Education
Saint John"s University.
Saint John"s University.
He is chiefly known, however, for his role as spokesman for the Northern Alliance during the United States.-led invasion of his country after the events of September 11, 2001. A consistent presence in American media prior to the Taliban"s collapse, Amin was appointed chargé d"affaires to the United States by the interim Afghan government on January 14, 2002. He was the highest-ranking Afghan diplomat in Washington for a year-long period in 2002-2003, before being appointed to the Tokyo embassy in 2004.
Amin was born in Kabul, Kingdom of Afghanistan of Tajik descent.
His family fled Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion of 1979, eventually settling in the United States. He returned to his home country in 1988 to fight with the mujahideen under their commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, who assigned Amin to Afghanistan"s embassy in Washington in 1990. Amin worked for the foreign ministry in various capacities until the government"s fall to the Taliban in 1996.
At the time of the 9/11 attacks, Amin was serving as a diplomat of the Afghan mission to the United Nations. He held a master"s degree in political science from Saint John"s University and was distinguished in 2002 as one of 77 "People for the Future" in Newsweek.
In 2007, drawing from his years in Japan, he wrote Afghan-Japan Relations: Lands Under the Rising Sun.
The book centers on historical relations and similarities between Japan and Afghanistan, and is the first to directly compare Afghanistan"s and Japan"s past and cultural heritage. Amin died of cancer in 2015, at an American hospital.