Soviet Soldier Found in Afghanistan 33 Years Later

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.

Since its inception, the committee has discovered 29 missing Soviet soldiers alive in Afghanistan. Seven of them chose to stay, while the others returned home when given the option, Aushev’s deputy, Alexander Lavrentyev, also an Afghan veteran, said at the press conference.

Khakimov is the eighth. He suffered severe head trauma during fighting in Shindand 33 years ago, when he was still a 20-year-old draftee, but was nursed back to health by a local village elder. The now-deceased Afghani, who made a living as a healer, adopted the native of the ancient Uzbek city of Samarkand and taught him the trade, Lavrentyev said.

Khakimov, who still has a nervous tic from the injury, forgot whatever Russian he knew and never tried to contact his relatives after being captured. “He was just happy he survived,” said Lavrentyev, who personally met with Khakimov in the city of Herat in western Afghanistan in late February.

But the former soldier – who married in Afghanistan, but is now a childless widower – was eager to meet his relatives, something that the committee is currently working to arrange, Lavrentyev said.

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20130305/179834151/Soviet-Soldier-Missing-for-33-Years-Found-in-Afghanistan.html

Makes me wonder about those stories about American MIA's supposedly still living in the jungles of Cambodia and Vietnam.

I believe this happens in most every war or conflict of some sort. I can remember when I was a teen and there was some Japanese soldier from WWII who surrendered in the Phillippines in "1976". Dude just rolled out of the jungle and finally gave up. It's shocking that he had been "escaping and evading" for over 30 years and that he was never noticed.

With this story though, it is not exactly the same. Obviously, this guy had no will to fight once injured and was obviously swayed by the compassion shown by the Afghan people which was also documented in Marcus Lattrell's book, Lone Survivor.

It's too bad that the Taliban don't have the same sort of mentality.

This is today's "now I've heard everything" story. We seem to be getting a new one just about every day. We're now getting them far more frequently than ever in the past.

And that face. That face is telling some sort of really weird bizarre story all by itself.

Sal wrote:

Bob wrote:And that face. That face is telling some sort of really weird bizarre story all by itself.

Sal wrote:

Sheikh Abdulla has seen some shit.

Bob wrote:And that face. That face is telling some sort of really weird bizarre story all by itself.

Sal wrote:

He is an Uzbek, which probably means he married family once he chose that wife in Afghanistan. They are all related in some form or fashion in the "STANS".