More than 90 per cent of young Afghan men in southern provinces home to sustained fighting between U.S. and Taliban forces do not know about "this event which the foreigners call 9/11," The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
According to a survey of 1,000 15 to 30-year-old men in Kandahar and Helmand -- where U.S. President Barack Obama sent the bulk of American surge troops -- 92 percent of respondents said they were unaware of 9/11 after being read a three-paragraph description of the attacks.
"Nobody explained to them the 9/11 story -- and it's hard to win the hearts and minds of the fighting-age males in Helmand if they don't even know why the foreigners are here," said Norine MacDonald, president of the International Council on Security and Development, which conducted the survey.
"There is a vacuum -- and it's being filled by Al Qaeda and Taliban propaganda claiming that we are here to destroy Islam."
The events of September 11, 2001, are known to educated Afghans, but elsewhere in a predominantly rural country where 42 percent of the population is under the age of 14 and 72 percent of adults are illiterate, many people have never been told about the atrocity.
Even in the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul -- near the country's eastern border with Pakistan -- there are people who have never heard of the terror attack that led to their nation being invaded by Western armies, the Journal reported.
