The following sources are most helpful in asylum cases for people who have recently fled Afghanistan. These are sources that focus only on Afghanistan, and should be used in conjunction with the government, international, and library sources already listed in this guide.
For more information, NATO LibGuides provide recommendations for high-quality information related to NATO efforts. They have a LibGuide just for Afghanistan.
Pashto and Dari (a dialect of Persian) are the two official languages of Afghanistan. News stories or other sources may be written in either or both of these languages.
If you are reading a source to determine if it is helpful for your case, putting the text into Google Translate and requesting that it translate from Persian is extremely helpful. Google translate will suggest if the text is actually in Pashto as opposed to Dari. However, remember that you cannot submit documents translated by Google Translate with an asylum application. This is merely for your own research and understanding.
Afghanistan uses a different calendar than the United States. Dates are written as day/month/year, but right to left, so it will appear as 1399/3/5 where 1399 is the year, 3 is the month, and 5 is the day.
