign troops leave. “Oh my God, it will be very bad,” she says. “Right now, with the international presence, our commanders and government are afraid to go too far, but when they go, these people won’t be afraid of anything. If all the troops leave, I will try to go, too.”

One of Danish’s fellow MPs, Noorzia Atmar, traveled the world as a symbol of women’s rights, but back home her own husband was beating her. She ended up in a shelter, and recently fled the country.

Danish, Atmar, Akrami, and Safi were in the vanguard of an attempt to get parliament to pass a law criminalizing violence against women. They ran campaigns across the country, and received endorsements from clerics in other Muslim countries, like Egypt.

Not only did their efforts fail, but the Afghan parliament instead approved a new criminal code that banned relatives of a criminal defendant from testifying against them. Given that most violence against women in Afghanistan is at the hands of husbands or in-laws, the change would effectively silence victims and make it impossible to prosecute abusive spouses or parents who force children into early marriages.

The change provoked international outrage, and ultimately Afghan president Hamid Karzai did not sign the new code. But its near-approval showed how precarious the changes for women are. One woman who discovered this the hard way is Shafiqa, an illiterate farmer’s wife from Dewari village in Takhar. She has given up all she has to seek justice after her daughter Zainora was abducted and brutally murdered three years ago.

Shafiqa looks at least 20 years older than the 40 years she says she is. She sobs and wipes her eyes on her leopard-print scarf as she tells her story, scattering photos of her daughter and sheaves of court documents that she cannot read.

“We are poor people; my husband grows tomatoes and potatoes,” she says. “Zainora was like a jewel — the most beautiful girl in the village.” One day when Zainora was 18, she simply disappeared during lunch time. After 10 days, her family discovered that she was abducted by a military commander and his friend Basir, the nephew of Qazi Kabeer, a powerful conservative MP.

Shafiqa’s husband, Haji Zada, went to the MP and begged for his daughter back. When Zainora finally appeared, she said that five men kidnapped her, forced her to smoke hashish and dance, and repeatedly gang-raped her. “Father,” said Zainora, “the shame will be really bad.” “Qazi Kabeer realized it would be very bad for his reputation if people found out, so he told us that his nephew would marry Zainora and gave us 50,000 afghanis [about $880],” says Shafiqa. “My husband told him my daughter also needs a house, land, and gold. Qazi Kabeer said ‘I will give her those things; you should be proud your daughter is marrying a rich man.’”

In fact, it was just a ruse. After the marriage, Zainora found that she was pregnant and went home to stay with her parents. Three months later, her husband Basir came late one night with his men and said that he was taking Zainora back in hopes that she could look after family guests while his mother was in India.

“She was happy,” says Shafiqa. The next time she saw her daughter was in the back of a police van, covered with blood. The men had tossed her out of the car onto a hillside and fired 33 bullets at her. “When I saw my daughter’s body, I wanted the person who did that to hang.”

Shafiqa decided to go to the provincial governor and local courts. “The judge in Takhar asked for 120,000 afghanis [about $2,100] to proceed with the case. He told me to bring a box of grapes as a gift and put the money inside.”

Instead, she took a bus to Kabul for the first time in her life. She found her way to Tolo TV and told her story. President Karzai saw the interview, and his office told her that Karzai would look after her. “They put me in a government guesthouse, but after a month, nothing had happened.”

Shafiqa received a call informing her that her younger daughter Shazia, age 15, had been abducted. Shazia’s kidnapper, a police commander who was a cousin of Qazi Kabeer, made her dance and gave her alcohol and hashish. “When your family stop all these complaints,” Shazia was told, “we’ll release you.”

After 33 days, Shafiqa found out where her younger daughter was. “My husband and son were really scared and didn’t want to go, so I went with another woman.” They found her in a basement. “My daughter was sick and in a very bad state,” Shafiqa says. “No one will marry her now.”

When they returned home, villagers went out and protested against Qazi Kabeer saying; “You did this to these poor people; next time, you will do it to us.”

That wasn’t the end. Shafiqa’s son was picked up and put in jail — falsely accused, Shafiqa says, of kidnapping people. Their house was set on fire, although people from the village helped put out the flames before the house was destroyed.

“Qazi Kabeer told me, ‘You gave me a bad name, so I will do whatever I can against you,’” says Shafiqa. She has sold all that her family once owned to try and get the case heard and her son freed. “I am afraid of God, but not Qazi Kabeer,” Shafiqa says. “But it seems President Karzai and everyone else is.”

Qazi Kabeer claims that Shafiqa and her husband killed their own daughter and are just trying to get money.

Hearing such stories, and visiting shelters full of girls who have fled forced marriages, it is easy to become despondent about Afghanistan. There are certainly enough grim stories to make anyone despair for the future. But telling those stories is important: as long as they are told, then there is at least the possibility of bearing witness to the long struggle of Afghan women for better lives, a more equal society, and a better country.

One of the brave poets I met in Herat, Nadia Anjuman, was killed by her own husband because he did not want her writing about women’s issues.

Her grave is now a shrine to local women; but it is also a reminder to the outside world of promises once made, promises that the West must not forget.