SEVEN NIGHTS TIL DAWN

Life would never be the same. It was Christmas Eve, December 24, 1979, and the people of the Soviet Union were celebrating the birth of their Christian Savior. Throughout Russia and many other countries of…

I was born Tooran Popal on May 2, 1974, into a loving family that enjoyed a prosperous life in the beautiful capital city of Kabul. I am descended from the Popalzai or Pashtun (pash-tune), which…

As time went by, Afghan communities and their residents learned to adapt to the new environment of occupation. The fear of the children became one of the first casualties of indifference as they let down…

As a fellow refugee, though from a different country, I recognized so much of my own family’s experience in these pages. The details about the escape, the poverty in refugee camps, the struggles in America, all of it felt true in ways that sanitized accounts never capture. Tooran’s honesty about how hard it was, and still is, gave me language for things I have struggled to explain to people who have never lived through displacement.

Henry Clark

I teach modern Middle Eastern history and assigned this book to my students. The personal narrative brings the Soviet invasion and its aftermath to life in ways textbooks cannot. My students who had no connection to Afghanistan came away with genuine understanding of what these conflicts meant for ordinary families. The seven night escape through the mountains became the part they remembered most vividly.

Jack Peterson

I picked this up not knowing anything about Afghanistan’s recent history. By the end I understood the Soviet invasion, the Mujahideen resistance, the civil wars, the Taliban, and the 2021 collapse in ways news articles never helped me grasp. Tooran explains the political complexity while keeping the focus on human impact, which made it accessible without oversimplifying.

Emily Sharma