ABOUT THE EVENT:

The compelling inside story of how America abandoned Afghanistan – and those who are willing to fight again to free their nation & their people from the inhumanity & barbarity of the Taliban.

When America retreated from Kabul amid chaos in 2021, Lieutenant General Sami Sadat, the last commander of the army of the Afghan Republic, was still fighting to the end. In this firsthand account, he reveals how his troops were starved of ammunition for two years before the final pullout, while America was glad-handing the Taliban.

Although Sadat spent his early career fighting alongside the CIA to track down al-Qaeda in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, it was in conventional combat—leading from the front—that he made his name. In The Last Commander, he contends that Afghanistan could have won the war if support had continued.

President Biden may have ended America’s longest war, but the story does not end there. Now Sadat’s birth country is plunged into barbarism, where women are beaten for showing their face and his former comrades are hunted down and killed. But Sadat is planning to fight back. It will not be easy, but this riveting personal account of combat shows that if anyone can do it, he can.

Sadat’s story was told in the Emmy Award–winning documentary Retrograde. Now he tells it for himself.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Lt. General Sami Sadat – The final commander of Afghan Special Operations, Sami dispelled the misguided notion that the Afghan military threw down their arms in leading the heroic final stand of the 215th Corps in the Taliban Heartland of Helmand Province. Not content in letting his country be dominated by extremism, Sami is leading an effort to unite the younger generation of Afghan leaders to shape the future of Afghanistan.

A Graduate of King’s College, the Joint Services Command and Staff College of the U.K., the NATO Defense College and Polish National Defense University, Sami was on the bleeding edge of counter-terror operations in Afghanistan. Prior to his assignment as Corps Commander, Sami commanded Afghanistan’s Join Special Operations Command, where in 2019, the Taliban saw its highest rate of casualties in 20 years of war.

Sami held several high-level positions within Afghan Intelligence Services, to include director of its covert action program Sami is arguable most recognizable as the focal point of 2022’s Retrograde; a National Geographic Documentary that chronicles the final months leading to the collapse of Afghanistan.