Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, Afghanistan remains a country defined by the consequences of that day -- and by the U.S.-led invasion that followed, which plunged the nation into two decades of war, foreign intervention and repeated shifts in government.
The U.S.-led military coalition invaded Afghanistan on charges of harboring Osama bin Laden, the then leader of the al-Qaida network. On Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida militants had hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against targets in the United States. Two of the planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, a third hit the Pentagon and the fourth crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Almost 3,000 people were killed.
What followed was a war that would reshape Afghanistan for a generation. In the two decades after the invasion, the country endured a U.S.-led military operation that left it in turmoil, with stability only briefly restored under foreign intervention. After the U.S. and NATO withdrawal in mid-2021, the situation has not stabilized.
Nowhere is that unresolved legacy more visible than in the western Kabul district of Dasht-e-Barchi, home to a large Hazara community, which has grown from a small suburb into a densely populated area of more than one million people.
Diljam Manan, a resident who moved to Kabul in the 1970s, is one of six brothers in the family now running a business in the city. He remembers the night Kabul was shaken by the first U.S. bombs. "We heard bombs and explosions, and knew something major was about to happen in Afghanistan. For the first time, Television Hill was hit. The blast was incredibly loud and powerful. That is what I remember most," he said.
Hazara communities continue to face religious discrimination and insecurity in their everyday lives.
"Sometimes, I feel terrified that the relative calm our people enjoy under the current government may erode in the future. This is the only fear that troubles me most," said Diljam Manan Qasemi. A generation that has known Afghanistan only in the aftermath of 9/11 is now confronting a new reality. Young Afghans, including many in Dasht-e-Barchi, see the exclusion of the country's younger generation from education as an issue with profound implications for the country's future.
"The girls we see in Dasht-e-Barchi cannot go to school or universities, or work with peace of mind. If they have no supporter like a brother or father, they have to work on their own -- and that, for me, is the most painful part," said Mustafa Qasemi, a young member of the Qasemi family.
Afghanistan still bears scars of U.S.-led invasion 25 years on after 9/11
