There is a legend in the Hindukush Mountains that reads like this:
– “When Allah made the world, He was found out that there were a lot of leftovers of his creation that didn’t fit anywhere else. The Divine gathered all these fragments and threw them to Earth, and that how he created Afghanistan.”
This legend describes the Afghan landscape very well; an austere landscape, full of forested mountains and arid deserts, with lush oases surrounding the rivers that run deep in the deep valleys. However, even in the deepest arid region, or at the highest permanently snowed mountain top, one should not think that the scenario means the absence of human presence. There is also an Afghan proverb that dictates:
– “No matter how high the mountain, you will always find an Afghan tribe!”
Afghan lands were, over the millennia, the place of creation or expansion of empires and religions. The ancient travelers thought that Afghanistan as the center of the world, because they had to cross it with their caravans whenever they traveled the very famous Silk Road.
Being in the center of Central Asia, Afghanistan is Ariana’s heir; an empire of noble and cultured people of distant antiquity.
I spent many nights in Afghanistan listening to old legends with heroes defeating dragons, titanic battles between armies, kings and giants of the underworld, Noah’s Ark, the mythical number 7 and the taboo number 39, etc. Afghans themselves describe the landscape of the Hindukush mountains as the skeleton of a huge apocalyptic monster. However, the most striking stories were those that I watched live, suffered in the flesh by the people of the local tribes, who, although distinct from each other, shared the same feeling of belonging to a country called Afghanistan.
Now that the eBook of Bosnia Herzegovina (Bosnia 95 – Peacekeeping in a War zone) is about to be released, it is time to start reviewing the UNAMA mission diary; Afghanistan.
#Peacekeepininawarzone
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