AFGHANISTAN

War, civil war, poverty and indescribable human pain and sorrow has dominated the life of about 20 million people for 23 years in this small country between the powerful neighbor states of Iran, Pakistan, and the former Soviet republics Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. 

 

1979 - 1989 Surprise Attack and War of the Soviet Union against Afghanistan

On Christmas 1979, the former Soviet army attacked Afghanistan, beginning a mercilessly brutal war against the Afghan civilian population. Thousands of villages were burnt by napalm bombs; mosques and medical units were bombarded and essential areas of the country were made uninhabitable by mines. This destroyed the means of livelihood for many people living outside the Soviet-occupied cities. More than a million people, women and children in particular, died. More than 6 million people, meaning every third inhabitant of Afghanistan had to flee the country - the most severe exodus in human history. Many of these refugees still live in miserable camps in Pakistan and Iran
 

Our Projects for Afghanistan

Paghman Trutz High School
Schools at Jalalabad
Village School of Zawa
Village School of Chewa
Start of Building Additional Schools
"Iron Cow" (Milk Supply for Children)
Mother-and-Child Hospital
Unicef
Basic Health Units
Orphanage "Children`s House Afghanistan"

1989 - 2001 Civil War and Taliban

After the defeat of the Soviet army in the spring of 1989 and the withdrawal of the Soviet forces from Afghanistan, the expectation for peace did not materialize as was hoped. The influences of foreign powers contributed to a raging, dreadful civil war lasting for four years between the different groups of Mudjahideen for political power in the capital of Kabul. During this murderous civil war, hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed. Kabul and other towns were largely destroyed.

Between 1989 and 1994, Afghanistan disintegrated into anarchy and chaos. In 1994, radical Islamic Taliban (students of arabic -Wahabi Quran schools of Pakistan) occupied the country in order to found an Islamic Sunnite "Government of God" influenced by clerics in Saudi Arabia. Using brutal violent force, they tried to force an aggressive, rigid, and primitive form of Islam onto the Afghan people, something completely unknown and foreign to the tolerant, amiable, and hospitable culture of the Afghan people. After their seizure of power in 1996 in Kabul, the Taliban exercised a horrible regime. Women were deprived of their elemental rights; their education and their rights to practice in their profession were limited or forbidden at all. There were no schools for girls any more.

Any offence against the rigid regulations of these "Warriors of God" resulted in drastic punishments. Offences against dress regulations by women were punished by whipping in public. Thieves were punished by amputation of one hand; women, alleged of "unchaste" behavior, were executed in the soccer-stadium of Kabul. Universities and high schools were closed, all sports and music forbidden. Irreplaceable cultural symbols of civilization were deliberately destroyed by the Taliban - among them the famous Buddha statues in Bamiyan of central Afghanistan.

The formerly multicolored and lively Afghan culture and society gave way to a somber and dreadful silent atmosphere of a graveyard. Even today, within the Madrasses (Arabic-dominated Quran schools in Pakistan’s refugee camps) several thousand boys - most of them orphans - are indoctrinated with hatred and fanaticism against all western "non Islamic" civilization, thus creating a new generation of Taliban.