Two matchboxes of the US Air Force and a much newer matchbox from the 2000s, of Russian origin, depicting Osama bin Laden, the founder and leader of the international Islamist terrorist organization Al Qaeda, on the front, and the bounty which had been made by the USA, on the back.
The United States has blamed him for masterminding the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, which killed just under 3,000 people.
In May 2011, the Americans, after discovering his hideout in Pakistan, killed him and threw his body into the sea.
But a few years ago -in the mid-1980s- the US had backed their ally, Bin Laden, and
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e Mujahideen – from whom the Taliban come- with hundreds of millions of dollars in the struggle against the revolutionary Afghan government that had seized power. It was no accidental, but it was unbelievable, that during the period of popular rule in Afghanistan, it was forbidden by law for a man to engage his women-children or marry them, in order to get money or goods. With similar decrees were taken measures for motherhood and all the laws that established the inequality of the two sexes were abolished. Within a few years of the revolution, there were 7,454 female teachers in Kabul alone and 9,000 in the countryside! From that moment on, an armed confrontation began between those who acquired land and those who lost it… 6,795,670 stremma (Greek unit of land area that is equal to precisely 1,000 square metres) of land were divided among 2,000,000 people. 4,000,000 stremma were removed from the 39,000 landowners without compensation. 11,000,000 members of rural families were relieved of their debts to the usurers, amounting to 70 billion drachmas. A few years later, the taxes owed to the state were given away for 4,300,000 farmers.
In 2001, after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, the United States invaded Afghanistan in the name of the fight against terrorism and remained for 20 years. Now they are effectively handing over power to the Taliban who have taken over the country. What they have accomplished, according to President Joe Biden, is the terrorist threat to have spread in many countries and not being limited to Afghanistan. Also the 20 years of American imperialist invasion and occupation left behind thousands of deads. At least 50,000 civilians have been killed in US bombings over the years.
And now the people of Afghanistan are being led from “Scylla to Charybdis” (Greek expression when someone is driven from one evil to another). The images coming from Kabul are shocking. People hanging from airplane bellows, climbing on warplanes ready to take off, and even people falling from airplanes in the air.
The suffering of the Afghan people continues…