An ethnic Tajik, he has also been at war with other Afghan guerrillas, their ethnicities different from his and their loyalties notably fluid. He rarely sleeps in the same place two nights in a row. He seldom gets to return to his family home in the Panjshir, where he has a library with 3,000 books. His wife and five children live in Dushanbe, the capital of neighboring Tajikistan, where they are safer. He is a man who wanted to be an architect in a nation that was once starting to prosper, and instead he became a military tactician in a woebegone country whose cities are in ruins.
Proper figures are hard to come by, the land is so numb with death.
Between a million and a million and a half people have been killed during 21 years of war. Perhaps another four million have fled. It is a nation where every major road has been torn apart by tank treads. Every major building has been blown full of holes. The Soviet army had invaded, and the West supported the Afghan resistance with the latest tools of battle.