Massoud
Reza Deghati
IRAN

Your memory as a reader may be filled with images of a magical and mysterious world that eastern storytellers recount, like Scheherazade through her Arabian nights. As an invitation on an imaginary journey, you can see caravans walking slowly, dignified looking men, their heads wrapped in a turban, the deep and eloquent looks of veiled women, erect sabers, and the white beards of wise men...

Entering Afghanistan in 1983, leaving the towns behind and scouring the country meant that I had the opportunity to immerse myself in that east like in an open book. The country and the people seemed to have remained indifferent to changes brought about by time, progress, industrialization and foreign influences. Every step, every meeting revealed how tangible the proud and unchanging integrity of the Afghan people was.

I remember the despair of an old man who, showing me his house razed to the ground by air raids, told me in a voice broken with sobs: "The bird of fire came and destroyed my house." He kept repeating that sentence to try to understand the incomprehensible.

The dreaded and fearsome Russian Army composed of 100,000 soldiers had invaded towns and the countryside, had cut off roads and rivers, and bombed any center of resistance. The entire country, burning and bleeding, seemed to remain prostrate, mourning its dead. However, a resistance movement was being organized with the utmost discretion. How minimal and little equipped the Afghan resistance was at the time. But it was superior in terms of determination. I understood after sharing the life of those men for several months that they would force the Russian Army to yield and retreat just as their ancestors had done with other occupying armies.

Rising against the 100,000 Russian soldiers, a young Commander named Massoud had walked from village to village and gathered a hundred men who, according to him, would win over the invader.

They were shadows, they were men, they were mountain warriors against an iron invader.