It's Our Turn

ALEX PERRY FOR TIME

The Dehadi refugee camp outside Mazar-i-Sharif. Most Afghan cities are ringed with such encampments

After 22 years of war, there is little that can make a grown Afghan cry. But mention Ahmed Shah Massoud and the most battle-hardened Northern Alliance mujahedin will tell you he wept on Sept. 9, the day two al-Qaeda agents posing as journalists assassinated the rebel leader in a suicide bomb attack. In death, Massoud has become even more iconic than in life. His picture hangs in shop windows across the northern Afghan capital of Mazar-i-Sharif and is pasted in the windshields of Alliance pickups and jeeps. Along every street those calm, hooded eyes gaze out from their baggy sockets. He's...

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