A Soviet war veteran reported missing in action in Afghanistan 33 years ago has been found living as a local healer in the province of Herat, news agency Ria reported.
The soldier, who was rescued by Afghans after being wounded in the first months after the Soviet Union’s invasion in 1979, was tracked down by a Moscow-based group of war veterans.
A native of the former Soviet state of Uzbekistan, he now goes by the name of Sheikh Abdullah and has adopted the local dress and profession of the healer who nursed him back to health.
The deputy head of the Afghan war veterans’ committee said Abdullah, whose given name is Bakhretdin Khakimov, had mostly forgotten the Russian language and never tried to contact his relatives after suffering severe head trauma.
Alexander Lavrentyev, who met with Abdullah in Herat last month, said the veteran, who was 20 when he went missing, still bore the scars of his injury: a nervous tic and a shaking hand and shoulder.
“He was just happy he survived,” Lavrentyev was quoted by Ria as saying at a press conference in Moscow on Monday.
The committee says it has found 29 of 264 soldiers still listed as missing from the decade-long conflict. It said seven of those it contacted chose to stay in Afghanistan.
About 15,000 Soviet troops were killed in the Soviet Union’s incursion to support a communist vassal government in Kabul.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees