The news was announced on Thursday by Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s office, which said it had organised Gula’s transfer to Italy within the broader context of the government’s Afghan evacuation, reception and integration program following the Taliban takeover of the country in August.
The statement said that the government had responded to requests from “non-profit organisations active in Afghanistan who, after the events of last August, received Sharbat Gula’s appeal to be helped to leave their country”.
The Italian government will now help to get Gula integrated into life in Italy, the statement said.
McCurry took Gula’s photo at the Nasir Bagh refugee camp on the Pakistan-Afghan border in 1984 and her image went on to become the iconic cover of the National Geographic magazine the following year.
Two decades later, in 2002, the photojournalist managed to locate Gula when he took her photograph again.
She is now 49 years old.
The Italian government said her photograph had come to “symbolise the vicissitudes and conflict of the chapter in history that Afghanistan and its people were going through at the time”.
