Rebel, Kingmaker, and Accused War Criminal: The Last Confessions of an Afghan Warlord
IT&#;S PUSHING MIDNIGHT when my armored escort pulls up to a high-walled compound on the outskirts of Ankara, the Turkish capital. After more than a year and a half of waiting, Abdul Rashid Dostum, Afghanistan’s most notorious and elusive warlord, has summoned me for an interview, his first since the Taliban takeover that forced him to flee his homeland. Special police patrol the periphery of his estate for assassins, and a pair of fighting mastiffs bark at me as I’m led past a fountain up to a villa fronted with candy-cane columns and giant golden lions bathed in floodlight. An adjacent reception room is stocked with Red Bull and assorted mementos: swords, a framed picture of Dostum and a U.S. Special Forces officer poring over a map, and a statuette of a rearing stallion.
Dostum enters wearing a striped Uzbek cape and extends a frail hand. He’s no longer the beefy warrior I remember. His movement is slow, his cheeks slack and pale. But he still sports his soldier’s buzz cut, underlined with thick black eyebrows that arch into daggers when his temper flares.I remind
The past and future of Afghan warlords
Regardless of how Afghanistan’s very uncertain situation unfolds, warlords are here to stay. In the second episode of the Dutch series '20 years after 9/11’, Romain Malejacq explains the resilience of Afghan warlords and their role in post-NATO Afghanistan.
Last April, United States’ president Joe Biden announced the full withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan to be completed by the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington D.C. Within two months of this announcement, the Taliban had intensified their offensives against Afghan government forces and captured over a hundred additional districts.
This eventually caused Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum, the infamous warlord of northern Afghanistan, to react. On 27 June , Dostum pledged to return to his home province of Jowzjan to lead the fight against the Taliban.1
This is not idle talk. During his time as vice president (from to ), Dostum took the initiative to coordinate the war in northern Afghanistan twice, turning his Jowzjan palace into a command centre, causing consternation as well as concern among both Afghan and Western military establishments. Back th
This article on ODA , General Dostum, John Walker Lindh and the battle at Qali-i-Jangi was originally published in the March edition of National Geographic Adventure
THE LEGEND OF HEAVY AND THE BOYS By Robert Young Pelton
The Regulators flew in from Uzbekistan at night on a blacked-out Chinook helicopter. They landed near a mud-walled compound in the remote Darra-e Suf valley in northern Afghanistan. As they began unloading their gear, they were met by Afghans in turbans, their faces wrapped. “It was like that scene in Close Encounters where the aliens meet humans for the first time,” one soldier says later. “Or maybe that scene in Star Wars: These sand people started jabbering in a language we had never heard.” The Americans shouldered their hundred-pound rucksacks while the Afghans hefted the rest of the equipment. The gear seemed to float from the landing site under a procession of brown blankets and turbans.
The next morning, about 60 Afghan cavalry came thundering into the compound. Ten minutes later, another 40 riders galloped up. General Abdul Rashid Dostum had arrived.
“Our mission was simple,” another soldier says. “Support Dostum. They told us, ‘If Dostum
“12 Strong”: The Inside Story of the Making of a (Refreshingly Accurate) Hollywood War Epic
When I received a phone call from a representative for famed producer Jerry Bruckheimer to visit the remote mountains of New Mexico to see the filming set for the forthcoming Afghan war movie, 12 Strong: The True Declassified Story of the Horse Soldiers, I was prepared to be underwhelmed. The movie, which retells the remarkable story of a brotherhood forged between Afghan Uzbek horse warriors and an elite Special Forces A-Team in the mountains of Afghanistan, is a story I have professionally immersed myself in exploring and bringing to life for a decade and a half. My journey to uncover the hidden story of this special operations campaign—that united Green Berets with fierce Uzbek Mongols as a proxy fighting force to overthrow the entrenched Taliban regime—had consumed me and, on a couple of occasions, almost led to my death. I still shudder at the memory of being told not to jump down from the clay wall of a small mountain firing post used by the anti-Taliban rebels when one of my Uzbek friends warned me there were landmines planted directly where I was about to land.
To put it
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