When the images of devastated skyscrapers flashed around the world last Sept. 11, some of the few people who never saw the images had to endure the violent retaliation: the people of Afghanistan.

The Taliban regime had long banned television and almost all newspapers and magazines. Many ordinary Afghans heard news of the terrorist attacks on their shortwave radios, but they never saw the scenes of catastrophe in New York that triggered the U.S. bombing of their homeland.

Almost a year later, Afghans finally have their first chance to glimpse the famous scenes that drastically changed their world.

A photographic exhibition called After September 11: Images from Ground Zero, by American photographer Joel Meyerowitz, opened in three small rooms at the national art gallery in Kabul this summer. Afghans were stunned by what they saw.

"It was a very beautiful city and now it is destroyed," Nafisa Zarifi, a 24-year-old education student at Kabul University, said as she wandered through the exhibit.

She was mesmerized by pictures of the skyline of lower Manhattan before and after the hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center.

"Why was such a beautiful place destroyed? We feel very sorry for the United States because it is a good country."

Ms. Zarifi was among a class of 35 female students from Kabul University who visited the exhibition soon after it opened, buzzing with questions and taking written notes as they gazed at the dramatic photos. "Where did the plane hit the building?" one student asked, counting the floors in the skyscraper.

The young Afghans had a personal response to the images different from that experienced by Westerners.

For them, the pictures of the wrecked buildings in New York evoked haunting memories of the damage wreaked by 22 years of war in their own country.

Sara Nori, 24, felt a surge of painful memories. "My own house in Kabul was destroyed by a rocket," she said. "When I see these photos, I remember how many buildings in Kabul were destroyed in the war between the mujahedeen in the 1990s."

The two students are themselves examples of the wounds inflicted by more than two decades of fighting in Afghanistan. Both were forced to quit university in 1996 when the Taliban imposed a ban on female education. Now, after a six-year gap in their education, they have returned to university to finish their studies.

The U.S. State Department, which sponsored the photo exhibit, is hoping that the images will help forge new links between Afghans and Americans.

"As we remember the victims and heroes of Sept. 11, we also recall the suffering of the Afghan people at the hands of terrorism," a pamphlet introducing the exhibit says.

In a corridor of the national gallery, not far from the photo exhibit, is a display cabinet with more evidence of the Taliban's crimes against the Afghan people. Inside is a jumbled pile of some of the 210 paintings and drawings from the gallery that were destroyed by the Taliban during their fundamentalist reign. Most are portraits of humans or animals, ripped crudely into pieces.

The torn paintings were hidden and saved by four gallery employees who risked their lives to do so.

"They put the ripped paintings into a box and gave it to us to burn," said one of the gallery employees, a guide named Enayetallah.

"But we knew the importance of it, so we saved it in a storage room," the guide said.

Dozens of other paintings were saved by a courageous physician and artist, Yusuf Asifi, who painted his own watercolours over oil paintings to conceal works that would have otherwise been destroyed.

After the Taliban regime was defeated last fall, Dr. Asifi carefully removed the watercolours to reveal the historic paintings beneath.