Gunshot tanks on the roadside, burned-out houses, small children standing barefoot in the snow: in 2002 there was a war in Afghanistan. And the West made two mistakes in the early years of the war.
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Joachim Käppner and Tobias Matern
Just two days before the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington, in which more than 3,000 people were killed, Islamists carried out a suicide attack on Ahmed Shah Massoud, as a result of which he died. The popular hero of the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Union, “the Lion of Pandjir”, was the last great opponent of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the civil war that soon followed the withdrawal of the Soviets in 1989. Almost the entire country is now in their hands, only in the mountains of the extreme northeast is the “Northern Alliance” struggling to hold on.