Rome: Sharbat sugar, a green-eyed Afghan woman immortalized a decade ago with a national geographical cover, has been evacuated to Italy, the Italian government said on Thursday.
“Sugar Sharbat Afghans have arrived in Rome,” he said in a statement, without giving a certain date.
Roma said they had responded to the request from a non-profit organization working in Afghanistan to help him leave the Taliban-controlled country, “he organizes it to travel to Italy as part of a broader evacuation program for citizens of Afghanistan and their government’s acceptance and integration plans”.
Sugar became the most famous Afghan refugees after US photographer Steve McCurry arrested his portrait in the Pakistani camp in the 1980s and was published on the front cover of the National Geographic magazine.
Sugar said he first arrived in Pakistan an orphan of an orphan, about four or five years after the 1979 Soviet invasion, one of the millions of Afghans who were looking for protection since then.
He was deported back to Afghanistan in 2016 after he was arrested for living in Pakistan on a fraudulent identity paper.
In early September, Roma said it had evacuated nearly 5,000 Afghans from Afghanistan after the Taliban seized power in August.
Italy earlier this month said it had provided citizenship to the Prosecutor of the First Afghan female prosecutor, Maria Bashir, after she landed in the European country on September 9.