Soviet Soldier Found Alive in Afghanistan

This story from RIA Novosti is pretty amazing.  It reminds me of the Japanese soldiers that they kept finding long after WWII had drawn to a close.  As someone who has lived through the ravages of war, the idea that this young man simply walked away from that and found a life for himself is inspiring.  If I had the proper linguistic skills and hadn't been married at the time, I may have done the same thing during my first tour in Iraq.  Living among the Kurds in northern Iraq was very appealing to me.

MOSCOW, March 5 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) – There is a traditional healer living in the Shindand District in Afghanistan, known as Sheikh Abdulla, an elderly-looking, impoverished widower with a wispy beard leading a semi-nomadic life with a local clan. 

His real name is Bakhretdin Khakimov and he is a Soviet soldier who has been missing in action since the first months of a nine-year-long bloody war that began when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in late 1979. 

Khakimov, an ethnic Uzbek, was tracked down two weeks ago by a search party of the Warriors-Internationalists Affairs Committee, a nonprofit, Moscow-based organization, operating under the aegis of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), whose activists spent a year following the missing soldier’s decades-old trail.

I am glad that there are still those in Russia who are trying to find those that were so cruelly treated by their government.  A government, which for a long time refused to acknowledge the extent of the sacrifice that so many young men were asked to make.

The committee’s operations are funded by countries of the CIS, a confederation comprising most former Soviet republics. Though the expenditures are a mere 12,000 rubles ($400) a year per missing soldier, some countries, such as Ukraine and even oil-rich Turkmenistan, dodge the financial support responsibility, Lavrentyev said.