Kabul's grimy livestock market blazed into life this week as thousands of Muslims browsed through animals, searching for a beast to sacrifice for Eid al-Adha, one of the year's biggest Muslim festivals. The blessings they will be counting as they make their offerings and give thanks for what they have received in the past 12 months, however, are mixed. New buildings sprouting up along the roadside in the north of the Afghan capital en route to the market signal the growing prosperity many Afghans are starting to reap three years after the fall of the Taleban. But not everyone is on the right side of the wealth divide.
For Ebadullah Ebadi, an employee of an international relief organisation and a recipient of the flow of foreign aid dollars into Afghanistan, this year's festival signals progress and prosperity.
"The progress that I have made over the past three years is significant - three years ago it could only been a dream that I would not believe come true," said the 33-year-old father of four.
Dragging home a huge ox he had just bought in the market, Ebadi said his blessings were many over the past year - a new apartment, a new car and most significantly his children and only daughter all at school.
Ebadi was following a tradition dating back centuries in which Muslims carry out Qurbani, the ritual slaughter of an animal, a sheep, a cow or a goat to thank God.
Eid-ul-Azha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice, dates back to the time of the prophet Abraham, who according to Muslim belief, was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac before he received divine intervention.
During the festival, which lasts for three days from Thursday to Saturday, Afghans visit their relatives, wear new dresses and give their daughters and sons small sums of money.
While the traditions are old, the conditions are new. Under the repressive Taleban regime, which was forced from power by a US-led invasion at the end of 2001, women were barred from attending school or leaving the house without wearing a shroud-like burqa to cover their bodies.
Three years on, women are allowed to work, girls go to school and the city's roads are clogged with traffic as glassy new buildings replace the ruins of a bloody civil war in the 1990s.
Not everyone in the Afghan capital is receiving the trickle-down of the foreign aid or the 2.8 billion dollars of opium wealth that Afghanistan generated last year, and many still wrestle with crushing poverty.
"For me nothing has been changed - actually it has got worse with prices jumping to the sky," said Mohammad Akram, an engineer searching for a job.
"Life is getting more expensive day by day, how can you afford to get by?" he asks.
Rents have been pushed up by the hundreds of foreign aid and reconstruction workers living in the capital but wages have failed to rise in tandem for most Afghans.
"If you see all these buildings, new roads, they are all significant but if you go outside Kabul you don't even have electricity. Loads of people still struggle for three meals a day," said one young man, Baharam Sarwari.
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