An American missile had struck the outpost before the Marines had seized it, the Americans would later say, burying Taliban fighters inside. But the bones were almost certainly not Taliban: they were decades and, likely in some cases, centuries old. A local scholar in Garmsir, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, said the hill had originally been a fort, but that hundreds of years ago its use changed. Local people, he said, and eventually ethnic Pashtuns, saw it and the other structures like it in the area as spiritual sites and transformed them into burial sites. Who built it is unclear, but the Safavid, Mughal and Ghaznavid empires, as well as Alexander the Great, all left their mark on the region.

Source: New York Times October 31, 2020 17:26 UTC