Saarah Khalil was born in a secluded mountain village, in the shadows of the Hindu Kush, and came of age mostly unaware of the endless wars and tribal strife going on beyond her sheltered village. Then one day, the Taliban came and everything changed.
Faced with the prospect of a forced marriage to a Taliban warlord, Saarah flees to a women’s shelter in Kabul, where she is invited to join a fledgling band of women warriors, her initial reluctance to engage in bloodshed turning to fiery determination when she learns that her father has been killed by the Taliban and her mother made a sex slave. No longer able to ignore the harsh new reality facing her life, that all her hopes and dreams, and, in fact, those of every woman in Afghanistan, will be meaningless if the Taliban can retake power, she joins the fight to free the Afghan people from their yolk of tyranny. And the heroics of these ‘lipstick warriors’ soon come to light, fueling a clandestine war of wills between the CIA and State Department, the CIA doing everything in its power to support this nascent crusade against the Taliban while State, at the direction of a new president, appears determined to stamp out what the administration views as upending their neat and orderly withdrawal plans.
With this band of women cornered and a horde of Taliban soldiers about to launch a fatal offensive, one sympathetic CIA operative, aided by his Kabul station chief and their crew of behind the scenes techies, go completely off the reservation in an effort to save them. Add to this mix a salty assortment of special forces mavericks, corrupt Afghani politicians and their imperious American counterparts and you have the ingredients for both a stirring adventure and heartwarming tale of redemption.
