Like many Afghans, Mohamed Jawad has no official record of his birth, and does not know his exact age.[9] Human rights workers trying to establish a reliable estimate of his birth date consulted with his mother; she said that he was born six months after his father was killed during a battle near Khost in 1991.[9] In an English-language Al Jazeera broadcast, one of his uncles said he was born four months after the battle where his father was killed, which he said occurred in 1990.[1]