The Fierce Mountain: Afghan Nation’s Long March Through Blood, Fire, and Freedom

An empire came with tanks. A people answered with faith. December 1979. The Soviet Union sends its Fortieth Army across the ancient Oxus River and into Afghanistan, expecting a swift and bloodless victory over what its generals dismiss as primitive mountain tribesmen. What it encounters instead is a nation of souls who have spent three thousand years teaching empires the same lesson - and who are ready to teach it again. THE FIERCE MOUNTAIN is an epic historical novel set across the full nine years of the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989). At its heart stands Tariq Khan, a young Pashtun from the Kunar Valley whose quiet faith and unshakeable dignity make him as dangerous to the Soviet occupation as any weapon. Beside him stand his fierce poet-friend Yusuf, the wise old historian Haji Ibrahim whose stories of Saladin and the Ottoman sultans sustain the fighters through the hardest winters, and Commander Hamza Gul - a brilliant tactician who insists on mercy even in the darkest hours of war. But the mountains hold other stories too. Katerina Volkov is a Ukrainian linguist blackmailed by the KGB into serving as a spy in Kabul - her brother held hostage to ensure her cooperation. Fluent in Dari and Pashto, schooled in her father's love for Afghan poetry, she is sent to seduce and recruit the very people she cannot help but admire. When she meets Tariq in a village courtyard and discovers that he reads the same poets she has carried in her bag since childhood, something in her world begins to shift - and the woman sent to destroy begins the long, costly journey toward becoming someone she is not ashamed of. Meanwhile, Cold War shadows lengthen across the conflict. RAW intelligence officer Major Rajesh Bhatt arrives in Kabul with satellite-precise information on mujahideen supply routes. The Soviets rain destruction on villages, prisons fill with the innocent, and the mountains absorb the cost in blood. But the mountains also give back what empires can never take: the unbreakable human will to remain. Spanning nine years of unequal, brutal, magnificent resistance, this novel weaves together the poetry of Khushal Khan Khattak and Rahman Baba, the history of Saladin and Suleiman the Magnificent, the love of a people for their land, and the unexpected mercy that flowers even in the hardest soil - to tell the story of one of the most important and least-remembered conflicts of the twentieth century. "The coffins are coming home, and the mothers weep. But nobody asked the Afghan mothers how many of their sons they have buried." - Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys A sweeping, deeply human story of war, faith, resistance, and the courage it takes to choose mercy when hatred would be so much easier.

Pagina's: 254, Paperback, Independently published