The authors first travelled in Afghanistan in spring 2002, in a country "marked by the hope of the first year without war and the green landscapes of the fleeting Afghan spring". On their 3,000-kilometre circuit they saw the country regain hope after the fall of the Taliban and heard of refugees returning, the end of the drought, weddings and reconstruction. But on their second journey, in 2003, chaos had returned: "More cautious, often disguised, we retraced the same route. In the South, huge territories had been abandoned to the Taliban by the international community; in the North the warlords had resumed their fratricidal fights." In spring 2004 they travelled the dangerous Iraqi roads from Basra to Mosul, where the American army had created chaos from the moment it arrived.