Un blog para todos y para nadie
It’s hard to discuss Afghan women, because one can hardly describe the subject concealed for the most part by the controversial blue or white veil, known as burqa or chadri. Islam, it seems, has different rules as to how women should be dressed in different countries. In Afghanistan, the prevailing…
During its ten-year war in Afghanistan (1979-1989), the Soviet Union lost 14,453 soldiers dead (Source: “Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses” by G.F. Krivosheyev) and hundreds of units of military hardware, including tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs), which still litter the former battlegrounds.
Afghanistan’s adults unanimously say they are tired of fighting, but their children seem to enjoy the numerous paraphernalia of war, from tanks to heavy guns to grandfathers’ rifles, that one can encounter virtually everywhere, from one’s home to a village maidan. And even if the peace that has finally come…
Afghanistan’s civil war has displaced millions and created a whole class of impoverished people.
“You’ve come here to see the war, so you are going to see it,” Aziz was trying to wake up journalists who had just settled down for yet another night of discomfort and anxiety in the front-line town of Jabal os-Saraj, also known as Jabul Saraj, which Russian-speakers aptly, if…
They say there are only good drivers in Afghanistan: all the bad ones are lying at the bottom of mountain gorges.
Afghanistan’s civil war was responsible for the existence of tens of thousands of prisoners captured by the two major parties to the conflict, the Taliban and the Northern Alliance.
All Afghan men are warriors. The old ones were fighters in the past, the young ones will become soldiers in the future.
Most Afghan families have many children, too many, in fact, for some. On the other hand, there are childless couples for whom adoption is the only choice. In Afghanistan, this often means buying a baby from a poor family.
One of my Afghan drivers never missed a chance to make sarcastic comments about religion in general and the Islamic clergy in particular whenever we passed a mosque on our long journeys across the country. One of his remarks that I recall is as follows: “Do what the mullah says,…
The war had been going on in Afghanistan for more than twenty years, largely unnoticed by the outside world, until the U.S.-led coalition said it was going to overthrow the Taliban regime and eliminate the al-Qaida leader, Osama ben Laden (Usama bin Laden).
One of the Taliban prisoners-of-war I met at the Do-Ab detention center in the Panjshir Valley in mid-September 2001 was a bespectacled man with refined manners and fluent English.
The late Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, who fought against the Soviet and Taliban armies, remains a cult figure in many parts of Afghanistan.
The final stages of Afghanistan’s civil war and the United States’ involvement in the conflict attracted hundreds of journalists from all over the world.
