Afghanistan has always been a land of conflicts, but the modern era has made it more so.

The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is a landlocked country in South and Central Asia with a population of approximately 28 million people. Its geographic position has made it of strategic and economic importance since the dawn of history. For this reason, it has been a focal point for trade and human migration, being home to the Ancient Silk Road trade route which was an important route of trade that wove its way through much of East, South and Western Asia as well as the Mediterranean and European world and parts of North and East Africa. This route provided a home to many various peoples that was a melting pot of many different cultures that eventually intermixed into the modern day Pashtuns. The route itself vital to the people who lived there, as it provided for them economically and socially. Its geographic position caused it to witness countless military conquests throughout the ages, notably Alexander the Great in approximately 300 BC, Chandragupta Maurya also in approximately 300 BC and after the advent of Islam, Genghis Khan in the 13th century. Since then, Afghanistan has served as a source from which many local dynasties established their own empires and later fell. In modern times, Afghanistan experienced the colonisation of the British. This was the first major foreign intervention in Afghanistan since Genghis Khans invasion. After seizing control of their independence, Afghanistan was quiet until roughly the 1970s, since which is has experience a continuous state of war. Afghanistan suffered under Soviet invasion and occupation during the Cold War in the 1979 and fought a brutal civil war in the late 1990s in order to cleanse the nation of everything foreign and return to an Islamic form of govern ship. But this was not to be the case. In October of 2001, the United States of America, an ex-British Colony, led a military operation that invaded the nation and saw the toppling of the Taliban government. Since then, Afghanistan has been occupied by combined foreign militaries under the direction of an International Security Assistance Force. Whilst it is evident that Afghanistan has been the battlefield of many different leaders, generals and armies, not until British colonisation and the invasion of Soviet Russia did conflict in Afghanistan ever become as prevalent as it has in the modern era. Its citizen and contingents were never the direct victims of invasion, many adapting easily to new leadership and rule throughout history until the first modern intervention, rather the colonisation of its lands by Imperial Britain. Since then, Afghanistan has been at the forefront, or perhaps centre, of most modern conflicts, which has had far reaching effects on its population, namely, 7 million men, women and children murdered in the latest invasion by the United States of America.