IN a week that saw Afghanistan replace Syria in rankings as the world’s least peaceful country, Foreign Editor David Pratt returns to the capital Kabul and reflects on the troubled times he has witnessed there and the mix of fear and optimism that now grips the city.

GUNS are as commonplace to the citizens of Kabul as pubs are to Glaswegians. I wish I could remember a time in the Afghan capital when it was not so, but I can’t.

Guns and those who carry and fire them have shaped this city for time immemorial long before I first came here back in the 1980’s and 90’s.

Only a few days ago while standing on the old tower platform that sits atop Koiatub mountain I watched as a group of Afghan children played on the iron barrels of the two ancient British 19th century cannons or “noon guns “ that sit there and once fired to let Kabulis know it was midday.

It was from this same position at the height of the civil war that gripped Kabul in the early 90’s that shells from tanks and other artillery would rain down on the civilian neighbourhoods below. Koiatub is just one of the mountains that flanks a strategic valley known as Shir Darwaza or Lion’s Gate guarding the southwestern approaches to Kabul.

Just like guns, lions too feature heavily in the lexicon of Afghan life. Ahmad Shah Massoud the Afghan politician, military commander and national hero to many Afghans whose face adorns everything from T-shirts to billboards here in Kabul, was dubbed the ‘Lion of the Panjshir,’ for his canny and ferocious defence of the valley of the same name against the Soviet Red Army in the 80’s.

It was Massoud of course that also fought the Taliban until his assassination two days before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

The connection between the two events is not lost on analysts, for it appears that the 9/11 operation was the major terrorist attack which Massoud had warned against in his speech to the European Parliament several months earlier.

Many believe too that it was Osama bin Laden himself who ordered and organised Massoud’s assassination.

In doing so he would rob the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance forces - America's Afghan allies - of their most able commander. It also endeared bin Laden to the Taliban still further, making it impossible for Mullah Omar, the then regime's leader, to withdraw his protection.

But while the courageous symbol of the lion is used to characterise Massoud, another actual lion, Marjan, the most famous resident of Kabul Zoo is perhaps an equally, if very different, symbol of the conflicts that have held Afghanistan in their grip for so long.

Having survived wars, sieges, invasions and a grenade attack, it was back in 2002 that Marjan, the Lion of Kabul, finally succumbed to the one foe he could not beat: old age.

Marjan’s closest shave in his long and troubled life came when a Taliban fighter trying to prove his courage climbed into the lion’s enclosure. As lions are apt to do especially when hungry, Marjan pounced on the hapless man, and killed and ate him. The man's brother is said to have returned the next day and lobbed a grenade into the cage, blinding Marjan in one eye and leaving him lame.

I well recall back at the height of the 90’s civil war seeing Marjan in his compound and watching local children who had braved shell and gunfire to come and seen the legendary beast. Some would use small mirrors to reflect the sunlight onto Marjan’s face in the hope perhaps that the light might somehow restore the sight to the lion’s blinded eye.

Only Marjan’s keeper Sheraq Omar and his colleague Shah Barat, remain of the zoo’s staff from those dangerous days when it sat on the frontline between Kabul’s battling factions and warlords

“We would come every day even under gunfire to bring meat for Marjan and what other food we could get for the few surviving animals and later even the Taliban let us come,” Shah Barat told me last week as we stood reminiscing in front of the zoo’s jackal compound that he was tending.

Everywhere around us local families many with small children in tow wandered through the zoo’s refurbished grounds at the end of the Eid al-Fitr holiday.

Nearby also, two grey headed grumpy looking vultures perched in their cage shared the distinction like Shah Barat and myself of being surviving witnesses to what were some of the blackest and most violent times experienced in Kabul in the past decades. Everywhere in this city the past it seems collides with the present.

Not far from Kabul zoo sits the recently rebuilt Russian Centre of Science and Culture. Back during the 90’s civil war it’s bomb blasted ruins were an incredibly dangerous place and little more than a shooting gallery between two of the numerous former mujahideen factions vying for control of territory in Kabul.

With the Soviets by then gone and the collapse of Afghanistan’s communist government, the onetime resistance movement against the Russians had now turned on each other.

Nekrasov Viacheslav is the new director of the centre and veteran of the Soviet War sometimes referred to as “Russia’s Vietnam.”

“This is me, when I was an advisor here in Afghanistan in the 80’s,” Viacheslav tells me, pointing to the figure of a young man in a black and white photograph in which he is sporting a fur hat and the same Freddie Mercury style moustache back then as he does today.

“We worked closely with many Afghan communities sometimes in remote rural areas bringing health care and schools, I’ve been connected with Afghanistan ever since,” Viacheslav explains, as we wander past image after image from those times some showing young Russian soldiers high in the Hindu Kush mountains.

All the photographs, including portraits of former and current Russian ambassadors to Afghanistan and other memorabilia that lie on shelves, is part of a tiny museum tucked away in the Cultural Centre in Kabul’s Deh Mazang district and all but unknown to many Kabulis outside on the city’s streets and neighbourhoods.

Today Viacheslav, who once brought Russian student journalist delegations to conferences at Strathclyde University in Glasgow also brings veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war to the centre in Kabul where former Russian paratroopers have paid for and erected a memorial to all their comrades and Afghans killed in that bitter conflict.

“Today that war is behind us but not forgotten, and Afghanistan now faces other pressing and challenging times,” says Viacheslav as he we conclude our tour of the museum without another soul in sight.

It speaks volumes about those challenges the country currently faces that last week a major study published by the think-tank Global Peace Index, gave Afghanistan the dubious ranking of the world’s least peaceful country.

Officially Afghanistan is now the world’s most violent conflict with the highest number of deaths from war and terrorism, replacing Syria at the bottom of the index, which is now the second-least peaceful country in the world, followed by South Sudan, Yemen, and Iraq.

Venturing onto Kabul’s streets to do my work as a journalist means needing to be constantly vigilant. Should I stop to take photographs or interview someone my ‘minder’ is always nearby, watching every passing individual or vehicle that might pose a potential threat.

Kabul is a frontline, but it’s a strange kind of frontline. One that cannot be clearly demarcated and where the “enemy” sometimes lurks among the “ally.” Here in this city, streets become risks.

Decades of conflict and changing methods of warfare have shaped Kabul. Its diplomatic quarter lies within a comparatively secure “green zone” that has grown enormously to include all embassies, as well as the Nato and US military headquarters.

In the blue zone, traffic restrictions exist that now slowly encompasses much of the rest of the city centre and the airport. Some districts, streets and roads have been so exposed to bombings and other attacks that they have become notorious.

“We always try to avoid Wazir Akbar Khan, unless it’s absolutely necessary to pass through it,” warns my Afghan fixer speaking of the neighbourhood in northern Kabul that is home to many international diplomatic missions. For many foreign foreign workers here the journey to and from Kabul airport is only undertaken in an armoured vehicle.

Neighbourhoods are no longer only pummelled from the outside by rockets as they were in the 80’s and 90’s. Instead the war in the city has increasingly become a shadowy one that every so often leaps into full garish view because of suicide bombers and gunmen whose explosives seem to get bigger as foreigners retreat farther behind Kabul’s vast labyrinth of concrete blast walls.

Just last Thursday while conducting interviews in the backstreets of the city’s Puli Mahmood Khan district which has a high number of government buildings and security posts, I was urgently warned by one of my minders to get into our vehicle and leave the area immediately after he spotted two young men watching us intently while using their mobile phones.

While it could have meant nothing, it could just as easily have been spies of the Taliban or ISKP tipping off their operatives of our presence.

This is a very different kind of threat from the one I and others faced in the same district in the 90’s when the danger then was running the gauntlet of bullets, rockets and shells fired indiscriminately into civilian neighbourhoods.

Today largely because of security concerns and restrictions, parts of Kabul have become largely inaccessible for many ordinary Afghans.

It’s almost impossible too not to sense their deep frustration over this and being caught between the Taliban on one side and what many perceive as a corrupt government of elites and warlords on the other.

Founded in 2015 ArtLords is a group of mainly young Afghan artists and activists using street art to promote messages of hope and peace. Around the city they have transformed the negative psychological impact of blast walls on the people of Kabul into ‘positive visual experiences’ through large-scale mural paintings and other art work.

Many of their images are critical of the country’s elites and warlords as much as they are the Taliban. Unlike many ordinary citizens, Kabul’s elites live with the comparative protection of their secure compounds and private militias. Frequently the streets are often literally cleared of traffic for them to past through quickly in their armoured 4x4’s to avoid any potential threat from Taliban or ISKP insurgent attacks.

“It’s important to hold those responsible for eroding our rights to account and to let them know that ordinary people matter too,” says Omaid Sharifi who along with Kabir Mokamel is one of the founders of ArtLords.

Starting with an award-winning series of anti-corruption murals on prominent blast walls near government ministries, the paintings of eyes, accompanied by the slogan, ‘I See You’, were designed as a warning to corrupt officials.

In another series, ‘Heroes of my city’, ArtLords sought to celebrate everyday heroes such as municipal workers, teachers and nurses.

In Kabul such activism and artwork is of course not without considerable risk.

“I’ve had threats from both authority officials and the Taliban,” admits Sharifi whose work is otherwise highly respected among many in the city.

Sharifi’s work reflects what can only be a healthy sign among young Afghans and Kabulis, who seem determined to make their voices heard and are willing to question those who perpetrate much of the violence and oppression.

If there is cause for optimism right now in Afghanistan then this youthful passion and commitment towards making things better is it.

Revisiting Kabul I have many reasons to worry for the future of Afghanistan perhaps not the least of which is the growing threat from ISKP. Today, IS’s affiliate numbers thousands of fighters, many from Central Asia but also from Arab countries, Chechnya, India and Bangladesh, as well as ethnic Uighurs from China.

This past week one Afghan official even predicted that the province in which he lives and works would soon replace the Middle East as IS’s centre of gravity.

Given this the chances of a more intense turf war between the Taliban and ISKP is a real possibility.

On another wider level however as recent peace talks have shown, the Taliban simply cannot be ignored as part of the future political shaping and governance of Afghanistan. For now fear and optimism continue to strangely live side-by-side in Kabul.

Those with the guns still quite literally call the shots here. But more than ever there are those willing to jaw-jaw rather than war-war, and therein lies Afghanistan’s best hope for a peaceful future.