They presented it as a humanitarian mission and of peacekeepingit was a war. A war never openly declared, but in which the Italian Armed Forces had 53 dead and 723 wounded. The heroics, lies and hypocrisies of the intervention in Afghanistan told for the first time by the voice of those who fought.
The mission was born immediately in the name of hypocrisy: "We stepped in to defend a NATO ally after 11/XNUMX", the politicians lied. Instead, the attack on Afghanistan was part of the operation Enduring Freedom, an American initiative, not authorized by the UN. NATO only took over later.
Sending the first soldiers out of Kabul into the fighting zone in 2003, the defense minister at the time declared: "It is a mission at risk, but its purposes are still peace-keeping". In fact, since the end of 2001 the pilots of the group Gray Wolves took off from the aircraft carrier Garibaldi they were engaged in bombing missions over Afghanistan together with American planes: they completed 278 of them.
There was no peace to be maintained over there, the existence of a unity like that also proves it Task Force 45, formed by the elite of the Italian special forces, engaged in combat actions on a daily basis, but whose existence at first was not even admitted by the government. Numerous 'operators' of the phantom TF-45 recount in detail the war operations, often carried out without being able to count on the support of Italian aircraft.
In twenty years of intervention, the war has brought with it corruption, robberies, economic appetites, betrayals. And there is only one toll: the situation in Afghanistan has worsened.
Wednesday 22 at 18.00 let's meet the authors of "The hidden war. Afghanistan in the story of the Italian soldiers", Giampaolo Cadalanu e Massimo DeAngelis.
See you there!
