In recent weeks, following the withdrawal of the U.S. Army and the seizure of power by the Taliban in Afghanistan, many have sought to soak through films or books about what is happening in the country. of the Middle East and why this situation has been reached after 20 years of the presence of international troops in the country.
However, to understand these films and books as well, one must contextualize the conflict in Afghanistan, as that country was at war long before U.S. troops and their international allies entered its territory in December 2001 (after the 9/11 attacks) aimed at dismantling the al Qaeda terrorist network and removing the Taliban from power to make this country a safe haven.
To understand what has happened and is happening there we must go back to the 80s, when the extinct Soviet Union militarily invaded the country, which triggered a 14-year war. After its end, in 1992, a period of political instability opened in the country in which a group of mujahideen guerrillas – fighters for jihad (holy war) armed – took control and laid the foundations of what would later be the Taliban.
A good reflection of part of this story is shown in the film “The Beast of War” (1988) directed by Kevin Reynolds. Set in 1981, it narrates the terrible attack that a Soviet tank unit carries out against a Pashtun village that houses a group of Mujahideen fighters, and which later pushes the latter to go after one of the vehicles in search of revenge. .
The third part of the Rambo saga (Peter MacDonald) (1988) does not overlook the Afghan-Soviet conflict, moreover, the final scene of the film has a dedication to the Taliban who helped Sylvester Stallone’s character to rescue Colonel Trautman from the hand of the Soviets: “The film is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan.”
From the other side of the trench, Russian filmmaker Ali Khamraev released the film in 1983 “Hot summer in Kabul”, In which a Russian doctor travels to Afghanistan during the war and sees first-hand the carnage caused by Islamist mujahideen towards the Russian socialist government.
Literature is not far behind either. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, Svetlana Alexievich, was published in 1989 “Boys in Zinc” a controversial story about Soviet troops fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the dead returning home in zinc coffins while their country did not acknowledge the existence of the conflict.
The intrusion of U.S. troops into Afghanistan after the 9/11 bombing of the Twin Towers and their stay in the country for 20 years has also been reflected in literature and film.
Inspired by real events, “Osama” (Siddiq Barmak, 2003), tells the true story of a young woman who disguised herself as a child to be able to work, as her uncle and father had died and without a man in the family, her mother, her Grandmother and herself could not even leave the house, so they were doomed to starve.
The film, winner of the 2004 Golden Globe, was the first to be filmed entirely in Afghanistan since the first rise to power and the subsequent fall of the Taliban.
A similar story is told by the animated film “The Breadwinner” (Nora Twomey, 2017, Oscar nominee for best animated film) based on the novel by Deborah Ellis, and starring Angelina Jolie in the production. It tells the story of Parvana, a young woman who has to take care of her family when her father is unjustly imprisoned.
The famous novel by Yasmina Khadra “The Swallows of Kabul” (“The Swallows of Kabul”) became an animated film directed by Zabou Breitman and Elea Gobbé-Mévellec, where a couple in love in the summer of 1998 dream of a better future, despite the violence and the hardships
the novels “The Kite Runner”, “Thousand Splendid Suns”, “And the Mountains Echoed”, of the American Afghan doctor Khaled Hosseini, conforms an incomparable triptych to understand the Afghan conflict, the Taliban ultraconvervadurismo and the null rights that the woman has under this regime.
Although she is not Afghan, Pakistani Malala Yousafzai won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize – she knows first hand what it is like to confront the Taliban (she was shot in the head for defending her right to go to school). After leaving the country, the young woman wrote “I am Malala”, an autobiography dedicated to all the girls.