Buzkashi is Afghanistan's national sport. It is dirty and brutal, played on horseback with headless goat carcass.

Peretz Partensky, who visited Afghanistan a year ago, wrote of Buzkashi:

"It turns out that just like Amer­i­can oil tycoons buy foot­ball teams, Afghan war­lords maintain stables of Buzkashi horses and teams of star rid­ers under their care. The Buzkashi field there­fore is not really a safe place. It’s a proxy war. But real war occasionally breaks out in the stands also. It’s the one pub­lic event where personal scores are set­tled by assassination."

In his profile of the sport for the ESPN Magazine, Carl Hoffman provided similar description, "The game is a microcosm of the country, a tangled web of patronage and allegiances, of great wealth, chaos and brutality. It is anything but simple."

Partensky agreed to share with us his photos and commentary of a game of Buzkashi played in Pan­jshir Val­ley a year ago.