Category Archives: History

Back in Exile: Afghan Stories of a Near Distant Past

Source: The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies

In 20 years of American-backed governments Afghanistan has changed immensely – singers, activists, and journalists showed the country that beyond the bloodshed, a world of culture, music, and beauty existed. Many of them were raised outside the country and returned to the homeland left by their parents in the previous wars. They helped rebuilding the nation, and now they are “back in exile,” joined by many other Afghans who managed to escape after the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul in mid-August.

Afghans exiles have been developing various discourses, including recording the memories of their flight, expressing nostalgia of a yearned-for past, and calling for social-political mobilization for the motherland.

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We Asked Russia’s 1980s Afghan War Vets To Judge The U.S. Exit. Here’s What They Said

Source: NPR

MOSCOW — It’s been more than a month since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Sergei Opalev is still trying to wrap his head around the chaotic end to America’s 20-year war.

It’s not the defeat that confounds him — he understands that part all too well. Opalev served as a captain in the Soviet armyas it was gradually humbled by Afghan mujahedeen fighters during a decade of war in the 1980s.

The problem, he says, is how U.S. forces left.

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