Jun 16, 2018
A Haqqani Killer, a Brave Girl, and an Afghan Hero
The Haqqani assailants made sure she was dead, the Afghan soldier whispered to her “you’re like my sister.”
Twenty-six — year-old Breshna Mosazai was praying at a mosque inside the American University of Afghanistan compass on 24 August 2016 when a group of Haqqani Network assailants stormed in and started indiscriminate firing. A polio paraplegic on one leg, Ms. Mosazai couldn’t run away like her classmates did. She laid on the ground and pretended dead. The armed assailants, nevertheless, shot her twice in her healthy leg to make absolutely sure she was indeed dead. How could the Haqqani murderers let a woman, praying inside a mosque, alive?!
That was how the Taliban fighters, allegedly brainwashed and trained in neighboring Pakistan, treated an Afghan girl.
Later that evening, Afghan commandos made their way to the mosque amid fierce Taliban shooting. “One soldier came near to me and said ‘you’re like my sister and like my mother…let me pick you up’ and he lifted me onto his shoulders,” Ms. Mosazai told the Voice of America in Pashto in this video.
For many non-Afghans, what the soldier told the wounded young woman may not make a lot of sense. For Afghans, however, those two short sentences convey profound meaning. The soldier could have easily dragged the wounded girl without saying a word, and he would still be her savior. Instead and amid a shower of enemy bullets and grenades, the Dari-speaking soldier first assured the Muslim girl that he would need to touch her but that’s like touching his own sister or mother — an irrefutable assurance of no ill intention.
“As he was carrying me, my leg was hurting and I made noises out of pain, but the soldier told me ‘please stay calm because if the enemy hear you they’ll know where we are and will shoot at us’ and he took me to an ambulance where my brother and fiancé were waiting for me,” Ms. Mosazai recalled the terror night.
I don’t know who that soldier is or was (because too many Afghan soldiers die in the war everyday). I also don’t know, frankly don’t care, what his ethnicity or religious affiliation are. All I know is that he is the real hero in an insanely meaningless war. Like the true heroes always are, that hero will never be known to the rest of us. Like him, there are and there were too many unsung heroes in Afghanistan. The Afghanistan war, at least for a while, was fought under the rubric of “winning hearts and minds.” If the Afghan heart matters, who else can genuinely win our hearts and minds but this hero soldier?
As the war in Afghanistan appears to transition from Taliban insurgents to the so-called Islamic State g(Daesh) group, prospects for real and viable peace still dwindle towards uncertainty and despair.
How many more sisters and mothers will the hero Afghan soldier will carry to safety is impossible to say, but I pray that his own biological sisters and mother will never fall victim to a Haqqani or Daesh killers’ guns.
