The Taliban trade weapons for pens to express their version of the war.

Once in power , numerous Taliban They have taken advantage of the return of peace to write their memoirs of the war , a way of recounting from their point of view 20 years of confrontation with the West , which they accuse of distorting reality.

Countless books have been written recently about the war against the ultra-rigorist movement and the failure of the West to prevent the Taliban from regaining power in 2021.

"In everything foreigners have written about us, they have ignored the reality of what happened to us and the reasons why we were forced to fight," explains Khalid Zadran, a member of the Haqqani network, a feared faction allied to the Taliban movement , now a spokesman for the police in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

In his 600-page memoir, written in Pashto and published in April, he recounts the early US incursions into his Khost province , south of Kabul, his childhood marked by stories of "atrocities," and his desire to join the Taliban in defense of his country's "freedom."

"I witnessed , every day, horrific stories, shattered corpses abandoned on the side of the road," one can read in his book 15 Minutes , whose title is inspired by a US drone attack from which he narrowly escaped.

"We must call a spade a spade. Contrary to what it claims, the United States has committed cruel and barbaric acts , destroyed our country with bombs, wrecked infrastructure, and sown discord (...) among nations," said Muhajer Farahi, Deputy Minister of Information and Culture.

In his book Memories of Jihad: 20 Years Under Occupation , he claims that the Taliban tried to negotiate with the United States over the fate of Osama bin Laden , whom the United States was seeking after the attacks of September 11, 2001. But to no avail, he says.

"It's clear that the Americans had already planned the occupation of Afghanistan," wrote Farahi, who doesn't believe in the so-called "war on terror."

"At first, Afghans thought that an incident that had occurred thousands of miles away, in a Western country, wouldn't affect them (...) But then everyone realized that the innocent people in our country would be punished."

The Taliban were at war for 20 years with a coalition of 38 countries , mostly NATO members, led by the United States.

Tens of thousands of Afghans and 6,000 foreign soldiers—including 2,400 Americans—were killed in fighting and attacks carried out by the Taliban. Farahi argued that the war was the fruit of Westerners' desire to "impose their culture and ideology on other nations."

Other books praise the war exploits of the Taliban and the "Islamic emirate," which is the dominant narrative in Afghanistan today.

But few have taken the form of autobiographies , which appeal to an audience eager to understand the war "from within," Zadran argues.

His book, which had a print run of 2,000 copies , sold out so quickly that another 1,000 are being printed, he said. Neither his nor Farahi's work makes much mention of the civilians killed in the attacks that spread terror across the country.

Both stories stop in 2021 , so they do not address the metamorphosis of the fighters from the remote Afghan mountains to the government offices.

Now, their battle is a diplomatic one : the Taliban are fighting to have their government recognized by the international community, which continues to criticize them for their "gender apartheid" towards women, who have been stripped of their rights.

"The war is over," Farahi said. "We want to have good relations with everyone."