Hero's burial for loyal Afghan who saved his president
With the turquoise dome of the shrine to the 18th-century father of the Afghan nation rising in the background, Muhammad Akbar paused, leaned on his pick and said that he had never before been asked to dig a grave in the sacred soil of this compound.
The grave was for Azimullah Muhammad, an 18-year-old who a week ago was an unknown seller of plastic water jugs from a dimly lit stall deep inside Kandahar's main bazaar. Now he is Afghanistan's newest hero, to be buried alongside mujahideen heroes of the guerilla war against the Soviet Union.
On Friday, television viewers around the world saw BBC footage of a man in a brown tunic watching as an Afghan Army guard shot at President Hamid Karzai and the Kandahar governor, Gul Agha Shirzai.
"Azimullah didn't hesitate a second, he just jumped on him when he saw him shooting," Khalil Pashtoon, the governor's press secretary, said. "If he had not been there, the soldier would have very easily assassinated President Karzai."
Now that's what I call "honourable", do you care so much about your country that you'd be willing to take a bullet for your elected leader? The unfortunate thing is that the cynics and warmongers in the UK and US see an opportunity to Big Up the United States so they don't tell the world of the heroic act of a lone Afghan child and instead try and make us believe that they're so good at what they do. They've lost any moral authority they may have had and are now reduced to lying about events to paint themselves in a better light. Some people just don't get it, certainly not an ignorant bunch of right-wing Texan hooligans!
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