A Soviet war veteran reported missing in action during fighting in Afghanistan 33 years ago was? found living as a local healer in the province of Herat, RIA-Novosti reported.
The soldier, who was rescued by Afghans after being wounded in the first months after the Soviet Union's invasion in 1979, was tracked down by a Moscow-based group of war veterans.
A native of Uzbekistan, he now goes by the name Sheikh Abdullah and has adopted the local dress and profession of the healer who nursed him back to health.
The deputy head of the Afghan war veterans' committee said Abdullah, whose given name is Bakhretdin Khakimov, had mostly forgotten the Russian language and had never tried to contact his relatives since suffering severe head trauma in the fighting.
Alexander Lavrentyev, who met with Abdullah in Herat last month, said the veteran, who was 20 when he went missing, still bore the scars of his injury. His face is creased by a nervous tic, and his hand and shoulder shake.
"He was just happy he survived," Lavrentyev said at a news conference in Moscow on Monday,? RIA-Novosti reported.
The committee says it has found 29 of 264 soldiers still listed as missing from the bloody, decade-long conflict. It said seven of those it had contacted chose to stay in Afghanistan.
Some 15,000 Soviet troops were killed in the fighting that followed the Soviet Union's incursion to support a communist vassal government in Kabul against Islamist mujahedeen fighters armed by the United States.
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